[5] Tillery has been a professional musician for her entire adult life and has had a long career as a backing or supporting vocalist for mainstream artists as diverse as Santana, Bobby McFerrin, Huey Lewis and the News and the Turtle Island String Quartet.

[11] Tillery is a self-taught singer, but her formal music education began at age 13 when she studied the classical bass[12] at Lowell High School in San Francisco.

[6] Linda with the Loading Zone frequently played popular Bay Area Night Clubs like Keystone Berkeley, Frenche's in Hayward and The Odyssey Room in Sunnyvale.

They toured with Vanilla Fudge and The Jeff Beck Group, and opened Bay Area shows for many other bands and performers including The Who on their first American tour,[14] Jethro Tull, Sam & Dave, Cream at San Francisco's famed Winterland Ballroom[6] and Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin at Bill Graham's historic venue The Fillmore.

[15] Through much of the 1970s, Tillery worked as a session musician providing backing vocals and occasionally playing drums on albums by Santana, Boz Scaggs, Lenny White, Teresa Trull and others.

[9] Tillery was introduced to Women's music in 1975 when the Bay Area band BeBe K'Roche submitted her name to Olivia Records to produce their album.

[25] The song "Freedom Time", co-written by Tillery and Watkins, brings attention to the problems of being black and female and gay with the lyrics: "If I could just tell you what it's really like/To live this life of triple jeopardy/I fight the daily battles of all my people/Just to sacrifice my pride and deny my strength".

The Varied Voices tour played in eight cities[26] and featured Tillery, Mary Watkins, Gwen Avery, Vicki Randle, and poet Pat Parker and brought poetry as well as jazz and blues to women's music audiences.

"[32] Tillery has referred to herself as the "queen mother" to women's music, to both deflect the tendency of some to look upon her as a sex object, as well as to recall the term's honorific association in some African cultures.

[35] A recording was made of the tenth anniversary of MichFest in 1985[36] with Tillery contributing her rendition of the Al Green hit song "Love and Happiness" to the LP.

[40] On November 26, 1982 Tillery was a member of the all-female band that performed with Meg Christian and Cris Williamson at Carnegie Hall in New York City, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Olivia Records.

Tickets to the two-show performance were sold-out two months prior to the evening to 5,400 women and 200 men,[41] and Olivia released the concert as an LP in 1983, on their Second Wave subsidiary label.

[45] Tillery's May 3, 1985 performance at Boston's Strand Theater was especially significant because the show was opened by a then-little known Tufts University undergraduate singer named Tracy Chapman, who made her major-stage debut that evening.

That evening, Skin Tight's membership consisted of Ellen Seeling and Jean Fineberg on horns, Joy Julks on bass, Nancy Wenstrom on electric guitar, Maria Martinez on drums, Bonnie Hayes on keyboards (subbing for regular pianist Julie Homi), with Tillery, Vicki Randle, and Teresa Trull providing the vocals.

[50] In 1991 while Tillery was channel surfing on her television, she came across a PBS special featuring opera singers Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle singing spirituals.

[10] Around the same time, Tillery was in rehearsals for the play "Letters From a New England Negro", and the producer sent her a cassette tape containing traditional black folk songs obtained from the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution.

[citation needed] From 2005–2007, Linda Tillery & The Cultural Heritage Choir with Black Voices (UK),[62] composed and arranged A Long Way Home: Concertizing the Golden Triangle for San Francisco International Arts Festival.

Their next release on the same label was a 2001 live recording titled Say Yo' Business that included guest appearances by Wilson Pickett, Laura Love, Richie Havens, Odetta, Kelly Joe Phelps, Eric Bibb and Kitka.

[65] Tillery was a founding member of Bobby McFerrin's 10-person ensemble Voicestra, including performing on the soundtrack of Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989).

[71] The dance was commissioned by Jacob's Pillow in 1998 and was the result of three years of research and collaboration between Haigood, Tillery as musical director, and storyteller Diane Ferlatte.

Tillery and Haigood with the Zaccho Dance Theater teamed up again on October 19, 2008 for a one-time performance of It Takes Two To Tango at Miraflores Winery in Pleasant Valley, California.

[75] In May 2005, Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir collaborated with Deborah Vaughan, founder and artistic director of Dimensions Dance Theater to create a performance called Spirits Uplifted I, which celebrates the positive aspects of Oakland, California.

[79] In July 2017, Tillery reconnected with Mary Watkins, Vicki Randle, Diane Lindsay and other musicians in a "Womanly Way Reunion Band" performance at the National Women's Music Festival.

[80] In September 2018, Tillery and former Meters drummer Zigaboo Modeliste teamed up in a "Bay Area funk supergroup"[81] and appeared as festival headliners to celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Freight and Salvage music venue in Berkeley, California.

Putting her ethnomusicological research to work in educational settings, Tillery was a visiting scholar and taught classes at Stanford University in 2009, as well as at Williams College.

[19] In 2011, Tillery was a research assistant at Indiana University Bloomington, as well as a member of the National Advisory Board for the Archives of African American Music & Culture in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at IU.

[82] She and fellow musician Teresa Trull were guest lecturers at a San Francisco State University class on women's music taught by Angela Davis.

[83] In June 2003, Tillery gave the keynote speech at the Phenomenon of Singing International Symposium IV, in Newfoundland, Canada titled "The Voice as an Instrument of Peace and Motivating Force for Justice".

[85] Tillery wrote the foreword to the scholarly book Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women's Music by Eileen M. Hayes (University of Illinois Press, 2010).

She has had both knees replaced[6] for which a benefit concert was held in June 2012 at Berkeley's The Freight and Salvage venue to help with her medical expenses, which featured artists Tuck & Patti, the Wayne Wallace Quintet, Faye Carol, and the Ray Obiedo Group.