Women and the blues make “an odd coupling,” says Mary Katherine Aldin, a well-established researcher who is the guiding force behind this historically comprehensive, musically compelling 2-CD collection. It’s the only off note she strikes anywhere in this ambitious and superbly realized project.
The blues, as we’ve come to know them, are all about survival, and what could possibly personify the spirit of survival amid adverse conditions any better than the heritage of African-American women? It was, in fact, Mamie Smith’s recording of “Crazy Blues” in 1921 that first alerted the recording industry to a previously unrecognized market for music reflecting the African-American experience.
Mamie Smith isn’t represented here, and neither are marquee names like Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith, this century’s pioneering pop music diva. Instead, what Aldin has traced through a careful, chronological selection of personal favorites, unjustly neglected landmark recordings, and the contributions of unsung heroines of this deep vein of cultural wealth is “an unbroken line of women who treated a body of music universally appealing in its straightforward honesty.”
Bertha “Chippie” Hill (“Some Cold Rainy Day”) is included, as are Memphis Minnie (“Me and My Chauffeur Blues”), Victoria Spivey (“Black Snake Swing”), Georgia White (“If I Can’t Sell It, I’ll Keep Sittin’ On It”), and Alberta Hunter (reprising Billie Holiday’s exquisite “Fine and Mellow). Original versions of some well-known songs are represented by Rosetta Howard’s “If You’re A Viper” and Blue Lu Barker’s “Don’t You Feel My Leg.” The jazz contingent appears by way of Dinah Washington, Ella Johnson, and, of course, Ms. Holiday.
In the post-War years, Big Mama Thornton (who had the original recording of “Hound Dog”), Esther Philips, and Lavelle White step to the microphone.
In the Sixties, Etta James (both solo and in duet with the frequently overlooked Sugar Pie DeSanto), Koko Taylor (with “Wang Dang Doodle” and Wllie Dixon’s sublimely clever “29 Ways”), New Orleans’ underrecognized Soul Queen, Irma Thomas (with a track from her Muscle Shoals session on Chess), and the irrepressible Tina Turner (on Ike & Tina’s “Three O’Clock Blues”) bring the tradition right to the fringes of the postmodern era.
Direct and personal in each individual expression, when gathered together, the sum total of this creative force amounts to an enormous part of our cultural inheritance.
