Shemekia Copeland has become the rising star that her bluesman father always knew she would be. She was named Female Blues Artist of the Year in the 2000 Living Blues Awards. This year, she’s been nominated for four W.C. Handy Blues Awards. Robert Plant said she “is bigger than the blues. She’s the next Tina Turner.”

The late Johnny Clyde Copeland knew his baby girl was going to become a singer. He encouraged her to sing at home and even took her onstage at the famed Cotton Club, but she wasn’t ready then.

But at age 15, with her father’s health failing, she knew it was time. “It was like a switch went off in my head, and I wanted to sing,” she said. “It was a want and a need. I had to do it.”

Johnny, after his heart condition was diagnosed, began taking 16-year-old Shemekia on the road with him, so that he could help her get exposure while he still could.

She stepped out on her own with the 1998 Alligator release “Turn the Heat Up,” gaining recognition from national press and TV. A Boston Globe reviewer raved, “She belts out songs with a passion rarely heard in one so young. She roars with sizzling hot intensity.”

Copeland, 21, hopes to convert others her age to the blues.

“A lot of kids my age say they don’t like the blues because it’s boring or whatever,” she said. “But when they come to see me, they love it.”

So the blues of Johnny Copeland live on through his daughter.

“I feel his spirit onstage every night,” she said. “As long as I’m here, the blues will always be in me and I’m gonna be spreading it around the world. I’m going to keep on doing this and make my daddy proud.”

– By Dale McGarrigle