Sparta Summer Concerts brings back Danielia Cotton

SPARTA — Last year, Danielia Cotton electrified the audience with her fiery blues-rock style. She will be returning Friday night to entertain once again. Cotton will take center stage at the Nicholson Pavilion in Dykstra Park on July 10 at 7:30 p.m. Inspiration for a career in music came from her mother, a little-known jazz singer, and two aunts. The three women sang as a trio at church, igniting a passion for big belting in Cotton. Outside of church, though, her musical tastes leaned in an unlikely direction. AC/DC, Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin and Todd Rundgren — not hip-hop or R&B — formed the soundtrack to Cotton’s discomfited youth, and shreds of the hard rock bands’ fury and of Rundgren’s literate sensitivity shade her songs. And she doesn’t mind letting the world know that the circumstances of her youth were less than ideal: Cotton, according to a mounting pile of press materials, grew up fatherless in rural Hopewell, N.J., as one of only seven black children at the local high school — thus the title of her CD, Small White Town. Radio stations across the country have appreciated Cotton’s unique rock talent. After she released her debut album in 2005, WXPN/Philadelphia and home of the nationally syndicated World Cafe named her Artist to Watch, slotted the albums’ soulful single “It’s Only Life” into heavy rotation, and featured her on their HD Network Broadcast of On Stage at World Cafe Live. Cotton earned the praise of critics nationwide with the release of ‘Rare Child.’ The NY Times hailed her “blaring, guitar-charged, Southern-rooted rock that links her to Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Black Crowes, Janis Joplin, Aerosmith and the rockier side of Bonnie Raitt” while the LA Times declared that “Cotton brings a freshness to the soul-rock formula, not to mention a contagious fervor, that is near irresistible.”