Clara McDaniel

Blues singer Big Clara McDaniel was raised in a musical family. During her youth, she sang at church and also took up the piano to accompany the choir. All the while, she soaked up the sound of the blues from her siblings, father, and grandfather, who frequently played blues recordings around the house. She also had a professional in the family, Dusty Brown, an uncle who was a Parrot recording artist. When the family relocated from her birthplace of Pontiac, MI, to St. Louis, McDaniel had the opportunity to meet Muddy Waters. She discovered more blues influences at nightspots like Ned Love's, Club Caravan, Cass, and Dynaflow at Glasgow. At Club Caravan she sang with Big Bad Smitty and Big George, and at Ned Love's she teamed with Albert King. McDaniel and King launched a long-term professional association, and the pair embarked on a tour of Mississippi and Arkansas, and they also swung West to Arizona. Upon returning home to St. Louis, she managed his taxi company. She has also performed with Tommy Bankhead, Bobby Bland, Ike Turner, Little Milton, Oliver Sain, and David Dee, among others.

High Tone Records released Unwanted Child, McDaniel's first album, in 1997. Albert "Falstaff" Foster, McDaniel's husband and keyboardist and leader of her band, passed away before she made the recording and the singer dedicated her debut to him. Following Foster's death, McDaniel relocated to Arkansas, where she welcomed a set of twins into the world. She has also been foster mother to dozens of kids, several of whom she adopted. For two decades before her debut, McDaniel usually juggled two jobs, and sometimes a third, and sang on the weekends. More than once she has opened the St. Louis Blues Festival with her group, the Magnatones. She also appeared at the Holland festival called Blues Estafette in 1995. Blues & Rhythm, a British magazine, dubbed her Discovery of the Year. She has toured Greece, France, England, and Switzerland. In 1998, McDaniel was nominated as Living Blues magazine's Female Blues Artist of the Year.