The Rough Guide to Blues Divas

The stereotypical image of the early blues pioneers as black itinerant males playing bottleneck guitar on the plantations of the Mississippi Delta tells only half the story. The first black blues singer ever recorded was Mamie Smith in 1920 and she launched a wave of recordings by other ‘blues mamas,’ accompanied not by guitar but by barrelhouse piano and brass or woodwind. Mamie Smith is among the 25 blues divas generously included here, along with other well-known early blues stars such as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey Yet the real interest lies in some of the more obscure names, all of whom were recorded in the 1920s before the Great Depression hit. Sippie Wallace's wonderful ‘I'm a Mighty Tight Woman’ may be familiar to some via Bonnie Raitt's 1971 cover, Victoria Spivey's great 1927 recording of ‘Dope Head Blues’ with Lonnie Johnson on guitar, and Maggie Jones' suggestive 1924 recording of ‘Anybody Here Want to Try My Cabbage’, on which she's accompanied by Louis Armstrong, have been widely anthologised. But tracks by the likes of Esther Bigeou and Martha Copeland in the classic 1920s jazz-blues mode and songs in a more vaudeville style by Lucille Hegamin and Lena Wilson will be little known outside the ranks of aficionados.