MARIA MULDAUR

A trip to Memphis Minnie’s gravesite in Wall, Mississippi several years ago inspired Richland Woman Blues, Maria Muldaur’s third album for Stony Plain Records. The new disc celebrates one of the most profound inspirations of 20th century American music – the early blues of the 1920s and 1930s. On Richland Woman Blues, Maria collaborates with a half-dozen of her contemporaries and a member of the next generation, all of whom she considers “keepers of the flame.”

Maria’s longtime soul sister, Bonnie Raitt, pays tribute to her slide guitar mentor Mississippi Fred McDowell on his “It’s a Blessing,” while John Sebastian, founder of the Lovin’ Spoonful, and with Maria, an alumnus of the Even Dozen Jug Band, plays guitar on one of Maria’s most-requested tunes, Mississippi John Hurt’s “Richland Woman Blues.”

Also on the album, former Mother Earth singer Tracy Nelson joins in on a Bessie Smith/Clara Smith duet, “Far Away Blues,” while Taj Mahal lends his soulful touch to a spirited Blue Willie Johnson number, “Soul of a Man.” In addition, Maria teams up with new-school blues man Alvin Youngblood Hart for two duets originally recorded by Memphis Minnie and Kansas City Joe (“I’m Goin’ Back Home” and “I Got to Move”). Rounding out the duets, sassy Angela Strehli joins Maria for another Bessie Smith/Clara Smith song, “My Man Blues.”

Longtime friend and collaborator Amos Garrett, who’s played guitar on numerous Muldaur sessions including the classic “Midnight at the Oasis,” returns to add his distinctive style on Leadbelly’s “Grasshoppers in My Pillow,” while Bay area guitarist extraordinaire Roy Rogers adds his considerable skills to “Me and My Chauffeur Blues” and “In My Girlish Days,” two more Memphis Minnie tunes.

Following the W.C. Handy Awards in Memphis several years ago, Stony Plain label head Holger Petersen joined Maria for a pilgrimage to the Mississippi Delta. “During that trip,” recalls Maria; “I was inspired to do an album of songs by some of the early blues pioneers, especially the women. For me, these early blues pioneers are the most important cultural elders of the 20th century.”

Memphis Minnie, born Lizzie Douglas, recorded more than 200 songs for Columbia, Bluebird, Okeh, Vocalion and other labels. For more than four decades beginning in the 1920s, she was counted among the most popular and highly regarded artists of the day. “I first encountered the blues as a teenager,” says Maria. “I listened to the women blues singers and started including several Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey songs in my repertoire. That was also when I first heard Memphis Minnie. Her raw, soulful sound remains one of my main musical inspirations to this day.”

While today’s blues scene tends to be dominated by guitar slingers, female singers figure red prominently in the earliest blues recordings. Generally considered the first blues record, Marrie Smith’s 1920 rendition of “Crazy Blues” inaugurated the blues genre by selling more than 75,000 copies in its first month and one million copies within the year.

Among those women who followed (in addition to Bessie Smith, Memphis Minnie and Ma Rainey) were such original blues artists as Victoria Spivey, Sipple Wallace, Ida Cox, Alberta Hunter, Bertha “Chippie” Hill and Blue Lu Barker.

Early in her career, Maria was fortunate enough to be able to meet and work with both Victoria Spivey and Sippie Wallace. Among her earliest hits, which included both “Richmond Woman Blues” and Leiber and Stoller’s “I’m a Woman,” was Blue Lu Barker’s “Don’t You Feel My Leg,” first recorded on Maria’s self-titled 1973 album solo debut for Warner Bros. Contained on that album was “Midnight at the Oasis” which rose to number six on the singles chart and kept the album on the Billboard album chart for over six months, earning her a platinum record.

“My voice has gotten stronger and deeper over the years,” Maria says, “and I feel like I’ve just begun to hit my stride, musically and creatively. When I sing these songs now, I’m finally able to feel that I have the right instrument, the depth of experience and the artists chops to properly celebrate these great pioneering artists and their music.”

“The early blues seem to me even more relevant and powerful today than in the 1960s, when so many of the surviving blues artists were being discovered, or even the 1920s and 1930s when the original records were being made. This is still a bluesy world and these songs remain timeless and articulate expressions of the human condition an the human spirit.”

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