Miko Marks Meets the Moment, Pays Homage to the Trailblazing Women of Country

The first time I heard Miko Marks belt out the lyrics to “Trouble,” a fiery blues-rock single released in 2022, I was bowled over by her powerhouse vocals.

This is a woman who was clearly born to sing. Words can’t quite do justice to the way she growls, soars, and just pushes out verses, leaving her listeners spellbound. She’s soulful, bluesy, rootsy, and raw, her voice sailing through anthems like “This Time” and the twangy “River,” buoyed by a gospel choir.

But while she is a rising star in the country and Americana music scenes, Miko Marks isn’t just a singer-songwriter. She’s a musician and mother brimming with stories, heartache, and wisdom she’s only begun to share.

What’s most inspiring about Marks is the way she’s beaten the odds, one song at a time. She’s played in spaces and on radio stations that were once the exclusive domain of white men in cowboy hats (while raising her son in the early 2000s). She resurrected her music career in 2019 after a 13-year hiatus (while in her mid-40s!). And in 2022, she was named one of CMT’s ‘Next Women Of Country.’

“I get asked, ‘What made you get into country music?’ so many times and each time I cringe because people of color are at the foundation of country music,” Marks, who lives in Oakland, California, tells me over a Zoom call. “To be asked about something that you helped to create the foundation of, and that blood is running through you, from generation to generation … I’m thinking, why is this such a far-fetched idea? The natural inclination of my spirit is to do the music that I’m doing. I mean, it’s in my veins and not necessarily because I chose it. It chose me.”

On February 23, 2024, Marks will play the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville before embarking on a 10-week, 43-date ‘Trailblazing Women Of Country’ tour with Kristina Train, which pays homage to the music of Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, and Dolly Parton — three country music icons who inspired Marks. She’s also playing the sold-out Stagecoach festival in April.

But while Marks’ “late bloomer” music-career rise is momentous, it’s the byproduct of a lot of sacrifice, patience, and self-reflection.

Starts and Stops

Marks grew up in Flint, Michigan, in the 1970s and 1980s, where she was fed a hefty musical diet of country when she wasn’t singing in her church choir.

“My grandma used to keep me while my mom worked second shift, and I’d be at her house, and she played all this old, traditional country music, like, you know, the Carter family, Johnny Paycheck … and Patsy Cline,” says Marks. “Country music has always been like a lullaby to my soul. I think that being exposed to it at a young age kind of gave me a real root — a real foundation for just loving the genre, not even knowing what the genre was.”

Throughout her adolescence, Marks tried lots of instruments to accompany her singing — piano, violin, and, eventually, guitar. But those were mainly just vehicles by which to create songs: Her voice is the instrument that always called her home, even as she went to Grambling State University to study politics, which led her into a career as a paralegal in her early 20s.  

“I was really late blooming,” she says of her epitome that she wanted to sing professionally. “I was maybe 24, 25, with a kid. My husband was a firefighter in the San Francisco Fire Department. And he was like, ‘You need to be singing, like really serving your passion.’ He was like, ‘I’ve got this job now. So why don’t you go create, be a creator and use your voice?’”

So Marks and her husband took $6,000 in savings to Fantasy Studios in Berkeley and bootstrapped her first demo.

“That’s when it started to feel real,” Marks recalls. “I got a calling card, and I was kind of like, ‘oh, okay, I really am doing this.’ I quit my job in 2005.”

While balancing family life with the demands of a music career, Marks released back-to-back albums (2005’s Freeway Bound and 2007’s It Feels Good). As her fanbase grew bigger, so did the gigs. Soon, Marks secured her first spot at the Country Music Association (CMA) Festival.

While the enthusiasm and support from her fans kept her spirits high, navigating a career in the music scene proved excruciating at times. Marks recalls a conversation with a record label executive who flat out told her, “You’re not gonna sell,” even as he praised her music.  

“I just dedicated myself to being a country music artist because that’s what I thought I wanted at the time, and I didn’t think there was much representation of people of color, so I felt like, ‘I love this music, and I can contribute to this genre,’” says Marks. “But, you know, the world don’t work that way. It works on another realm. There’s business, there’s industry, there’s gatekeepers, there’s all these things that really shattered me back in the day. I was really sad and angry about not being seen as what I was, as a traditional country artist. Whenever I do sing or perform, I give my soul, so my soul was getting stomped on to a degree.”

In 2009, CMA Fest grew more competitive — making it harder for emerging artists like Marks to gain a coveted performance slot.

“So that was another nail in the whole thing to where I was like, ‘you know what, I want to go back to California and just focus on my family and focus on my life,’” says Marks.

The Resurrection

Marks spent the 2010s balancing jobs as a paralegal and tennis club social director with marriage and mom duties — only venturing out to sing the occasional cover gig. But in 2019, with her son Justin “mostly grown” and pursuing his own music career, the desire to create, record, and perform, which Marks had submerged for more than a decade, started bubbling to the surface.

“Right before COVID, I had a dream that I was going to work with Justin Phipps and Steve Wyreman, my old bandmates from the early 2000s,” recalls Marks.

It just so happened the timing was serendipitous. Phipps was starting his Redtone Records label and had just written the perfect song for Marks to record.

“He was like, ‘I’ve got a label, and I have this song, ‘Goodnight America,’” says Marks, recalling the events of 2020, including the murder of George Floyd, which inspired the song. “When I heard that song, I cried my eyes out, because it was so true, a lullaby that laid all of America’s wrongs to rest. I’d never heard a song like that, which was so honest and true for me, and I really identified with that, as opposed to earlier in my career, when I would have said, ‘oh, no, that’s too controversial.’ But fast forward all these years of living in life, you need to say what is real. And that song was real for me. And I recorded it.”

Listening to “Goodnight America” is not easy. It’s beautiful but emotionally wrought, juxtaposing familiar phrases connected with American idealism with the reality that the American Dream is dead. Yet the song gave Marks the momentum she needed, as she and Phipps went on to write a follow-up, “We Were Here,” inspired by the lead-water crisis in her Flint, Mich., hometown.

“I started to get on this internal path,” says Marks. “Rather than what I thought was going to sell or ‘what do people like?’ I started to get on this healing path for myself, and putting out music that I thought mattered and would help someone else.”

As WMOT Roots Radio observed, “Goodnight America” became the linchpin of not only reuniting with her producer, but creating her 2021 album Our Country, and the EP Race Records, “a savvy commentary on the segregated history of country music.”

Soon after, she released her full-length album Feel Like Going Home in 2022, with Phipps and her bandmates (The Resurrectors). A spring 2023 tour with Rissi Palmer followed, coinciding with the release of their single “Still Here.” It’s a song about resiliency in a world that can chew you up and spit you out. As a mom in her 40s trying to stay relevant in a world that punishes women for aging, I relate in more ways than one.

[SEE RELATED: ‘COUNTRY GIRL’ RISSI PALMER, ON TOURING, THRIVING, AND STAYING RESILIENT]

Revitalizing Country

Marks doesn’t love the label of “country artist.” Lately, “Americana” feels closer to home, perhaps because the Americana music scene feels more diverse and inclusive.

And yet Marks is gratefully anchored to country music as she embarks on the “Trailblazing Women Of Country” tour celebrating the legacy of Cline, Lynn, and Parton. One of the less-publicized, but notably cool, tour details is that Marks’ backing band comprises an all-female ensemble: Megan Palmer (musical director, piano), Morgan Blaney (bass), Heather Thomas (drums), Thayer Sarrano (acoustic guitar, keyboards), and Anne McCue (electric guitar, lap steel). 

“Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, and Dolly Parton are three women that ran rampant at my age of 5, 6, 8 years old in my grandma’s house, and I mean, rampant, like, ‘when you come home from school, this is who you might hear,’” says Marks. “I grew up on that, you know, and to be able to go out on a tour and really shine a light on these women and lift them up, that’s like a childhood dream. You know, all this life happened in between, but those women were a key piece of my foundation, especially Loretta and Patsy.”

The irony is not lost on me that Marks, herself, is a trailblazer, too. While Beyonce just became the first black woman to top Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, it’s women like Marks, Palmer, and Mickey Guyton that undoubtedly paved the way for the next generation of black and minority women in country music.

“It’s kind of like a full-circle moment for me to do this tour,” says Marks. “And it’s not going to be just traditional country, because it’s still gonna be me. At the same time.”

Marisa Torrieri Bloom is the editor and founder of Rockmommy.