Delia Bell

She was born Francis Leona Nowell in Bonham, Texas, on 16 April 1935 and moved with her family to Hugo as a child. With her three sisters and a brother she played music from an early age, and she began to take her singing seriously in her teens. In 1959 she married Bobby Bell, a friend of Bill Grant’s, and met Grant at a jam session that year. Grant was then a regular on the Little Dixie Hayride on radio station KIHN in Hugo, and she joined him there, though for years the two played mostly for friends.

Bill Monroe heard them and invited them to his Bean Blossom festival in Indiana, where they played in 1968 and 1969, and when Grant and his family started the Salt Creek Bluegrass Festival on their ranch near Hugo in August 1969, Bell and Grant were its hosts. In 1970 they recorded two of Grant’s songs, and on the second, “Beneath the Old Pine Tree,” Bell sang lead; a reviewer compared her to the young Molly O’Day. Grant issued it in 1971 on his new Kiamichi label, and through the 1970s they made nine LPs for it with their band, the Kiamichi Mountain Boys, the brothers Orville, Ben, Glenn and Virgil Bonham, among them The Blues – Mountain Style, with “Unfaithful One.” On most of their songs Bell sang tenor to Grant’s lead.

County Records released the first album under her name alone, Bluer Than Midnight (County 768), in 1978, with Grant on mandolin, Josh Graves on Dobro, Joe Drumwright on banjo, J. T. Gray on bass and James Bryant on fiddle. Her solo recording of Ruth Franks’s “Roses in the Snow” caught the attention of Emmylou Harris, who recorded the song in July 1979 for her Warner Bros. album of the same name. At Harris’s urging Bell then made an album of her own for Warner Bros., Delia Bell (1983), produced by Harris, which mixed little-recorded older songs with newer ones; Harris and Carl Jackson sang harmony on Ray Park’s “Coyote Song.” Its single, “Flame in My Heart,” on which Bell and John Anderson shared the lead, reached the top fifty of the Billboard country chart in 1983, but cuts at the label ended her contract before she could record for it again.

With Grant she made two albums for Rebel in the early 1980s, among them Rollin’ (1981), with Bill Bryson’s “The Girl at the Crossroads Bar,” and later in the decade three for Rounder with the Johnson Mountain Boys behind them: The Cheer of the Home Fires, A Few Dollars More and Following a Feeling. Rounder now billed them as Delia Bell and Bill Grant, putting her name first, and in 1997 gathered fourteen of those tracks, among them Hazel Dickens’s “Won’t You Come and Sing for Me,” on the CD Dreaming. From 1987 she and Grant also promoted a March Early Bird Bluegrass Show in Hugo, which ran for almost twenty years. Their later records, new recordings and reissues of the Kiamichi LPs, came out on Old Homestead, including the CDs A Sacred Collection and Kiamichi Moon. Though she wrote few songs, she had a hand in some, among them “Your Letter’s Overdue.”

In their years together the pair played in many states and in seven countries, with eleven tours of England, where in 1979 they recorded an album of sixteen traditional country songs. They sang together for the last time in May 2006. Bell and Grant were recognized together as Pioneers of Bluegrass Music by the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Owensboro, Kentucky. Delia Bell died on 15 June 2018, aged 83, and was buried at Springs Chapel Cemetery in Hugo.