Appalachian Figures
Corbin, Kentucky, does not usually appear in histories of Motown Records. On paper it is a small railroad town on the Whitley and Knox county line, remembered more often for a 1919 racial expulsion and for Colonel Harland Sanders than for rhythm and blues. Yet in 1928, in that same railroad community, a girl was born who would become Motown’s first white woman solo recording artist and one of the label’s more quietly influential songwriters.
Her name in the courthouse records was Reba Jeanette Smith. On record labels and movie credits she became Penny Smith, Debbie Stevens, Debbie Dean, and eventually Krisha Electra Rigel. Her road from Corbin to Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles traces a very Appalachian story of leaving home, reinventing oneself, and still carrying a hometown voice into the wider world.
Corbin roots and a railroad family
Genealogical records place Reba Jeanette Smith’s birth in Whitley County on 1 February 1928, almost certainly in Corbin, which lies partly in both Whitley and Knox counties.
The 1930 United States census lists her in Corbin as “Reba J. Smith,” the youngest child in the household of Walter B. Smith, a railroad engineer, and his wife Alma, a homemaker. That pairing of railroad wages and housework will be familiar to many Appalachian families who lived along the Louisville and Nashville line. Corbin developed as a division point for the railroad in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the company shaped everything from work schedules to town politics.
By the time Reba was born, Corbin was also notorious for something else. In October 1919 a white mob rounded up most of the town’s Black residents and forced them out on a night train, an event historians now describe as a racial expulsion that helped make Corbin a sundown town for much of the twentieth century. The census and newspaper coverage from the following decades show overwhelmingly white demographics.
That context matters because when Reba Jeanette Smith later became a visible white face on a Black owned label, she carried not only her own accent and upbringing but also the complicated racial history of her hometown.
Pageants, plug horses, and a Kentucky stage name
Family recollections and music historians agree that Reba showed talent early, singing in school and local events. The most colorful early glimpse of her comes not from Whitley County records but from Lexington.
In 1948 she won the title of “Miss Plug Horse Derby” at a state fair event in Lexington, then went on to place second in the Miss Kentucky State Fair contest. The plug horse derby was a tongue in cheek race for less than impressive horses, but the beauty title that came with it still carried statewide publicity.
Motown historian Adam White describes this moment as the unofficial start of her show business career. He notes that the young woman from Corbin, using the name “Reba Penny Smith,” was already on a path that mixed small town pageants, modeling, and singing jobs. Within a few years she had left Kentucky for Chicago, following a path many Appalachian migrants took, but with a microphone instead of a lunch pail.
Penny Smith and Debbie Stevens in Chicago
By the mid and late 1950s Reba was working in the Chicago area under the stage names Penny Smith and Debbie Stevens. Sources like AllMusic, Wikipedia, and a detailed fan biography on the “Soul Free” site describe her as a regular presence on Chicago radio and television record hops, sometimes appearing alongside or through her first husband, rock and roll disc jockey Jim Lounsbury.
As Penny Smith she cut sides for small labels, including a 1958 single written by Bill Haley for the Kahill label and another for Roulette Records, backed by a vocal group known as the Deltones. Under the Debbie Stevens name she recorded rock and roll material that blended pop crooning with early rock rhythms.
Discographical databases and label scans show Debbie Stevens releasing “Billy Boy’s Tune (Billy Boy’s Funeral March)” backed with “I Sit and Cry” on ABC Paramount in 1959. Other surviving records from the period include “If You Can’t Rock Me” and “What Will I Tell My Heart” on the Apt label in the same year.
These sides are primary artifacts of her pre Motown life. The labels spell out the stage name, matrix numbers, and publishers, and the sound of the records captures a singer with a clear, slightly husky voice and a trace of southern inflection that had not been polished away by Chicago studios.
Winter Dance Party and a contested memory
One of the most dramatic stories attached to Debbie Dean concerns the 1959 “Winter Dance Party” tour that starred Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. When their chartered plane crashed near Clear Lake, Iowa, on 3 February 1959, killing all three, the tour continued with replacement acts.
The Debbie Dean Wikipedia article, drawing on earlier fan research, states that she joined the tour as “Debbie Stevens” after the crash, helping fill the bill as it wound through the Midwest. The long narrative on the Soul Free site, likely written with input from people close to her, instead places her on the bus during the tour and misidentifies the crash location.
The details are difficult to untangle today without a full set of tour contracts and route books. What both lines of evidence agree on is that Reba from Corbin spent part of 1959 on the same grueling winter road circuit that took the lives of Holly, Valens, and J. P. “Big Bopper” Richardson. That experience, whether before or after the crash, tied her story to one of rock and roll’s most mythologized tragedies.
From Chess Records to Hitsville: a Kentucky path into Motown
During her Chicago years Penny Smith recorded with bands connected to Chess and its earlier sister label Aristocrat. The Aristocrat label history by Robert Campbell notes her work with Chicago bandleaders and documents the label’s late 1940s and early 1950s recording ecology.
Within that world she met Berry Gordy, then a young songwriter working in the orbit of Chess Records. The Soul Free biography recounts that Gordy was impressed by her talent and wrote songs for her before returning to Detroit to found his own label, Tamla. When Gordy began building Motown in 1959 and 1960, he reached back out to her.
Motown biographers, the Debbie Dean Wikipedia entry, and WBSS Media’s artist profile all agree that Gordy signed her in 1960 to a three year recording contract and gave her the new stage name Debbie Dean. This made her the first white solo artist and, in practice, the first white woman solo recording artist on the Motown roster.
For a singer born in a railroad town that had expelled its Black residents within living memory, becoming part of a Black owned label that was reshaping American popular music carried more than a little irony. It also placed her within a creative community that was far more integrated than the one she grew up in.
Motown singles and the Whitley County song
Debbie Dean’s first Motown single, “Don’t Let Him Shop Around” backed with “A New Girl,” appeared on Motown 1007 in 1961. Label scans and auction listings show the Detroit address “2648 W Grand Boulevard” and credit Berry Gordy Jr. as producer, with songwriting credits that include Gordy and Smokey Robinson.
The song was an answer record to the Miracles’ hit “Shop Around,” and contemporary charts recorded a modest national showing. Billboard’s pop chart peak is often given as number 92, while an R and B trade paper charted it higher on its own list. More important than the chart numbers is the sound preserved in the grooves. Debbie’s vocal is bright and sly, with a noticeable southern twang that still hints at Kentucky.
Two more Motown singles followed. “Itsy Bity Pity Love” backed with “But I’m Afraid” appeared as Motown 1014 later in 1961, and “Everybody’s Talkin’ About My Baby” backed with “I Cried All Night” came out as Motown 1025 in 1962. None of them became major hits, and by 1963 Motown’s attention had moved to acts like Mary Wells, the Marvelettes, the Miracles, and a rising girls group called the Supremes.
Yet her Motown singles have had a long afterlife. The multi volume box set The Complete Motown Singles reissued “Don’t Let Him Shop Around” and “A New Girl” from master tapes, treating them as part of the label’s foundational years. Northern Soul collectors in Britain later embraced “Why Am I Lovin’ You,” the 1968 single that marked Debbie Dean’s final appearance as a Motown vocalist, issued on the V.I.P. imprint as 25044.
In Kentucky, the Frazier History Museum in Louisville chose one of her Motown sides to represent Whitley County in its recent exhibit and audio series “Musical Kentucky: A Song from Each County.” For Whitley the museum selected “But I’m Afraid” and introduced Debbie Dean as “Reba Jeanette Smith of Corbin, the first white woman to sign a three year contract with Motown Records.” That curatorial choice quietly brings her Appalachian roots back into the story of American soul music.
From the front of the stage to the writers’ room
After her first Motown contract lapsed, Debbie relocated to California. She continued singing in clubs and took film and television bit parts under studio contracts. Wikipedia, WBSS Media, and the Soul Free narrative mention appearances in mid 1960s films such as “Hot Rods to Hell,” “Hotel,” and “For Singles Only.”
Her second act at Motown began not as a singer but as a bridge between Los Angeles and Detroit. Around 1965 or 1966 she met Dean Lussier, a musician whose band Deke and the Deakons was opening for acts like Ike and Tina Turner. They became partners and collaborators, and she reintroduced Lussier, now working under the name Deke Richards, to Berry Gordy when Motown began setting up operations in California.
Motown signed both of them in October 1966, Richards as a writer producer and Debbie Dean as a writer singer. Together they wrote songs for major Motown artists. A discography compiled at Soulful Kinda Music lists “I’m Gonna Make It (I Will Wait For You)” for Diana Ross and the Supremes, “Honey Bee (Keep On Stingin’ Me)” for the Supremes, “I Can’t Dance To That Music You’re Playin’” for Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, and “Sweet Joy of Life” for Edwin Starr and Blinky, all with songwriting credits shared between Deke Richards and Debbie Dean.
Modern digital releases still carry her name in the credits. On Apple Music and other streaming services, tracks like “I’m Gonna Make It (I Will Wait For You)” and “Sweet Joy of Life” list Debbie Dean as a songwriter, tucked into the metadata behind Diana Ross, Blinky, and Edwin Starr.
These songs did not make her a household name, but they anchored her place inside the Motown creative network. In the West Grand Blog, Adam White points out that by introducing Deke Richards to Berry Gordy, Debbie helped launch the producer who would later co write smash hits for the Jackson 5 and other Motown acts. Her influence thus extended well beyond the handful of singles that carried her own voice.
Reinvention, illness, and a final resting place in Corbin
The later decades of Reba Jeanette Smith’s life are harder to document. The Soul Free biography, which appears to have been written by someone close to her family, describes a restless search for spiritual meaning, serious health problems including a debilitating chronic illness, and even a mysterious disappearance that she later would not discuss.
It also describes yet another reinvention. In the 1970s she adopted the name Krisha Electra Rigel, self published a book titled “New Names for the Age of Aquarius,” and experimented with veganism and alternative health regimes. During these years she continued to act in small film roles, to paint, to write songs, and to maintain friendships with musicians from earlier chapters of her life.
Official records bring the chronology to a close. The Social Security Death Index lists Reba J. Dean, born 1 February 1928, dying on 17 February 2001 in California. A Find a Grave memorial and local accounts state that she died in Ojai, California, and that a memorial service was held at Pine Hill Cemetery in Corbin, where a stone now bears her name “Reba Jeanette Smith” alongside her Motown identity “Debbie Dean.”
From a historian’s perspective the stone and the burial records bring her long journey full circle. The girl who left Corbin as a beauty queen and aspiring singer, moved through Chicago ballrooms and Detroit studios, and wrote songs for some of the most famous acts in American music, ended up memorialized in the red clay and sandstone hills of the town where she began.
Remembering Debbie Dean in Corbin and beyond
If you drive through Corbin today you will see billboards and a museum dedicated to Colonel Sanders, but there is no downtown marker for Debbie Dean. A fan who grew up on her street in Corbin told an online baseball forum that his town has done little to remember her beyond the headstone at Pine Hill, even as music collectors around the world pay high prices for her Motown and pre Motown singles.
Outside Kentucky, her name appears in scattered but significant places. She has a compact artist biography on AllMusic. The WBSS Media site features a concise overview that emphasizes her Corbin birth and her status as Motown’s first white woman solo artist. Motown discographies and Northern Soul websites document her singles and songwriting credits. The West Grand Blog and the Soul Free narrative attempt to place her inside the broader story of Motown and postwar American popular music.
For Appalachian history, though, the most striking recognition may still be the Frazier History Museum’s “Musical Kentucky” project, which chose her Motown recording “But I’m Afraid” as the song to stand for Whitley County. That choice implicitly argues that the sound of a Corbin railroader’s daughter on a Detroit record is as much a part of Kentucky’s musical story as bluegrass, old time ballads, or coalfield laments.
Debbie Dean’s life shows how Appalachian people have moved through and shaped American culture in places where textbooks rarely put us. Her Motown years remind us that mountain and foothill voices did not stay in the hollers. They rode trains north, stepped onto television stages in Chicago, and walked through the doors of Hitsville U.S.A.
For a town often remembered only for a racial expulsion and a fast food empire, Corbin also sent a woman to Motown who helped write the soundtrack of the 1960s. Reba Jeanette Smith of Whitley County deserves a place in both the history of Appalachian migration and the history of American soul.
Sources and further reading
Kentucky birth registers for Whitley County, the 1930 United States census, and the Social Security Death Index entries for Reba Jeanette Smith and Reba J. Dean establish her dates, parents, and Corbin residence. These are cited and summarized in the Debbie Dean article on Wikipedia, in the WBSS Media biography, in Wikitree’s “Reba Jeanette Smith (1928–2001)” profile, and in the Find a Grave memorial for Reba Jeanette “Debbie Dean” Smith at Pine Hill Cemetery in Corbin.Wikipedia+2WikiTree+2
Primary discographical information for her singles appears on original labels, surviving 45 rpm records, Discogs entries, auction listings, and specialist discographies. These sources document “Don’t Let Him Shop Around” backed with “A New Girl” (Motown 1007), “Itsy Bity Pity Love” backed with “But I’m Afraid” (Motown 1014), “Everybody’s Talkin’ About My Baby” backed with “I Cried All Night” (Motown 1025), and “Why Am I Lovin’ You” backed with “Stay My Love” on V.I.P. 25044.Discogs+2eBay+2
Evidence for her songwriting work with Deke Richards and others appears in Soulful Kinda Music’s Debbie Dean discography, Motown session histories, and the credit fields on digital releases such as Diana Ross and the Supremes’ “I’m Gonna Make It (I Will Wait For You),” Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ “I Can’t Dance To That Music You’re Playin’,” and Edwin Starr and Blinky’s “Sweet Joy of Life.”YouTube+5soulfulkindamusic.net+5Wikipedia+5
The brief Debbie Dean entries on Wikipedia, AllMusic, and WBSS Media provide compact overviews of her life and career, drawing on primary records and earlier fan research.Wikipedia+1 Adam White’s West Grand Blog essay “The White Nightingales” places her in the context of the first white women signed to Motown and highlights her Miss Plug Horse Derby title and her role in bringing Deke Richards to Berry Gordy.Adam White
The WordPress site “Debbie Dean ~ Soul Free” offers a long narrative biography that appears to incorporate family memories, covering her childhood, Chicago years, Motown work, acting roles, health struggles, spiritual searching, and later life under the name Krisha Electra Rigel.Debbie Dean ~ Soul Free A post at the From the Vaults blog and reminiscences on a RedsZone forum thread add further local color, including memories from a neighbor who grew up on her street in Corbin.From the Vaults+1
For Corbin’s racial history and the 1919 expulsion of Black residents, see recent scholarship and public history work on the “Corbin Race Riot,” which document how a white mob forced nearly all Black citizens from town and how this shaped Corbin’s reputation as a sundown town for decades. For Kentucky’s musical heritage, the Frazier History Museum’s project “Musical Kentucky: A Song from Each County” provides interpretive notes on Debbie Dean as Whitley County’s representative artist and preserves audio of “But I’m Afraid” as the county’s chosen track.Frazier Kentucky History Museum