ETTA BAKER was one of the last surviving original American folk-blues performers.

A famous southern matriarch whose immediate family by her death had expanded to 108 members spanning five generations, she brought up nine children, which meant that she was in her forties before she made her first recordings. She then waited until retirement before she began performing outside family and friends. Yet her early field recordings were a direct influence on the young Bob Dylan, and she was still playing the guitar in her nineties, when she recorded an album with the Grammywinning bluesman Taj Mahal.

Etta Lucille Reid was born in 1913, in the rural foothills of Caldwell County, North Carolina. Both her parents played several instruments, and she had picked up a guitar at the age of 3. “I was so small, I had to lay the guitar on the bed, stand on the floor and play on the neck,” she later recalled. Her seven brothers and sisters also played, and at an early age she was performing old-time breakdowns, waltzes and two-steps with them on family and local community occasions.

By the late 1920s she was highly proficient on the six and twelve-string guitars, and she had mastered the Piedmont blues style; popular across the southeastern states of America this style was softer and more melodic than the more guttural Mississippi blues, which had developed in the harsher landscape of the Delta. Yet, like many traditional musicians of her era, playing was not a career but something she did for personal satisfaction and for the pleasure of her immediate circle.

With music taking second place to her duties as a wife and mother (her nine children included two sets of twins), it was not until 1956 that she was first recorded, when the New York-based folk singer Paul Clayton was visiting North Carolina, and heard her playing a song called One-Dime Blues.

He returned the following day with a tape recorder and made several field recordings of her playing, which he anthologised on the LP Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians. The collection became one of the most influential recordings of the acoustic folk and blues revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and at least two of Baker’s songs, One-Dime Blues and Railroad Bill, became standards. The record also led to invitations to perform at folk festivals across America, all of which were declined. “My husband could play piano real well and we could have made it, but he did not want to leave home,” she revealed many years later.

If Baker would not tour, that did not prevent other musicians travelling to the South to see and hear her. Clayton had a cabin near Charlottesville, Virginia, where he would bring friends from the Greenwich Village folk scene for weekends and invite Baker over to play for them. One weekend in 1962 he arrived with Bob Dylan and Dylan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo in tow to celebrate Dylan’s 21st birthday. It seems likely that Dylan, who knew Baker’s playing from the Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians album, heard and met her on that occasion. Soon afterwards, he adapted Clayton’s song Who’s Going to Buy You Ribbons (When I’m Gone) into Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright, in which the influence of Baker’s finger-picking guitar style can be discerned.

After the brouhaha generated by the folk revival Baker continued to work for the next two decades at the Skyland Textile Company factory in Morganton, North Carolina, until she reached retirement age.

In the 1980s, after the death of her husband, Lee Baker, she began finally to accept invitations to perform beyond the borders of Caldwell County. Although in her seventies, she went on to become a much-loved attraction on the folk and blues festival circuit, appearing all over America and even touring Europe. For the first time she secured copyright control of her early field recordings and in 1991 recorded her first studio album, One-Dime Blues. It was followed in 1999 by Railroad Bill and in 2004 she recorded an album with Taj Mahal, who had first heard her recording of Railroad Bill in the early 1960s and had been performing it ever since. Her final recordings, made when she was 92, appeared on the album Carolina Breakdown in 2005.

Etta Baker, folk and blues singer, was born on March 31, 1913. She died on September 23, 2006, aged 93.