Toni Price, the country-blues vocalist who issued some of Austin’s best-selling albums and hosted one of its most revered live residencies, died Friday following complications from a brain aneurysm, according to an announcement posted on her website. She was 63 years old.
Price was born Luiese Esther in Philadelphia in 1961, but called herself Toni when she sang “One Tin Soldiers” in a summer camp talent contest in Nashville at age 10. She issued a few country singles under the name after growing up in the genre’s capital city, but relocated to Austin – home to a blues scene her manager, Cameron Randle, thought she’d fit in with – in 1989.
The move set off a 30-year love affair with the city. Price found a home at Antone’s nightclub, and sisterhood with reigning local blues queens Lou Ann, Marcia Ball, and Angela Strehli. “They were so encouraging, like sisters,” she told the Chronicle‘s Margaret Moser in a 2001 cover story. “No competition, just, ‘Come on, little sister, hop on!’ In Nashville, everybody hates everybody; it’s not loving like it is here. Clifford Antone was, ‘Come in to the Home of the Blues.’ Just welcomed me.”
Never a songwriter, Price lent her honeyed alto to compositions by David Olney, Herb McCullough, Blaze Foley, J.J. Cale, Shelley King, and, most notably, Gwil Owens, her principal collaborator since 1986. She was always content being a singer.
“I never worried about not being a songwriter,” she said in that same cover story. “Even if I change the song, I never take the credit. I can put a dress on, take it up, put on jewelry, a belt, whatever, but I didn’t make the dress. And I’m amazed at songwriters. It’s a sacred mystery, what they do. Some people open their mouths to sing and that’s what I do.” Five of her releases ranked among Waterloo Records’ 100 all-time bestsellers in 2018.
The “Juke Joint Madonna” was equally uninterested in touring – she had enough of a fan base in Austin. For 22 years, she hosted a weekly Tuesday night “Hippie Hour” residency at the Continental Club, playing with a slew of local pickers including late Austin Music Hall of Fame fiddler/guitarist/mandolinist Champ Hood, Denny Freeman, Derek O’Brien, Casper Rawls, and David Grissom. After retiring from that stage, she moved the residency to the Little Darlin’ and then the Devil’s Backbone Tavern in Fischer. (After his death in 2001, Champ’s son Warren picked up fiddle and accompanied Price for over a decade.)
Price took home 12 Austin Music Awards from 1993 to 2004, including “Best Female Vocals,” “Album of the Year,” “Song of the Year” and “Best Blues,” and in 2017, she was inducted into its Hall of Fame. Still, she was never afraid to voice her qualms with the Chronicle, or adjacent festival South by Southwest. She called out the conference for underpaying artists long before it became a national conversation, and stopped reading the paper when former staffer Ken Lieck’s “Dancing About Architecture” column joked about her friends Kelly Willis and Buck Owens.
“Then I realized I didn’t know what was going on in town and I missed everything happening, so I started looking at it again,” she conceded in 2001.
Price’s family requests that any memorial donations be made in Toni’s memory to Hospice Austin’s Christopher House. A tribute show will be announced soon, according to the announcement.
This article appears in November 22 • 2024.