Ruth Copeland (born c. 1946) is an English former singer who has lived in the United States since the 1960s. She is best known for her collaborations with George Clinton and Parliament‑Funkadelic. Copeland was born in Consett, County Durham, in northeast England, where her father worked for the Consett Iron Company. She grew up in the Blackhill area and was a neighbor of musician Freddie “Fingers” Lee. She attended Consett Grammar School and Consett Technical College, and began singing in 1963 with a local jazz band, the Collegians. After her mother’s sudden death and her father’s remarriage, she left college to pursue a singing career, first in Blackpool and later in London, where she joined the band Ed and the Intruders, with Lee on keyboards. In 1965, Copeland moved to Detroit, where her sister Norma lived, and began performing in local clubs as a blues and folk singer. Under the name Kelly Michaels, she recorded the single “Foggy Days” / “I Need Him” for Ollie McLaughlin’s Carla label. She also worked as a comptometer operator and briefly married football player Karl Sweetan. After being noticed by Edwin Starr, she met Motown songwriter and producer Jeffrey Bowen, with whom she later formed a relationship and eventually married. Bowen was involved in establishing Invictus Records with Holland‑Dozier‑Holland, and Copeland signed with the new label in 1969. According to Copeland, “their plan was to create another Diana Ross — only white this time.
See for more.
Hare Krishna
Heaven
Take Me To Baltimore
The Silent Boatman
The Music Box
Crying has made me stronger
I Got A Thing For You Daddy
The Medal
More To Life
I Am What I Am by Ruth Copeland 1971 Full Album
This page contains text from Wikipedia. The content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution‑ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY‑SA 4.0). See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
This text is based on the original Wikipedia article.