The career of Bristol-born and raised singer Yolanda Quartey reached new heights last weekend with the release of the new Elvis movie. Making her big screen debut, alongside Tom Hanks and Austin Butler, she portrays Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the black musician credited as the “godmother of rock and roll” and sings the groundbreaking 1945 hit, Strange Things Happening Every Day.
On Sunday, the artist now simply known as Yola and based in the country music capital of Nashville, USA, closed the Leftfield stage at Glastonbury. She’s sung at her home county festival in various guises over the last two decades, but never before as a solo artist. She delivered numbers from her two Grammy-nominated Americana albums, the most recent being 2021’s Stand for Myself.
Bristol folk will probably remember her best as the fabulous frontwoman with the city’s ace country soul band Phantom Limb and sometime vocalist with Massive Attack in the 2000s. She may be moving in different circles these days - performing alongside globally celebrated artists including childhood heroine Dolly Parton and Brandi Carlile - but Yola has never forgotten the community that helped to shape her and fuel her ambitions.
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Born in Bristol, Yola spent most of her childhood in Portishead . Her mother came to the city from the Caribbean as one of the Windrush generation, and she doesn’t remember her Ghanaian father, who left when she was very young. The 38-year-old makes no bones about how difficult she found growing up as a black girl in a predominantly white neighbourhood and in a somewhat eccentric household where music was her passion and her salvation.
Her mother had eclectic tastes and a precious vinyl collection - everything from Elton John (she covers Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on her latest album) to Ella Fitzgerald and the O’Jays - and little Yolanda soaked it all up, adding her own cross-genre collection, spanning Blur, Mary J Blige and Nirvana, in the 1990s. She’s fought hard over the years to make her own niche, without being pigeonholed.
Speaking to me in 2011, Yola said: “When I was a kid I was singing Dolly Parton, which wasn’t normal for a little black girl. But I didn't grow up in what you’d call a normal environment. If you watch shows like Little Britain you see pockets of screaming mentalism; Portishead was no different from any other place in that respect and that’s how it was for me.
“The country trills felt natural to me, and peer pressure didn’t figure in my head. But I also sang R ’n’ B and soul songs. At school I had a rock band. But it took a long time to get to the point where I could have control over what I did.”
She spent many years working as a session singer, emulating other women’s voices and briefly moved to London. Returning to Bristol, she immersed herself in the thriving music scene, but was never complacent, even after finding a comfortable “home” with the acclaimed Phantom Limb, playing countless gigs in and around the city and across the UK for several years.
“Bristol is a city with talent coming out of its ear holes; it’s awesome, but sometimes it can be too awesome and you can become languid and procrastinate. And the English way is to overthink everything... sometimes you just have to say ‘Hell, yeah!’, take it down to the hips and swing a bit,” said Yola in 2011, when she was also working as a vocal teacher.
Two years later, two huge events happened within a short period that gave her a wake-up call - her mother died and Yola escaped a fire that damaged her home. Resolving to beat the racial stereotypes and barriers that had dogged her professional career, she decided to strike out alone and set her sights on international success.
Yola recently told the i newspaper: “I had a music industry executive from a record company, and I won't name them, say nobody wants to hear a black woman sing rock 'n' roll. A black woman - Sister Rosetta Tharpe - invented rock n roll!”
Releasing her first solo EP, Orphan Offering, in 2016, Yola caught the ear of The Black Key’s Dan Auerbach, who signed her to his Easy Eye Sound label. Suddenly Nashville was calling.
In 2017, she won the UK artist of the year awards at the US Americana Awards and in 2019 her debut album, Walk Through Fire, was released to universal acclaim. At that year’s Newport Folk Festival she joined some legendary names on stage - including Dolly Parton.
Recently she trod the red carpet at high profile premieres for the Elvis movie, which is now booking at cinemas across the UK. The girl from Portishead has certainly come a long way.
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