Rissi Palmer joined Gospel Country stars The War & Treaty as part of their ‘family’ team on Celebrity Family Feud recently. Palmer will be appearing, along with The War & Treaty, at the North Carolina Folk Festival in September located in Greensboro, NC.
Rissi Palmer’s 2018 protestation ’Seeds’ resonates as profoundly as ‘A Change is Gonna Come,’ Sam Cooke’s puissant early-sixties cri de coeur. “I wrote that song with Deanna Walker and Rick Basford,” Palmer explains. “We've been writing songs together for years.”
Having grown up in St. Louis with many friends in the Ferguson community, Palmer says the idea grew from a sense of powerlessness surrounding the murder of Michael Brown. “I wanted to say something but, to be perfectly frank with you, I couldn't think of anything positive to say and I tend to be a pretty positive person. I understood why people were angry, why they were hurt.” When she saw a quote that stated: They tried to bury us, they didn't know we were seeds, “I was like, that's the way to look at this.”
Making music is something Rissi Palmer was attracted to since childhood, “I started singing in church as a kid. I actually have a picture of me at age four standing on a milk crate to reach the microphones.” At 19-years old, she was offered a record deal from Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam but, “I ended up turning it down and did not get another deal until I was 26.”
Palmer considers her eponymous first album to be a straight-up country, That same year, Rissi Palmer made her debut at the Grand Ole Opry after becoming the first black woman in 20 years to hit the Country music charts.
Palmer’s bio states that she shared the stage with Taylor Swift so I had to ask. “She was a baby at the time, this was at beginning of both of our careers,” Palmer’s tune ‘Country Girl’ was released just as Swift’s debut single ‘Tim McGraw’ was rising. “This was 2007, we played quite a few new artist rounds together for radio stations. I was her opener for a music festival in Wisconsin, I think she was like 15 or something.”
“As I've gotten older, thanks to being an independent artist,” Rissi Palmer says, “I’ve had an opportunity to explore different sides of my influences. So I don't know that it's particularly fair to people who are traditional country artists to call what I do country.” Instead, she began calling her style Southern Soul, a mixture of country, R&B, gospel, pop, “and all those things that I listened to and loved as a child.”
