Great Blues Albums: Mississippi John Hurt, Avalon Blues

“Mississippi John Hurt’s music is as fresh today as when he first recorded it in 1928”
Philip Ratcliffe, biographer.

Photo: Joe Alper

Mississippi John Hurt, Avalon Blues: The Complete 1928 Okeh Recordings (Columbia/Legacy)

Mississippi John Hurt was known only to a small group of music aficionados outside the State where he lived for most of his life, until he was 71. What was known of him was the music on six 78rpm records made in 1928.

These songs we can now enjoy on Avalon Blues: The Complete 1928 Okeh Recordings.

Born in 1892, John Hurt, whose parents were freed slaves, was the last of a large family of ten. His mother Mary Jane Hurt and her children moved to Avalon in Mississippi when John was a baby and he lived there for most of his life. He picked cotton for long hours when he was a child, but began playing the guitar when he was nine when his mother purchased his first guitar for $1.50 – a major purchase given that a day’s wages for black labourers was under a dollar. John referred to it as “Black Annie”, which he insisted was the brand name of the instrument, and he became an accomplished picker as a teenager, going on to play at local dances (never juke joints).

His guitar style became the inspiration for generations of acoustic guitar players, after his rediscovery in the early sixties after more than thirty years simply working as a farmer. Many of today’s professional artists started their journey of seriously studying guitar by learning the style of John Hurt.

For many, hearing him play for the first time, it sounds like there is more than one guitarist. He keeps a steady alternating bass going, combined with melodies and harmonies picked out on the treble stings, and throws in intricate hammer-ons and slides. Although he developed his guitar style around the same time as Mississippi bluesmen like Son House or Charlie Patton, his more constrained and relaxed approach is far removed from theirs.

There are some similarities between Hurt’s style and the Piedmont style of picking characteristic of musicians like Elizabeth Cotton and Etta Baker from North Carolina, or John Cephas from Virginia. But his friend Jerry Ricks didn’t think John had ever heard any of these musicians and we can’t be sure how he developed what is a very characteristic style. You just know who it is within a couple of bars of any song he’s performing, and you know if anyone is playing in his style.

By all accounts, John was a lovely man, easy-going and friendly, with a gentle smile. He was a great story teller and very humorous, and his deep religious faith was a strong foundation in his life, particularly in later years. His granddaughter, Mary Frances Hurt Wright, said, “My Daddy John had a supernatural spirit that had a far greater effect on people than his music alone.

“I can still visualize Daddy John playing on the dusty circle drawn stage of our front yard, totally absorbed in his music. While the people clapped and stomped their feet in agreement with the music, Daddy John’s smile would widen like a stone thrown in a pond.”

And Larry Hoffman, musician and author, said of him: “It seems as if this gentleman was to enrich every life he touched…His great kindness, generosity and gentle spirit has made him a folk legend, and we remember and treasure him through his music – the loving spirit that flows through time and the generations as does his unforgettable music.”

By the early 1920s, John had teamed up with a white fiddle player, Willie Narmour, to play at local dances, with a repertoire that included blues, spirituals, ballads, and ragtime tunes.

Narmour was picked to record after a fiddle contest by visiting Okeh agents. He then introduced them to Hurt, who agreed to go to Memphis to record. Ten months later, at the age of 35, he was asked to come to New York to record some more. Here he recorded some twenty songs, from which 6 records were released (12 sides in all). John was paid $240. Another song, Big Leg Blues was released at a later date and is included in The Complete Okeh record.

The 13 songs on the album feature simply John singing in his laid-back manner and playing his guitar in his iconic style. The album contains a number of his most famous songs like Frankie, Candy Man, Louis Collins and Stack O’Lee, as well as a couple of spirituals, Blessed Be the Name and Praying on that Old Camp Ground. It’s a glorious mixture of murder songs, blues, and Christian songs, all delivered with good humour, fine musicianship and considerable style.

The album opens up with Frankie, written by Bill Dooley from St Louis in 1899, about an event said to have taken place in a St Louis bar room in the 1890s. “Good girl” Frankie Baker shot and killed Allen (Albert) Britt, a ragtime pianist, for his infidelity with Alice Pryar. “He was my man, and he done me wrong.”

John Hurt’s Stack O’Lee Blues – variously known as Stagolee, Stackalee, Staggerlee – is probably the definitive version of the countless recorded versions of the tune. John explained the background to the song to Tom Hoskins in 1963, as he also does in his introduction to the song on the Mississippi John Hurt: Legend album.

Hurt said that Stackolee and Billy Lyons were white men and the fight took place down in a mine where Stackolee was aiming to rob the miners who were gambling. Jesse James, claimed Hurt, accompanied Stackolee, and also shot one of the miners,. I’m not sure how that exactly tallies with the confrontation in the song about the stealing of Stacklolee’s “ten-dollar Stetson hat.” But the story in the song seems to stand by itself anyway, and it rips along nicely, driven by Hurt’s rapid and rhythmic guitar picking.

Louis Collins was written by John Hurt about a real event. His friend Jerry Ricks reckoned it was about a cousin of John’s, but Hurt himself said it had happened in Memphis. Collins, Hurt said, “was a great man. I know that, and he was killed by two men named Bob and Louis. I got enough of the story to write the song,”

The two Louises in the song had me confused every time I listened to it until I heard John Hurt’s explanation. First, Mrs Collins is weeping “to see her son Louis leaving home” to go to “the old graveyard” after his killing, But in the verse that accounts for Louis’s death, we get, “Bob shot once and Louis shot two, shot poor Louis, shot him through and through.” So, it seems, there were two Louises, one shooter and one shot. Somehow, once again, the violence of the song is counterbalanced by Hurt’s gentle singing and nifty guitar work.

Candy Man, a song full of gleeful sexual innuendo was written by Hurt on the way to New York City for the Okeh sessions. He recalled having written it in pencil and that the lyrics were typed up for him at the recording studio. The comedy in the song is accented by Hurt’s seemingly innocent vocals which accentuate the song’s comic effect perfectly. As one writer put it, he sounds so kind and sincere that you can almost convince yourself that he doesn’t actually mean anything sexually suggestive at all!

Avalon Blues was also written on this New Trip trip, a nostalgic yearning for John’s home town – “Avalon, my hometown, always on my mind.” The bright lights of New York city might be attractive – “New York’s a good town but it’s not for mine,” but it’s nothing compared to Avalon and his “pretty mama.”

Okeh never called on John to record again.  The 1930s saw economic collapse and the Great Depression, and along with that a record sales slump. Hurt’s Okeh recordings were unlike anything else recorded at the time and didn’t translate into big sales. He retreated into rural Mississippi life and obscurity.

If was only after producer Harry Everett Smith included some of those old recordings on the Anthology of American Folk Music, which led Tom Hoskins and Mike Stewart to track Hurt down in 1963, that John Hurt was to have a proper music career, playing universities, coffee houses and the 1963 Newport Music Festival.

Alas, it was short lived, with Hurt passing away in 1967. It was enough, however, to make him one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century.

Mississippi John Hurt remains an iconic figure in the country blues. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1990, and continues to inspire new generations of guitarists, and his gentle spirit lives on in his music – these Okeh recordings, after nearly a hundred years, still sound great and have a great attractive charm.

Check out Philip R. Ratcliffe’s detailed biography

These tribute albums are also worth listening to:

The story of John Hurt’s Guitar – John Oates

Mississippi John Hurt Documentary

Mississippi John Hurt: His Life, His times, His Blues, by Philip R. Ratcliffe

Eric Bibb: “Everything can change, if we believe”

Photo: Michael Wall

Eric Bibb – blues troubadour, global griot, as a recent album has it, whose music always seems to arrive at the Needed Time – considers his Dear America album to be his finest work yet.

Bibb, originally from New York, but now resident in Sweden, has been delighting audiences on both sides of the Atlantic for more years than he cares to remember, with his finely honed guitar picking, his honeyed vocals, his good humour and all-round positive vibe. No matter what sort of day you’ve had, when you go to an Eric Bibb gig, the weight of the world disappears and you’ll find yourself with a smile on your face that doesn’t go away for a week.

He’s a Grammy nominated, Blues Music Award winning song-writer and performing artist who is very much at the top of his game, as is evidenced by Dear America, which he says is “a love letter, because America, for all of its associations with pain and its bloody history, has always been a place of incredible hope and optimism.” On this record, he says, “I’m saying all the things I would want to say to somebody dear to me.”

Thanks to the wonders of Zoom, I got chatting to Eric at his home on a farm south of Stockholm where he has spent the last 18 months, like the rest of us, keeping safe. He has, however, been able to work online, performing and giving guitar lessons – “I haven’t suffered like many of my colleagues, so I feel quite, quite blessed.”

I asked him, first of all, about the making of the album and his musical collaborators and guests. He told me that, although he’s proud of the body of work he’s created in the past, both he and his producer, Glen Scott, who has worked with him on many previous projects, agree that “this is our best work.”

The album, on the Provogue label, features a number of well-known guest artists, the result of Scott’s vision, who had said to Eric a while back, “Eric, one day, we’re just going to go to New York and you’re going to have like the best rhythm section in the world, and we’re going to cut some tracks.”

So, the album features top notch players like Steve Jordan on drums, who has worked extensively with Keith Richards and John Mayer, Tommy Sims on bass, “a great musician all around, but amazing bass player and singer and guitar player, who’s worked with everybody from Bonnie Raitt to Bruce Springsteen,” Chuck Campbell of the Campbell Brothers who plays lap steel guitar on Different Picture, Billy Branch on harmonica, and Ron Carter, again on bass.

Of the legendary Ron Carter – the most recorded jazz bassist in history – Eric talked about the first time he’d played with him more than fifty years ago, as a young man of sixteen.

“He was the bass player who had the bass chair on my dad’s television show in the late sixties. My dad [Leon Bibb, the renown folk singer, actor and civil rights activist] had a TV show called Someone New that featured young talent – nine-year-old Yo Yo Ma was on that show. I was sixteen years old and my dad put me in the guitar player’s chair. It was the first time I was in a completely over my head situation. I had to get a union card and there I was with Ron Carter playing bass and I’m trying to read the chart! So it was an amazing reconnection with him.”

Other guests include Lisa Mills, who duets on the album’s last song, the exquisitely beautiful Oneness of Love, and Shaneeka Simon, a gospel singer from the UK – “just a gem of a musician, a great singer, a fine person” – who makes a telling contribution on Born of a Woman.

The songs on the album are quite bluesy both musically and lyrically. None more so than Whole World’s Got the Blues, which bemoans the state of the world – “everywhere you turn you’re looking at sad, sad news.” The song is taken to a new dimension by the appearance of Eric Gales’s guitar, which weaves in and out of Bibb’s lyrics and then breaks into its own protesting, moaning solo, echoing eloquently the sombre message of the song.

“Eric Gales – his palette is so huge, and when it comes to blues, he’s the epitome of the best of old school and modern sensibilities. He’s in a class all by himself and also a fine person to work with, to vibe off. Because he’s spontaneous, straightforward, honest, you know, a heart open-on-his-sleeve kind of guy. I met him on a Joe Bonamassa blues cruise and Ulrika [Bibb’s wife] caught him on film, kind of dancing to a song during my set. And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a good sign.’ And then I heard him and I was completely blown away, so I went up to him said, ‘listen, would you guest on my album if I could make the thing happen?’ And he said, ‘it’s going to happen’!

Dear America is a collection of thirteen Eric Bibb originals, all testament to his outstanding song-writing skill, ear for a good tune and top-notch guitar chops, but what makes Dear America such a great album – and an important album – is not just the music but the nuanced social commentary and challenge he presents.

Dear America addresses the troubled racial history of the United States and what is still, sadly, going on. A number of the songs are quite explicit and quite hard hitting. In White and Black, he highlights the “crooked thinking, white is good, black is bad”; in Dear America, “on the one hand to be called your citizen, on the other to be excluded because of the colour of my skin”; and in Different Picture, the repetitive nature of America’s racial problems are firmly in view.

I wondered how important it was for Eric to make this record, to say the sort of things that he’s saying here and to ask the sort of questions he poses.

“I think the whole world has been preoccupied with current events in America for some time – the whole Trump era unleashed a lot of monsters that we’ve been trying, as a collective people, to sweep under the carpet. I think that, with that, and with events like the George Floyd murder and so on, things just seem to be coming to a head.

“And it was like everything was conspiring to make the world pay attention to these issues in a new way. This was borne out by the fact that so many young people ended up becoming involved, and not only African-Americans, but others with the whole Black Lives Matter movement. And, you know, this is ongoing. It’s not new, but it’s certainly more in our face than ever before.

“I was very aware going into this project that we were dealing with very uncomfortable issues. But to pretend that it doesn’t exist or minimize its impact on our lives is to end up being much more uncomfortable. And I think the more we understand that, the better off we’ll be. So, I knew I wanted to say something about all of this and say it from a perspective of an American living outside of America.”

One of the very sobering songs on the album is Emmett’s Ghost. The gentle, almost cheery finger-picked guitar introduction belies the dreadful historical event the song refers to. Emmett Till was a 14-year-old African American from Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955, who was falsely accused of offending a white woman and then brutally lynched, before his body was thrown into the Tallahatchie River. Outrageously, his murderers were acquitted, but Emmet Till became an iconic figure in the Civil Rights movement.

Bibb sings about his own experience of coming to know about Emmet Till as a boy himself, of coming to realize “from that day on, some hated my kind.” Sadly, this is not just an event from the past – Emmet Till’s ghost still haunts America, “we can’t move on because hate’s still going strong all over this country.”

Events like this still clearly reverberate; another recent blues album, Guy Davis’s Be Ready When I Call You, shines a light on the appalling Tulsa Massacre of 1921 [see our interview with Guy here]. I asked Eric if America has really come to terms with its past, with the brutality and inhumanity of events like these?

“Well, the hatred mentioned in the song refrain is still going on, and one of the reasons for that is because it’s never been properly acknowledged, it’s never been properly taught about in schools. It’s that part of American history that has often been whitewashed. There are people who told me – and I’m talking about educated people, man – they had never heard of this story.

“But African-Americans have been aware of it because it was pivotal in the history of the whole Civil Rights movement. But the number of people who were unaware of this story was quite shocking to me. Emmet was 1955, half a century ago or longer. The George Floyd murder, for example, to me was a very palpable reverberation of the same energy, the same attitudes.

“The fact that the guys who perpetrated the Emmett Till murder got off, the fact that the policemen who murdered George Floyd didn’t get off, tells me something about the evolution of consciousness and that we’re growing. And I also found out the Emmett Till case has been reopened and in absentia could possibly get a guilty verdict. [This Guardian article reviews the re-opening of the case.]

“So, as uncomfortable with this history is, as long as it’s taken to even get to this point and, let’s face it, these are what seem like minimal steps forward, I have a feeling that the process is accelerating.

“And I think being in a position to add my voice to this ongoing conversation is really good for me because this is what I do. I’m a troubadour who is aware of my surroundings and the world that I live in. And if there’s any way this troubadour can influence a conversation and perhaps promote change, that’s good.”

Although Dear America addresses some serious issues, Eric wanted to make clear that “this is not a protest album.” Growing up in the ‘60s in New York, with a father like Leon Bibb, Eric was well acquainted with folk protest songwriters like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs. And so, although he never considered himself an artist in that vein, “it was impossible for me to not take on board in my songwriting all of these things. It was just impossible.”

“I consider myself some kind of storyteller. Who’s got something to say, with a history that gives me a platform for speaking out and being a voice for promoting certain kinds of conversations that will hopefully lead to change. That’s part of my chameleon background. But I also wanted it just to be a groovy album, you know, that people would get into. I didn’t want to just be on a soap box. So that was in itself challenging, but I think I had help from above in pulling it off, you know?”

That’s a delicate balance to achieve, but I think he has, indeed, pulled it off. Because, like every Eric Bibb album you listen to, there’s a thread of hope and joy that comes through very strongly. And the music is great.

Photo: Michael Wall

I did want to ask him about one other song on the album, which I think is a hugely important one. Born of a Woman, which features Shaneeka Simon, addresses the tsunami of violence against women all over the world.

“Yes, I’m very glad that song came to me because I want to weigh in on this and basically draw attention to something that is really, as you say, global and alarming, to say the least.

“Again, to me it is indicative of the fact that we’re in a time right now, where it seems that all of the issues or whatever trauma that is holding the human community back from becoming this loving family – the misogyny, racism, all of that – seems to just being pushed to the front of our awareness in dramatic ways, and people are taking sides.

“And young people, fortunately, are kind of getting it and stepping up in more numbers than ever before. But the pushback is also quite intense right now, there are people who are really resistant to looking at all of this and coming to terms with it.”

While Eric, rightly, points to the hope lying in the younger generation, a thread of hope is never far away in an Eric Bibb album. Take the first song, Whole Lotta Lovin’, where we find Eric giving thanks for the simple things in life. “A whole lot of thank you, Lord, for all you provide.” It’s a wonderful way to start the album and we get threads of this thankful attitude right the way through. I wondered how important gratitude is to him and how important gratitude is in the midst of all the difficulties we’ve be talking about?

“It’s essential to me personally, and I think it’s an essential attitude and emotion for the healing of all of us. I’ve written a couple of songs, even one with the title Gratitude [On Roadworks, 1999]. It’s central to my way of going forth in the world. And it’s really helped me, I think. Without that the possibility of tipping over into the lane of cynicism and bitterness is quite huge. So that’s the antidote to that.

“And it’s funny, you mentioned the first song. This album is called Dear America and I call it a love letter. If I can think of one or two things about the American experience – speaking personally, but I think it’s also a universal feeling – it would be the food and the music, you know, because there’s something poetically and cosmically fitting about a music that spans so many different kinds of expressions – jazz, calypso, blues, gospel, whatever, music born of a history and a people who have been really hard done by. And this fascinates me.

Photo: Michael Wall

“It’s like, it tells me something about the creator. Giving the gift of a certain kind of irresistible music that not only makes the whole world joyful, but makes whole world connected in its love of it, makes the whole world want to play it, sing it, understand it, know about it.

The fact of where it’s come from is a beautiful, beautiful comment on life in general. And I want to make it clear that this gift from the African-American tribe to the world, that has basically brought so many people together in so many ways, is the way I want to think about America when I think about what’s great about it, you know, what it’s given us. And I wanted to start there because I knew I had to go other places, but I really wanted to start there. And I’m glad you mention that.”

In similar vein, Love’s Kingdom, strikes that same note of hope and thankfulness – “Everything can change, if we believe,” and “Let’s start with being grateful for being alive.” There’s a defiant hope here against all the darkness, hope which almost goes against the grain.

“That song, really, I guess you could say, summarizes my philosophy. I really think at the end of the day this is the way. And I think it’s not a simple path, getting there is not simple, but it is a simple solution. Making that decision to step into Love’s Kingdom, to basically really follow the great teachings of all the great teachers, whoever you want to follow, that was the message. And we have that possibility and I just felt like saying it as simply as that – if we can step into Love’s Kingdom, you know, turn it over and really trust in some kind of loving higher power, however you want to frame it or put it into words.”

It’s a fabulous song, though not a typical Eric Bibb arrangement. A collaboration between Eric, Glen Scott and Tommy Sims, it’s got a kind of retro soul feel to it, which lifts you up and carries you along. Right into the closing song, Oneness of Love, a beautiful, gentle song, with a simple accompaniment, graced by the sweet voice of Lisa Mills added to Bibb’s own. It’s a fitting way to complete the album, where a letter that is painfully honest, but never hopeless or cynical, is sandwiched between notes of thankfulness, hope and love at the beginning and end.

Eric Bibb’s is a voice we need to hear. In a world where there’s so much aggression and hatred, a voice for peace, for unity, for humanity is one that needs to be heard. And Dear America is especially timely – shining a light on much of what is pulling people apart and giving rise to bitterness and division, but never giving up on the possibilities that love can bring.

[See our extended comment on Born of a Woman here]

Great Blues Albums: Stevie Ray Vaughan, Texas Flood

Stevie Ray Vaughan made a big impact in what was a short career, sadly dying in a helicopter crash in 1990, after featuring in a concert along with his elder brother Jimmie, Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, and Robert Cray.

Despite living only long enough to produce six studio albums (two released posthumously), he breathed new life into the blues rock genre and left a lasting mark as a guitarist who has inspired subsequent generations. Vaughan drew his inspiration from the pantheon of great blues guitarists, like the three Kings, Albert Collins, T-Bone Walker, and, of course, Jimi Hendrix.

“I started out,” he said, “trying to copy licks from Lonnie Mack records. He was a really big influence for me. And my older brother Jimmie used to bring home records by B.B. and Albert King, Albert Collins and guys like Hubert Sumlin, Buddy Guy – all of ’em.”

He was able to synthesize all these influences into his own unique style rooted in blues, rock, and jazz, but yet was clearly in the tradition of the great Texas bluesmen. John Hammond (Sr.) said of him, “Stevie is in that great Texas tradition of T-Bone Walker. It’s a wonderful tradition. T-Bone, who I first saw back in 1936, used to do what Stevie does now – play the guitar behind his neck and everything else.”

Although, refreshingly at that time in the early 80s, Vaughan eschewed technological musical wizardly, dry ice, fog and lasers, stripping the music back to its essentials of guitar, bass and drums, he was an extravagant on-stage showman, with his distinctive Tex-Mex bandido get-up and pained guitar-solo face. But it was his virtuosic guitar playing that rightly endeared him to fans, both during his life-time and after.

Texas Flood was the debut studio album by Vaughan and his Double Trouble band mates, Tommy Shannon on bass and Chris Layton on drums. Released on June 13, 1983 by Epic Records, the album took its name from one of the record’s songs, first recorded by  Larry Davis in 1958. There are ten songs on the original release, with six written by Vaughan. The CD version released in 1999 added 5 more songs.

Jackson Browne had seen and been impressed with the band when it played the Montreux Jazz Festival in the summer of 1982. After taking up Browne’s offer of some days of free use of his own recording studio in LA, the band recorded a demo which caught the attention of John H. Hammond and landed them a recording contract with Epic Records. Texas Flood was the first album made, recorded in the space of three days again at Jackson Browne’s studio.

The album garnered Grammy Award nominations – the album for Best Traditional Blues Performance, and the song Rude Mood for Best Rock Instrumental Performance. Critical reception was generally excellent, with Stephen Thomas Erlewine describing it as having a “monumental impact” and suggesting it “sparked a revitalization of the blues.” Texas Monthly called Vaughan “the most exciting guitarist to come out of Texas since Johnny Winter,” although Winter himself was less than positive, saying that he thought Vaughan didn’t have a distinctive style.

There’s no doubt about Texas Flood’s success, however – the album went to #38 on the Billboard 200 chart and went platinum in Canada and double-platinum in the United States, selling over 2,000,000 units. It became a 2021 inductee into the Grammy Hall of Fame in recognition of its historical significance.

The album kicks off with some rockin’ rock’n’roll with Love Struck Baby and you’re hooked straightaway. Before you’ve time to catch your breath, we’re into one of Vaughan’s signature tunes, Pride and Joy, showcasing his fine songwriting and, of course, his guitar chops.

Photo: Marty Lederhandler

The title track is up next, slower in tempo, but the guitar work no less fiery and emotional. This is old school blues, but it’s got a characteristic SRV stamp on it. As well as Vaughan originals, the album has a Howling Wolf song, Tell Me, driven now by Vaughan’s urgent guitar rather than the piano of the original, and a little more up tempo.

Oddly, Vaughan includes a children’s nursery rhyme, Mary Had a Little Lamb, now transported into a blues setting but it’s largely an opportunity for Vaughan’s guitar soloing. We get a couple of instrumentals, too, in Lenny, a slow, shimmering electric guitar exercise, and Testify, with Vaughan going at break-neck speed up and down the fretboard.

For the most part, it’s breath-taking, toe-tapping (or dancing if you’re so inclined) stuff, all Texas brashness and explosive energy. No wonder it went down a storm and put Stevie Ray Vaughan on the map.

He was the victim of his own success, sadly, descending further into the drugs and alcohol addiction that nearly claimed his life before he managed to get clean and begin touring again in 1986.

He recorded his fourth album, In Step, with Double Trouble in 1989 – “I’m finally in step with life,” he said, “in step with myself, in step with my music.” That was to be Vaughan’s last recording – tragically, he was killed in a helicopter crash with four others in August 1990. A huge loss to his family, but also to the wider music and blues world. Buddy Guy and John Lee Hooker dedicated their next albums to his memory.

Track list:

Love Struck Baby
Pride and Joy
Texas Flood
Testify
Rude Mood
Mary Had a Little Lamb
Dirty Pool I’m Cryin’

From Sharecropping to Soulful Singing – Jack Ward’s Remarkable Story

Jack Ward was a successful Stax recording artist, but, remarkably, has never made an album – until now. At a lively 83 years old, he has released a fabulous album of bluesy, soulful gospel songs, Already Made, on Bruce Watson’s Bible and Tire Recording Co. label.

“I was born in the country,” says Jack, “and I would hear Elmore James, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Howlin’ Wolf, all of them guys — and I used to patronize them, and sing like them a little bit, but I came back to my roots. I used to do a lot of blues singing but I broke from that and got into the gospel.”

Jack was the lead vocalist in a 1960s group along with Isaac Hayes on piano and had several hit records with both Stax Records and Peacock Records. He retired from professional singing to concentrate on being a church pastor in Memphis, and although his outstanding singing voice has been heard often in his church, this outstanding release from Bible and Tire gives the rest of us the opportunity to appreciate his considerable songwriting and vocal talent.

Elder Jack Ward’s re-discovery comes as a result of Bruce Watson working with Juan D Shipp on the old D-Vine Spiritual’s back catalogue. On finding some of the artists still alive and active, Watson has had them in the studio, with brilliant results. Elizabeth King’s Living in the Last Days was released to considerable critical acclaim and now we have Ward’s Already Made. [Catch our interview with the remarkable Elizabeth King here.]  Produced by Watson and Sacred Soul Sound Section leader Will Sexton at Memphis’s Delta-Sonic Sound Studio, the ten song program features the warmly-recorded winning ingredients that are becoming a trademark of Bible and Tire’s patented Sacred Soul sound, from Ward’s spirited vocals to the crack studio band laying down the grooves behind him.

I was delighted to get the opportunity to chat to Elder Jack Ward about the album, his music and life. I found him justifiable proud of his past singing career, performing and recording in the 1960s.

“I did a recording with Stax, Don’t Need No Doctor. It’s been so long, man, fifty years, but that’s what put me on the top. It was all just about for two years a hit. The Christian Harmonizers, we were with Stax and we went out on the road. I did a lot of writing myself, my own songs. And then I put a group together called The Gospel Four. That’s when we put out, Look Down the Lonesome Road and Change Gonna Come. And that put me in the spotlight.”

When you listen to Jack Ward sing, you hear a soulful tenor voice, with great range and a sweet falsetto. I asked about choosing gospel music rather than blues or soul.

“My mom, she was a singer and, I used to hear her – see, I’m a country boy – she used to pick cotton in the country and drive tractors and mules and she would sing songs. She was the one that kept me in the church whenever I was a lad of a boy. I was the only son and I had two sisters.”

Jack was singing from a young age, better, he said, than the “white boys” he knew, who would get him to sing for them in Moorhead Mississippi. “They heard me sing and I was I think about 10. I’d say, ‘Come on, who you want to hear?’ I used to do Earnest Tubb’s Walking the Floor Over You, Hank Williams and all of that. And they would give me a dime, fifteen cents.”

Jack left his home on the farm and came to Memphis when he was 18 – “I had it in mind to make me a hit record.” He went back and forth for a couple of years, but settled, he told me, when he was 21 and has been in Memphis ever since.

“And I had my mind set to come to Memphis to sing blues or rock ’n’ roll.” But some school friends said to him, ‘Look, man, we need you to sing gospel,’ so he joined the Christian Harmonizers, making a number of successful gospel records before going on to form the Gospel Four in 1968. The Gospel Four had an altogether different sound and style than the Christian Harmonizers, as exemplified by the gripping testimonial The Last Road and the mid-tempo, minor-keyed A Change Is Gonna Come.

“That was something that I enjoyed in my heart,” Jack told me, “and maybe this stopped me going to rock and roll and the blues and I’m glad that I turned around and got into the gospel.”

He earned the moniker “Jumping Jack Ward” around this time, “because, you know, I had a little jump from the singing. It was no outstanding thing, it just made me feel good. And I just do my little thing and they called Jumping Jack Ward.”

For the last fifty years, though, Jack has been Elder Jack Ward. He had started pastoring before his professional singing career finished –  “I was doing evangelism and so on” – and went on to found the Earth Temple Holiness Church, which he has led for the past 57 years, although he started to “pass things back” a while ago.

Jack is clearly – and justifiably – quite delighted about the new album and the opportunity to get on the road. “Now this would be my first album [as opposed to 45 singles]. So this is where I am now at this time. I plan to do some traveling as soon as we get everything lined up. I’m an 83-year-old man!”

Watson feels that Already Made is one of the best albums he’s ever produced – given some of the albums he’s worked on at Fat Possum, that’s saying a lot. It is, indeed, very, very good, with Ward’s soulful vocals beautifully backed by both his daughters and Bible and Tire label mates the Sensational Barnes Brothers. Guitarists Will Sexton and Matt Ross-Spang add a little magic to the mix, adding variety to the songs, from the distortion on He’s Got Great Things to the cool reverb of Shout Trouble’s Over to the shimmering vibrato of God’s Love.

God’s Love is a lovely song, with Ward’s tender vocals giving a great sense of somebody who has personally experienced God’s love and care over the years, despite life’s difficulties.

“When you weak, he will make you strong, when you’re lonely, he would never leave you alone. So that was a comfort to me a whole lot. I didn’t drop out. I just kept doing what God had gave me from birth. I love that one, God’s Love.”

Other songs, like Someone Who Is Greater Than Me, Lord I’m In Your Care and God’s Got a Hold of My Hands, all convey the same positive message of Ward’s experience of faith in the nitty gritty of his own life and those of the many people he has pastored over the years.

He’s someone who knows about hard times – not that he’ll be forthcoming in complaining in any way. I asked him, for example, about his early life, and he told me about life in a family of sharecroppers in rural Mississippi in the first half of the last century. Life wasn’t easy, to say the least.

“We was raised up on a farm. I had to work on the farm, my family and I, and my two sisters. And we had to chop cotton, pick cotton. When I turned 17, I was working with my father and some men that he had hired. And we cut wood for cross ties that goes on the rail road. So I was working, doing, the job that men was doing. I was pretty apt to catch on.

One Row Planter

“And, as I just come up through the years, I applied to use a one row planter. You had to put the mule on the row with the planter, and you had to walk on the top of it, one road planter, and man, it was hot. We was in the sun. 85 or 90, sometime they would get up there to 105. My head, it was black in the sun! I’ve done some bogus work. I’ve done everything, drove tractors and drove mules and baled hay.”

Sharecropping is a system where the landlord allows a tenant to use the land in exchange for a share of the crop. Mississippi tenant farm families were often kept severely indebted. The landlord would extend a line of credit to the sharecropper while taking the year’s crop as collateral. The sharecropper could then draw food and supplies all year long. When the crop was harvested, the harvest was sold and the debt settled, but with no added benefit for the sharecropper.

“Sharecropper,” Jack mused. “But you would get nothing out of it. You wouldn’t get anything out of that because the boss man, he tell you, ‘Well, Jordan’ – that’s my daddy’s name – he said, ‘y’all just come out, outta debt.’ And so daddy said, outta debt? He said, ‘well, we’ll loan you some money and go through the winter.’” Jack chuckled as he recounted this.

Remarkably, he remembers the good things about those days. His family never went hungry – “because, we raised vegetables and water melons, sweet potatoes, corn, popcorn. We hunted rabbits and stuff like that. And we never did get hungry.”

“I mean, back in the old days, it was pretty good, because, we didn’t have no responsibility like, lights and all of this, ‘cause we didn’t have lights. During that time we had to use kerosene, paraffin, stuff like that, and when the boss man put lights in our house, man, I tell you, I was just so happy.”

“You know, you was in the country. You didn’t have nothing too much to worry about. You had to work hard and they pay you little money. So from that point, yeah, it was tough. But, people was not sick. Like a lot of people now. See, we had chickens, geese, mules and all of that and hogs. Getting close to wintertime, dad would kill a hog. We was in the field and didn’t get sick because you would get out in the heat and sweat all that stuff out. You didn’t have no high blood pressure. They didn’t have no headaches and diabetes.”

Jack remembers being able to dress up once in a while, putting on his best shoes and a suit. “Looking back, we was taken care of. We just did so much hard work, bogus work. I call it like that. You didn’t get no pay amount to anything. I’ve chopped cotton for a dollar and a quarter a whole day. We moved on from that, but, you know, I thank God for how he kept me and I didn’t get sick and a lot, but I just thank God for this time.”

Elder Jack Ward has an incredibly positive attitude to life, and thankfulness is clearly a mark of the man. You just have to listen to He’s Got Great Things Waiting You, to get a sense of the way his faith gives him confidence in God, no matter what life throws at him. “Dry your eyes, and don’t you cry, your blessing is so nigh.”

At 83, Jack knows the road ahead is shorter than what’s behind, but his sense of gratitude, his faith and his enthusiasm for life as inspirational. “I know we all got to leave here, but a whole lot of my friends, they are gone. So I’m thankful. I thank God for just keeping me alive. And I’m doing pretty good and my ministry and then my singing career – I love both. I love singing. I love preaching. I love teaching and that’s me.”

The album finishes with Ward’s favorite, I Feel Better Since I Prayed. When I asked him about it, he got on the theme of thankfulness again.

“We do pray the prayer of Our Father, but perhaps you want to thank God for what he has done and how far he has brought you. And you look back and you see a lot of your friends and your school mates in the singers, they are gone and we are blessed to be here. Now, I’ve got a song called You’re Blessed to be Here, with the Sunset Travelers. You’re blessed to be here. And I tell people without God, we are nothing because he wakes us up in the morning. We have a lot to be thankful for.

“And I thank God every day. You know, you don’t have to be screaming, hollering, you can just pray in your spirit. When we leave home and go places, when we get ready to get out of drive, my wife prays and I’m driving. God has brought us through a lot of things. So I just take a step every day. I don’t worry about what tomorrow would bring. The Bible tells us that the morrow will take care of itself. And, we just go one day, when you wake up, you’re thankful that you are alive. I tell people when you wake up, you sit up and you get up!”

“You can give God praise, you got to tell him, thank you for another day, you kept me, you kept your arms around me.”

He may have just recorded a terrific album in Already Made, but there’re no sense of Jack Ward resting on his laurels. He’s looking to the future with a thankful heart and an optimistic spirit. “I tell people there’s a whole lot to be done and a little time to do it. So I got a message. I got a message I’m going to do on that. It’s a whole lot to be done, but a little time to do it.”

We hear you Jack.

[Check out our interview with Bruce Watson, telling the remarkable story of Bible and Tire here.]

“Sometimes all anybody needs is a human touch.” Jackson Browne

I’ve been a fan of Jackson Browne since I first saw him on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test in May 1972, performing Jamaica Say You Will at the piano. I still have, and play, the old vinyl albums from the 70s – The Pretender, Late for the Sky and Running on Empty. I’ve seen him perform live on a number of occasions – the Royal Albert Hall concert in November in 2017 was particularly memorable, and I’d say it ranked with the best of the Bruce Springsteen gigs I’ve been to.

So I’m always pleased to see a new Jackson Browne album appear. In Downhill From Everywhere, the music is reliably good, with fine musicianship and song arrangements, featuring superb, less-is-more guitar work by Greg Leisz and Val McCullum, the excellent Bob Glaub on bass, and Mauricio Lewak and Russ Kunkel on drums.

The lyrical content, as always, is superbly crafted by a master songwriter. There’s often a nice synthesis of the personal and the political, where Browne manages to get you focused on some important issues without ever sounding preachy.

So it is with the ten tracks on Downhill from Everywhere, Browne’s first album since 2014’s Standing in the Breach (which I found a fine piece of work). He tackles the problems of immigrants to the US in The Dreamer and poverty in Haiti in the beautiful Love is Love. And there’s a thoughtful rumination on the idea of the American Dream in Until Justice is Real. It’s a song perhaps only someone in their 70s could write, with more of the road behind them than ahead. (I’m beginning to know the feeling, Jackson.)

“Time rolling away
Time like a river, time like a train
Time like a fuse burning shorter every day.”

It begs the inevitable question: “What is my purpose, what can I do?” I guess of we’re honest, particularly as the clock of life ticks on, that’s what we all want to know. Browne wants us to “put our shoulder to the wheel,” but wonders, “what would it look like?”

Perhaps something of the answer comes in A Human Touch, written and performed by Jackson Browne and Leslie Mendelson. The song appeared on the 2018 documentary film 5B, about the care given by doctors and nurses to people living with AIDS.

Singer-songwriter Leslie Mendelson and Steve McEwan came up with the song originally, and Browne says he only” added a few lines,” but nevertheless, “we really got into every line and nearly every word in depth to make sure it was what we wanted to say and convey in the song.”

The song addresses suffering, pain and loneliness, of which there is still far too much in the world:

“Everybody gets lonely
Feel like it’s all too much
Reaching out for some connections”

And sometimes:

“all anybody needs
Is a human touch.”

Leslie Mendelson said of the song, “One of the most important things in life is human contact. To feel empathy or to experience a connection with someone is why we’re here. Without that we have nothing. At the end of the day, people want to connect and feel and be loved.”

My mother lived for many years after my dad had passed away, and, although she was a determined woman who just got on with things, she did find being on her own a challenge. She used to love it when I would give her a shoulder rub when I visited, and I know she appreciated that even when she eventually succumbed to Alzheimer’s near the end of her life. “Sometimes all anybody needs is a human touch.”

Which brings us back to “what’s my purpose, what can I do?” Although in Europe and America we live in a culture where the individual is king, and you’re meant to make it on your own, that’s not the way humans are made.

Other non-Western cultures have something to teach us in this regard. In South Africa, the word Ubuntu describes a way of life where our dependence upon each other is recognized – “I am because we are.” We are all connected and can only achieve for ourselves as we seek the growth and progress of others. Archbishop Desmond Tutu said that Ubuntu was about being generous, hospitable, friendly, caring and compassionate. “You share what you have. It is to say, ‘My humanity is inextricably bound up in yours.’ We belong in a bundle of life.” 

Our fast-paced, acquisitive, self-absorbed culture has largely forgotten this. But if we want to find our purpose, Unbuntu, the human touch is exactly where we find it – and ourselves. In giving the generosity, care and compassion that Tutu talked about.

Sometimes all we need is a human touch.

Great Blues Albums: Eric Clapton, Unplugged

Eric Clapton was once “god,” the best rock and blues guitarist on the planet, adored by fans of his time with John Mayall, Cream, Derek and the Dominos and then his solo career.

Now, aside from the recent nonsense of joining in with Van Morrison in a petulant wail against pandemic restrictions, and touting unscientific and dangerous claims about fertility against vaccines, he is a figure who seems to divide blues fans.

This is clear whenever you see something about him posted on blues-related social media – the negative reaction can be visceral. There’ll be those who won’t even bother to read this article and will simply react to the mere suggestion that Clapton’s Unplugged could be a classic blues album.

Others will take a more considered approach to Clapton, understanding his lifelong obsession with the blues and the contribution he made to the genre during the 1960s when the genre was in steep decline in the United States because of the rise of pop, rock’n’roll, soul and R&B. That was B.B. King’s view, who said that he and Clapton had been friends since they met in the 60s and that Clapton “plays blues better than most of us.”

The album the two made in 2000, Riding with the King, which won a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues album, shows two men in love with the blues, their music making flowing effortlessly off each other. And, of course, the admiration was not one way, Clapton thanking King “for all the inspiration and encouragement he gave to me as a player over the years,” and hailing Live at the Regal as the album which got him started with the blues.

Clapton was also very close with Muddy Waters, whom he described as “the father figure I never really had” and his greatest influence. His playing was also deeply influenced by Robert Johnson, who amazed him with his guitar chops and singing. “There were very few people on record who sounded like they were singing from the heart,” said Clapton, “there’s no comparison, this guy’s got finesse. His touch was extraordinary. Which is amazing in light of the fact that he was simultaneously singing with such intensity.” Clapton’s 2004 album, Me and Mr Johnson plays tribute to his lifelong fascination with Johnson.

So, given the association Clapton has had over the years with the greats in the blues Pantheon and their high opinion of his blues contribution, it’s hard to understand how he gets dismissed so readily by some blues fans. Clapton himself has said of his commitment to the blues, “I recognise that I have some responsibility to keep the music alive.”

All that said, on to Unplugged as one of our “Great Blues Albums.”

Playing his Martin 000-42 acoustic guitars, and accompanied by a small group of musicians, including Andy Fairweather Low and Chuck Leavell, Clapton performed the songs for a small audience in England in 1992 at a particularly emotional time for him. His four-year-old son Conor had died four months previously after falling from his 53rd floor apartment. Tears in Heaven – clearly not a blues song in form, but arguably in content – was one of the fourteen songs on the original album, which became 20 in the 2013 remastered version.

The album won three Grammys at the 1991 awards and became the bestselling live album of all time, and Clapton’s bestselling album, selling 26 million copies worldwide. It was released in August 1992 to wide critical acclaim and revitalized Clapton’s career.

The bulk of the setlist consists of traditional blues, including Big Bill Broonzy’s Hey Hey, Robert Johnson’s Malted Milk and Son House’s Walkin’ Blues. Songs from Jimmy Cos, Lead Belly, Muddy Water, Bo Didley, and Robert Cray, along with a couple of Clapton originals complete the set. One of these is an acoustic version of Layla which works surprisingly well.

Clapton breathes new life into these songs – his version of Jimmy Cox’s depression era song Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out has become something of a definitive version, his Walkin’ Blues with its cool slide guitar recalls Robert Johnson’s version, and Muddy Waters Rollin’ and Tumblin’ still rocks as an acoustic number.

Although the blues songs here are all cover versions of old blues songs, aside from the fact that the album just sounds so good, the significance of the album is the effect it has had on acoustic blues music. Subsequent to Unplugged, during the 1990s, you see artists like Keb’ Mo’, Kelly Joe Phelps, Eric Bibb, Rory Block and Guy Davis all seeming to come to prominence. For sure, these and other great artists whose music was based on acoustic guitar had been plying their trade for some time before that – some for a long time, reaching back to the 60s – and had a loyal following. But Clapton’s Unplugged brought blues music – and acoustic blues – to a much wider audience and got a new generation of fans interested in these other artists and then also beginning to listen to the original artists as well.

Testimony to that is conversations I’ve had recently with professional acoustic artists who hail Unplugged as being formative in their awakening to the blues.

Plus, Unplugged stands the test of time. It’s an album anyone can listen to and hear a modern interpretation of the blues that is not dated and is hugely enjoyable. Purists may prefer that everyone listens to Lead Belly or Bill Broonzy, but for everyone else, Eric Clapton’s Unplugged is their way into appreciating the blues.

Bob Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom Review

I’ve seen a few shows of varying quality during the pandemic restrictions of the past year. But none comes close to Bob Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom gig. Granted, it wasn’t a live gig, although you kinda got that impression from the advance publicity.

But the quality of this pre-recorded show, the surprising setting, and Dylan’s performance was such that any initial gripes were quickly forgotten. Shot in black and white, mimicking a smoky down-at-heels club in the 1940s, Dylan was in full cabaret singer mode, all gestures and stances, singing positively tunefully.

Where was the raspy, near-croak we’ve become use to in recent years? Gone completely as he treated us to a romp through his early back catalogue – mainly 1960s and 70s with What Was It You Wanted from 1989’s Oh Mercy the most recent one covered.

When you go to a Dylan gig, you expect the songs you know and love to be completed re-reworked, sometimes so you can barely recognise them. Here with the backing of a young band playing largely acoustically – double bass, acoustic guitars, mandolin, accordion, occasional electric guitar and no percussion – the songs sounded fresh, instantly recognizable and utterly captivating. Especially with the man in such good voice, at times strumming a couple of arch-top acoustic guitars and blowing a tasteful harmonica.

The dim lighting and the black and white shooting lent a considerable amount of atmosphere to the show, with patrons sitting around tables being served drinks and – à la 1940s, smoking. No wonder the band had their masks on – presumably to shield from the cigarette smoke rather than the virus. Though, actually, I kinda suspect the cigarette smoke might have been faked.

It worked rather well, though. The only thing else needed, said one wag on the online comments, was a “bar room brawl off stage.”

Dylan at 80 still managed to look rather cool, with his white jacket or – my favourite and I want one – his black embroidered one. The man still has a decent head of hair, though the low light suitably concealed his creased, craggy features.

He kicked things off with When I Paint My Masterpiece, probably the best version of this song he’s done, followed by Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine, before the exquisite Queen Jane, with Dylan standing at the mike, articulating the lyrics almost sweetly and the band paring things back to put the spotlight on the song and the singer.

I’ll Be Your Only Baby Tonight, musically was very cool, but I have to say, I felt rather uncomfortable about Dylan being flanked by two young women as he sang. Didn’t seem a good look. My feminist daughter, however, reckoned that the scene was supposed to subvert “the male gaze” (Google it!) – the women actors looked right into the camera all the time and not at Dylan. If so, it was clever work by Israeli-American director Alma Har’el, who did a superb job overall. Watch this song yourself for yourself and decide.

A few songs later we got What Was It You Wanted from 1989’s Oh Mercy, a quite beautiful acoustic version, with a little plaintive harmonica from Dylan, which brought out the yearning and pathos of the song. And that’s the thing about these arrangements – it helped you appreciate just how strong Dylan’s songs are, both lyrically and musically. In some concerts I’ve gone to in recent years, the songs were all but obscured by the rockabilly or rock’n’roll treatment.

He followed that with a tenderly sung Forever Young. I’ve always loved this song, but tonight, it seemed particularly poignant. That’s what we want for Dylan, for his songs, the albums, are so much a part of our history and we can’t bear to think of him aging. Because that means we’re aging too. And although we want it to be true, that he and we could stay forever young, we know, at 80, we’ll not have him performing and writing songs for much longer.

It was nice to get a song from John Wesley Harding in the mix, the lyrically opaque Wicked Messenger, whose title is based loosely on a verse from the biblical book of Proverbs. The obscurity of the lyrics was nicely emphasized by Dylan either being hidden entirely by the guitar player or almost completely in shade.

The final song, I hope we can’t read too much into – It’s All Over Now Baby Blue, sung with some deliberation, the band following Dylan’s careful enunciation, and highlighting the lyrics much more than the jaunty version on 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home.

Suddenly it really was all over, just 48 minutes. But 48 utterly absorbing and totally entertaining minutes. The good thing is, having paid my $25, I can watch it again a time or two over the next couple of days.

Setlist

When I Paint My Masterpiece
Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go MIne
Queen Jane Approximately
I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
Tombstone Blues
To Be Alone With You
What Was It You Wanted
Forever Young
Pledging My Time
Wicked Messenger
Watching The River Flow
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

The Unique Talent that is Mark Harrison

“Rapidly becoming a British national treasure.” Blues Blast Magazine

Mark Harrison’s sixth album, The Road to Liberty, showcases his adept story-telling and clever lyrics, his knack for composing a catchy tune, and his never-less-than-engaging performance as a singer and guitarist. He’s hard to pigeon-hole, not quite blues, but blues never far away, somewhere in the folk-blues-country continuum.

That’s not a bad thing, given the unique talent that he is, able to write songs that transport you to another place, to make you contemplate the world around and, as well as that – most importantly – to entertain you.

Harrison is an English singer songwriter, who plays a nifty acoustic guitar, who has been delighting audiences over the last ten years with his carefully crafted songs and witty banter. He was a late starter as a professional musician, not picking up a guitar and singing until his fifth decade, but he’s made up for lost time, touring the country and supporting such artists as The Holmes Brothers and Doug MacLeod, along with major festival and radio appearances. He’s also released now six albums, all of which have been eagerly received and critically acclaimed. If you haven’t come across him as yet – put that right straight away and grab yourself a CD or download.

You could start with The Road to Liberty, a double album of 21 songs, featuring Harrison and his two bandmates, Charles Benfield on double bass and Ben Welburn on drums and percussion.

I got chatting to Mark about the new album and his musical journey. His previous albums, he told me, had been the “standard studio procedure of layer upon layer,” but that the band had felt that this album ought to reflect much more Mark’s live performances – “this business of singing your songs, standing up in a booth with headphones on, when do you ever do that in real life?”

A double album is a little unusual these days, and I wondered how that had come about. Mark said that he’d a lot of songs in the bank, so to speak, and, although he thought they’d only choose the standard 12 or 13 songs, the band like the lot of them, “so we thought, well, let’s just record them all. So, I’ve actually cleaned out everything I’ve got now!”

I remarked on the quality of the album’s cover and artwork – so often you get flimsy, pared back packaging these days and you wonder why you didn’t just buy the download. The Road to Liberty, however, feels quite luxurious.

“Well, it’s Andy Hall, who’s done everything for me from the very beginning. He and Rick, his business partner, ran a website called Blues in London when I got started, which was a sort of central thing for the blues scene in London. That’s how I met them, doing jams down at the Green Note in Camden. So when it came to do my first album, they said they’d like to do the cover. And so, it’s gone on from there and Andy does really wonderful things that make everything look great.”

The album has more of a band feel about it than some of Harrison’s previous albums. Charles Benfield and Ben Welburn, Mark’s two band members, are very talented musicians, whom he met on the blues jam scene at the very beginning of his career. They’ve been playing as a settled trio since around 2017, and sound a very solid and tight little outfit.

Mark does some solo gigs as well, depending on the venue and the promoter’s budget, but increasingly, it’s the trio. “I’d say it’s more fun when it’s the three of us.”

The album’s title, The Road to Liberty, is intriguing and one reviewer rather poetically suggested that it describes a “set of observations set to the heartbeat of humanity which exemplify the struggle of narrative freedom being taken seriously.” The phrase occurs in the song Restless Mind, a clever, jaunty number, with the band in full flight, which takes an ironic look at what happens when you let your mind become too restless.

“Well, I always take a phrase from a song, not a song title. So all the albums have a phrase or a word that is in one of the songs as the title of the album. I felt that I wanted a title that reflected some upbeat message because, in my opinion, the music generally speaking has an upbeat message in the words, even if it might not appear that at first glance.”

For sure, the tunes in the album are very upbeat, very optimistic sounding. At times they almost seem to belie the lyrics, a deliberate ploy by Harrison: “I’ve always felt that the music itself is uplifting or is meant to be, so you have perhaps a contrast between what is often a jolly tune, with what might be called slightly acerbic lyrics. And I think that’s probably where I’m at.”

As you listen to the songs, you’ll find yourself in turns amused, intrigued and puzzled. I asked Mark about one song in particular, which is great fun and had piqued my curiosity, Don’t Let the Crazy Out of the Bag (Too Soon).

“A woman friend told me a little while ago that if she was in a successful relationship that was going well, she would often find that the worst possible thing she could say would pop into her mind. And yet knowing that, she would find herself saying it! And then there came a point where she got engaged. But later I noticed on social media that she was no longer engaged. So I asked her about it. And she wrote, ‘I think I let the crazy out of the bag too soon.’

“And that one does have a happy ending by the way! It’s like a lot of things, you come across a phrase and you think it has a much more general application perhaps than the context in which you’ve heard it. And so, as well as that being a bit of fun, I thought that was a suitable subject for a song.”

Mark Harrison’s songs typically address a wide variety of situations and snapshots of life – on this album, you’ll find a song about the life of Skip James, Skip’s Song, a song about working in a factory in an economic downturn, Toolmaker’s Blues, and one about a poor guy on trial before the judge, All Rise. As you listen to this set of all-original songs, you can’t help but pick up echoes of blues music. Harrison plays a National resonator and has a cool kind of bluesy, picking style. You might expect him to throw in a few old blues songs, but that tends not to be what he does.

Mark told me that when he first got started, he tried to work out a few old blues tunes on the guitar, but found he couldn’t do it. The second song on the album, Everybody Knows, is a nice guitar-driven song in a Mississippi John Hurt style, but Mark said it was actually the first song he wrote using the 12-string and he had thought at the time he was working out Blind Willie McTell’s Statesboro Blues. “So the short answer is, I don’t do covers of them because I’m not capable!” (Unlikely, Mark is an accomplished guitarist.)

Mark’s back story as a musician is a remarkable one. He’d played guitar seriously in his youth, but only returned to it much later in life, about eleven years ago.

“I got this guitar shortly before I started in 2010. And that transformed everything. I had absolutely no intentions at all of launching it into anything. I didn’t expect to make an album or do a gig, and so for a little while, I just went and played a little bit at jams and it was a social thing. But the London blues jam scene is pretty good – a bunch of really good people and very high standards. So then, I’d written some songs and I thought I’d commit them to posterity and that was the first album [the acclaimed Watching the Parade]. I had no inkling of what would happen. It sounded okay to me. I put it out there a little bit cautiously and I got a few gigs and it built from there. So it’s a rare case of something in life that’s just taken on its own momentum. And it hasn’t been a big struggle!

“One of the advantages of the changes in society in my lifetime is that it doesn’t matter what age you are with music. In fact, the acts most likely to sell tickets and do main stage at festivals probably have an average age that’s pushing 70! Most theatre listings of music and festivals are all about nostalgia. So, the idea that you couldn’t be doing this at a relatively older age, that doesn’t exist. Which is pretty good.

“And people with my musical background would tend to be what you call old school, which is that you’re not going to go out there and inflict yourself on people then unless you’ve worked out something that’s of a really high level professionally. So I carry that sort of attitude with me.”

We chatted a bit about the economics of being a musician and how embarking on a career or going out as a professional musician is a pretty uncertain enterprise.

“It’s pretty obvious to anyone involved that the demise of recorded music as a commercial enterprise has had an enormous effect. In the past you could shift a lot of albums, but by the time I got started, that ship had sailed. So you need to form your plans realistically with that in mind. I do really pretty well for someone that wasn’t established many years ago. But in terms of making money, nobody is.

“I used to listen to radio when there were a limited number of radio shows and I would buy albums straight off hearing people on, say, the Paul Jones show and others. Now I’ve been on those shows subsequently, and I think in the past, if you got played there, let alone did a session, like we have, that would have led to very significant sales of your albums. But these days it doesn’t. So there’s no point complaining about that. That had already kicked him by the time I got going. So it’s a question of understanding the environment you’re operating in and being realistic. There’s no point being in music if you’re going to complain about not being famous.

“For me, it’s going out and playing, the audiences, the people that come up and talk to you, the places that you go, the experiences that you have.”

Part of Mark’s story is acquiring a guitar previously owned by Eric Bibb, whom he admires a great deal.

“I started to listen to music again about 2000 after a long time of not listening to anything. I saw in the gig listing of one of the papers, “Eric Bibb, Sublime Bluesman.” I thought, I didn’t know there were any sublime bluesmen still alive. So, I went to see him several times and I thought what he was doing was great. And it showed you that you could get a really great big sound with a band that had an acoustic guitar leading it, not an electric guitar and someone pulling faces.

“Years later, I went to a shop in London – it doesn’t exist anymore – The London Resonator Centre and I thought I’d buy one of these guitars. They got me trying out some of the new Nationals, which are great. And then the guy running the shop said, ‘Ah, the way you play, you might like this that’s just come in.’ And he said that Eric Bibb had just brought it in. So I ended up getting that and subsequently I’ve met Eric numerous times, and he always hails me whenever I go to one of his gigs – “Mark!” from across the room.”

If you like acoustic blues music, you’re almost bound to appreciate Mark Harrison, even though his music can’t be pinned down to simply that genre.

“I think that I’m in the tradition of those guys that called themselves songsters. Back in the twenties and thirties, they would do a whole variety of stuff. I mean, if you listen to the full output of Robert Johnson, very little of it, actually, is what would now be called blues. Variety and entertainment were the key factors. So I’m in that tradition.

Entertainment is certainly what you get with a Mark Harrison performance and with a Mark Harrison album. But it’s not just entertainment. He’s a thoughtful artist who appraises life’s peaks and valleys and converts this into stories with wry and incisive lyrics, but never short of compassion. He’s a unique talent and one you ought to be familiar with.

Best Blues Albums 2021 – So Far

It’s been a great year so far for blues albums. Whether it’s acoustic blues, blues rock, traditional, modern, gospel or funk, there’s been something for everyone. We’ve chosen our top 15 albums – arranged in alphabetical order, rather than ranking them. Enjoy!

Selwyn Birchwood, Living in a Burning House

Fresh modern blues, featuring Birchwood’s bluesy voice, and top-notch guitar and lap steel playing. Thirteen original energetic songs with a blues rock sound, with a jazzy feel at times. Birchwood is quite a talent and this is his best album yet.

Joanna Connor, 4801 South Indiana Avenue

An absolutely top-notch set of blues rock that clearly has a Chicago blues heritage, yet sounds completely fresh and modern. Connor’s killer slide guitar and vocals are augmented by some characteristically fine guitar work by Joe Bonamassa and a tight-knit top-class band. Superbly produced, and packed with raw, high-energy musicianship. Check out our interview with Joanna here.

Paul Cowley, Long Time Comin’

Paul Cowley is an outstanding musician, a fine guitarist, with a deep appreciation for the acoustic blues tradition. Long Time Coming, has 12 acoustic blues songs, 5 traditional songs from the likes of Charlie Patton, Blind Boy Fuller and Blin Willie McTell and 7 originals. It’s outstanding, and hugely enjoyable. Here’s our great interview with Paul.

Steve Cropper, Fire It Up

Legendary guitarist, songwriter and record producer delivers his first proper solo album since 1969. Thirteen well-constructed songs, with a terrific band, excellent guitar work by Cropper  and an outstanding vocal performance from Roger Reale. Check out our full review here.

Guy Davis, Be Ready When I Call You

Great songs, featuring Guy’s distinctive, growly vocals and rhythmic guitar work, good humour and engaging stories. More than just blues musically and most of the songs have a shard-hitting strong social commentary going on. An outstanding release from Davis and M.C. Records. Guy spoke to us about this important album.

Robert Finlay, Sharecropper’s Son

Finlay’s rasping, soulful voice is distinctive and memorable, and shines on this terrific album of blues, gospel, soul, and R&B. Produced by Dan Auerbach, the album evokes Finlay’s life of struggle and determination. Finlay is one of those musicians helped by the Music Maker Relief Foundation and his first album only appeared in 2016. Auerbach says simply, “Finlay is the greatest living soul singer.” To judge by this album, he’s not wrong. 

Chris Gill, Between Midnight and Loiuse

A stripped-down recording, just two microphones, a small amp, no overdubs and a lot of love for the blues. Relax on the back porch as Gill takes his acoustic, resonator and cigar box and performs nine originals and Virgil Brawley songs. It’s finger picking good, good old-fashioned acoustic blues played with considerable depth and passion.

John Hiatt with the Jerry Douglas Band, Leftover Feelings

A rewarding set of songs from Hiatt and Dobro master Jerry Douglas. Hiatt taps a rich vein of song-writing skill and experience in a mixture of ballads and blues songs with compelling stories. The combination of Hiatt’s always interesting voice, Douglas’s jaw-droppingly good guitar work and eleven good tunes makes for a hugely enjoyable experience.

Kelly’s Lot, Where and When

Kelly Zirbes’s band, which hails from the Los Angeles area has been plying its trade for the last 25 years, mostly as a blues rock outfit. Where and When sees them stripping things back, performing 11 acoustic blues songs with resonator-slide guitar and Zirbes’s gritty voice to the fore. It’s fabulous stuff, six originals written by Kelly and rhythm guitarist Perry Robertson that evoke the blues of a bygone age and five reworked traditional blues songs, including a terrific version of Robert Johnson’s Stones in My Passageway.

Elizabeth King, Living in the Last Days

Wonderful set of bluesy gospel songs from gospel singer King 50 years after she stopped performing and recording professionally. It’s a funky, blues, soul-filled pot of rich gospel fare, an album full of great songs, music that touches you, and Ms. King’s powerful vocal performance. It’s a gift for us all. Check out our great interview with the wonderful Ms King.

New Moon Jell Roll Freedom Rockers, Vol 2

Classic old-school recording from a kind of blues super-group, the musicians sitting together in a circle in the studio and playing amongst the microphones. It’s a joyous exploration of the blues, with great heart and soul A fine tribute to Jim Dickinson and a huge treat of an album for all of us. Our full review is here.

Gary Moore, How Blue Can You Get

If you buy one blues album this year, this is it. A set of eight songs, some previously unheard and unreleased, from the Moore family archives, will move you, excite you, get you on your feet, and make you regret all the more that Gary Moore is no longer with us. Released on the tenth anniversary of Moore’s passing How Blue Can You Get proves, if there was ever any doubt, that Gary Moore was a master of the blues. Our full review is here.

Reverend Shawn Amos, The Cause of It All

“I want to bring the ancestors into the room,” said Amos of this set of blues classics by the likes of Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, and Little Walter. The songs are stripped to the bone, with Amos on harmonica and vocals, and his longtime collaborator Chris “Doctor” Roberts on guitar. Check out Amos’s hair-on the-back-of-your-neck-raising vocal performance on the wholly acoustic Hoochie Coochie Man.

Alabama Slim, The Parlor

Approaching his 82^nd birthday, close to seven feet tall, and typically dressed in an impeccable tailored suit, Alabama Slim has given us a perfect, classic blues album which recalls the boogie of John Lee Hooker. It’s delicious, pared-back, but tasty fare from a man whose soulful and oh-so-cool vocals are served up in a wrap of sweet guitar groove from Little Freddie King, Slim’s cousin. Check out our full review here.

Christina Vane, Nowhere Sounds Lovely

Sit up and take notice of Cristina Vane, whose Nowhere Sounds Lovely is a terrific amalgam of blues, bluegrass and country – a thoroughgoing bluesy Americana, you might say. Whatever way you want to describe it, she’s a wonderful talent – a skilful guitar picker and slide player, a fine songwriter and a beautiful singer. We reviewed this excellent album here.

Maria Muldaur wants us to get happy with her

“You have a choice every day, you can be bummed out or you can be happy.”

Having a tough week? Feeling a bit down? Here’s a sure fire-remedy – click on the video below and catch Maria Muldaur singing with New Orleans band, Tuba Skinny, and feel your cares slip away as your smile gives way to a big grin and you suddenly find yourself on your feet dancing.

If you’re a roots music fan you’ll know Maria Muldaur from her many albums of blues, jazz and roots music over the last five decades; if not, you’ll surely know Maria’s big hit song from 1973, Midnight at the Oasis, with its sand dunes, camels and cactus. She’s still going strong, as upbeat and positive about life as ever, and has blessed us with a new album, recorded with Tuba Skinny, a group of traditional jazz musicians, entitled Let’s Get Happy Together.

Recorded in New Orleans last October during the dark days of the pandemic, but released as some semblance of normally seems to be returning (at least to America and Europe), Let’s Get Happy Together captures the note of hope we’re all looking for, not only in its title but in the exuberance and joy of the songs.

Maria Muldaur has had a stellar career, with a back catalogue of 43 albums, six Grammy nominations, multiple Blues Music Award nominations and a Lifetime Achievement Americana Trailblazer Award from the Americana Music Association in 2019. And that’s before we get to the hordes of fans all over the world.

The new album is one of the best you’ll hear this year and features twelve songs from the 1920s and 30s that Holger Petersen, the album’s executive producer and founder of Stony Plain Records, its label, says “is a historic project that pays reverence to many of the early New Orleans women of blues and jazz.”

Muldaur says that she hopes listeners “will be inspired to look up these wonderful artists yourself on YouTube and start exploring and enjoying the endless abundance of incredible music they left us.”

I got chatting by phone to Maria at her home in California about the album and about life in general. She was a breath of fresh air. I asked her, first of all, how the album came about, and she told me this remarkable story.

“Well,” she said, “a few years ago, I was shopping in a store in Woodstock, New York, and this wonderful, exuberant, toe-tapping music came over the speakers and it just sounded like the most wonderful vintage jazz. So, I remarked to the shop gal how cool it was that the local radio station would be playing this hip jazz. And she said, ‘Oh, that’s not the radio. That’s a band. That’s Tuba Skinny.’ Well, you know, I’ve studied that kind of music all my life, really immersed myself in it, since I was in a jug band back in the sixties, and I’d never heard of them. She said, well, they are a young band from New Orleans and they play on the streets. And I couldn’t believe that they were young because they were playing with such soulfulness and such authenticity. So I just was immediately smitten with their music.

“Long story short, she knows some of them. So she hooked me up with five of their albums and I became an ardent fan. It was like they were channeling not just the music itself, but the very atmosphere and aura and rhythms of life from that bygone era. It’s almost like going back in a time machine to a time when things were not as mechanized and digitalized and, you know, industrialized.

“It just makes you happy to listen to it! Well, anyway, I was making my last album two years ago in New Orleans where I was paying tribute to a wonderful New Orleans blues woman named Blue Lu Barker, who originally wrote and recorded a tune that’s been in my repertoire for almost 50 years, called Don’t You Feel My Leg. So I made it my business to go see Tuba Skinny every chance I got, whether they were playing on the street or in clubs. And eventually the washboard player recognized me. I didn’t go up and talk to them or anything – I just was there as a fan. And he said, is your name Maria? Maria Muldaur? I said, Yeah. And he couldn’t believe it!

“So I ended up sitting in with them a couple of times. And then in January of 2020, I was invited to come to New Orleans and do a special guest showcase of the International Folk Alliance, and I wondered if Tuba Skinny would play with me. So I got in touch with them. We had one quick rehearsal, and it immediately felt like going home because it just was a natural fit. Even though they were several generations younger than me, it’s clear we’ve all been drinking out of the same musical fountain.

“So anyway, we did the gig, it was wildly received and an old friend of mine, Holger Petersen happened to be there because he was getting a lifetime achievement award for having had a roots music show on the radio for 50 years in Canada. And over lunch the next day he asked me about doing an album with them. And I loved the idea. So that’s how this album came about.”

The album has songs originally done or written by Lil Hardin Armstrong, Louis Armstrong’s second wife, Dorothy Lamour, Frankie “Half Pint” Jaxon, Sweet Pea Spivey (sister of Victoria Spivey) and the delightfully named Goofus Five. The music is infectious and upbeat and the lyrics are clever, at times funny and uplifting. It’s music, I suggested to Maria, that stands the test of time.

“I would say that these songs were written in a time when things were more kind of heartfelt and genuine. And I go out of my way to choose songs that have relevance for me. Now, I figure if they resonate with me a hundred and some odd years later, then there’s a good chance they’ll resonate with my listeners. The very first day when Holger took me out to lunch. I got really excited about the project, and we said, well, what kind of songs will we have? And he started scrolling around. And we had the idea that a theme of the album could be paying tribute to women artists from New Orleans.

“And he came across Lil Hardin’s Let’s get Happy Together. Which we both found immediately appealing. I said that it should be the first song on the album – in fact it should be the title of the album. But little did we think that barely a month or two later, we’d all be locked down and put into hibernation? And so for the album to come out in May like it did it, just as people are starting to be vaccinated and come out of hibernation, it couldn’t be a more timely title.

“But that song was written over a hundred years ago, and it’s got very hip lyrics and is very lighthearted. I think people didn’t take themselves too seriously back in those days, because there’s all kinds of lighthearted, goofy songs. People weren’t expressing their inner anger. All my life I’ve gone for songs that have some kind of uplifting message.”

As you listen to this album, there’s a lot of positivity throughout. From talking to Maria you can’t help but suspect that these songs are reflective of her as a person.

“I’m disgustingly positive, some might say! The kids in the band say to me, ‘You’re always so upbeat, so cheerful!’ Why live here on this planet, if you’re not gonna at least attempt to be that? You have a choice every day, you can be bummed out or you can be happy. My motto is ‘No problems. Just solutions.’ That’s who I am as a person. And I always choose songs that reflect who I am as a person.

“After Midnight At The Oasis, they realized they had a possible hitmaker on their hands, and Warner Brothers were trying to duplicate that success, trying to figure out how to get that to happen again. So they brought me a song called You’re no Good [which the Swinging Blues Jeans had had a hit with in 1963]. And I listened to it and said, ‘Why in the world would I put that message out over the airways? Husbands are telling their wives they are no good; parents are telling their kids, they’re no good. Why would I amplify that message?’

“Well, my dear friend Linda Ronstadt had a huge hit with that about a year or so later, and took that all the way to the bank! But I never regretted it because I’m all about putting out a positive message.”

One of my favourite songs on Let’s Get Happy Together is Valaida Snow’s 1935 Swing You Sinners. Snow was a virtuoso jazz musician known as “Queen of the trumpet,” and hailed by Louis Armstrong as the “world’s second-best trumpet player.” The song celebrates faith as being something joyful and upbeat.

“If you’re going to have faith in God,” said Maria, “it might as well make you happy, right? Rather than, you know, cowering and graveling before some angry father God, just looking to punish you at every turn. That’s one kind of religion, but my religion is let’s get happy together!”

She told me she’s attended an African American church in her neighborhood for the last forty years where she enjoys the kind of worship that is always joyful and full of music. “And that song, I think, puts that across. It’s just swinging so hard for one thing, and without saying anything too religious, it basically says, when those old blues come around, you don’t have to wear a frown, just swing out, boys, and let the sweet tones ring!”

Even the blues, for which Maria Muldaur is well-known, shouldn’t be something downbeat and depressing. “The blues is always about surviving by the time you get to the end of it. ‘Trouble in mind, I’m blue but I won’t be blue always, the sun’s gonna shine in my back yard some day.’ That could sum up the theme of so many blues songs. It’s not about wallowing in self-pity. It’s about expressing your sorrow or your disappointment, but finding a way to transcend it. And that, to me, is the magic of the blues and why the blues will never go out of fashion.”

Photo: Alan Mercer

Talking to Maria Muldaur is a ray of sunshine. Like Rory Block, whom I spoke to a while back, who told me that at 70, she was “just getting going,” and whom Maria referred to as “her little sister,” Maria told me that, “I certainly don’t feel like I’m slowing down very much.” She’ll keep on making great music “as long as I can find some kind of music that interests me.”

I wondered as she looks back over her career, all the albums, all the awards, all the accolades, what stands out for her, what is she most proud off?

“Well of course I just always followed my passion or philosophy – Joseph Campbell used to call it following your bliss. That’s what I’ve done without ever thinking about the commercial success that might or might not be involved in a particular endeavor. It’s been all about the music. When I look back, I’ve been so blessed to work, to record, and to perform with so many of my own musical heroes. Everyone from Doc Watson to Ry Cooder to Dr. John, to Mavis Staples, to Bonnie Raitt. Working with Benny Carter in an all-star big band was certainly the thrill of a young singer’s life, as was singing a duet with Hoagy Carmichael. And singing a duet with Ralph Stanley was an out of body experience.”

And then Maria told me this great story about her 2008 album Yes We Can! for which she had formed a “peace choir” of women’s voices.

“I had originally thought of it as a protest album about the issues that were going on in the day. Then I remembered that I actually didn’t like protest music! I liked the causes they were espousing, but I didn’t like the music itself. So I quickly changed the idea to turn it into a pro-peace album. And the first song I thought of was Yes, We Can, which was an Allen Toussaint song that had been a Pointer Sisters hit around the same time as Midnight at the Oasis.

“So I formed a choir of women who have raised their voices for peace and social justice. It included Bonnie Raitt, Joan Baez, Odetta, Jane Fonda, Phoebe Snow, Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir – and that names just a few. And so I put together this really cool album, and someone who worked in the studio where we were mixing said, you know, there’s a guy running for president and he’s using, ‘Yes we can,’ as his slogan, you should send him that song. I said, ‘yeah right, some guy running for president is gonna listen to my song!’ And then two weeks later, someone else was in the studio and said the same thing. But I wasn’t interested – because I was planning to vote for Hillary – this was early in that election year.

“But I ended up sending the album through someone I knew who could get it to him and expected nothing at all. A week later I got a handwritten letter from Obama himself thanking me for the song and saying it perfectly fit the spirit of his campaign. And he was going to have it played at his rallies and speeches. I thought, you know, I have mail on my desk I haven’t answered in four years and this guy took time out personally thank me! I ended up voting for him of course. So that’s something I’m really, really proud of.”

Now you can’t talk to Maria Muldaur without asking about that song – Midnight at the Oasis. Does she still enjoy performing it?

“I do. That song put me on top, not just in the States, but all over the world, for some strange reason. It’s a song about a camel! But, first of all, it’s a very hip song musically. A lot of jazz artists have covered it over the years because it has really hip jazz chord changes. And it’s a song that’s enjoyable to play. It almost kind of plays itself and I can improvise on it every night. God forbid if my biggest hit had been some three-chord song! So I’m just grateful every day for it; it’s a delightful song to sing.

“And as if that weren’t enough, when we get to that song, which we do almost at the very end of set, we see people in the audience, couples grabbing hands and giving each other knowing looks. Because for some reason, that song, so I’m told, was the soundtrack to many a love and lust, and it brings back hot sexy memories! So I’m happy to have provided something like that; it’s a song I’ll forever be grateful for.”

Having said that, we’re all grateful that Maria Muldaur hasn’t rested on her laurels – not at any stage over the past fifty years. And here she is, still making great music that entertains and uplifts. Quite rightly she’s very proud of Let’s Get Happy Together, which may be her best work yet. Her good friend Bonnie Raitt certainly thinks so.

That being the case, she says, “I must be still slowly but surely improving my skills as a singer. So, I’ll just keep doing it until nobody wants to hear it anymore!”

As long as Maria Muldaur keeps on making music, we want to hear it.