Maria Muldaur

A Woman Alone with the Blues

Artist Interview by: Shaun Dale

The first ten years of Maria Muldaur's forty-year exploration of American popular music forms saw her rise from the girl fiddler in a Washington Square bluegrass band to a chart topping pop chanteuse with "Midnight At The Oasis." In the thirty years since, her chart profile has been somewhat lower, but her music has never been better, as evidenced by a series of nominations for Grammies, W.C. Handy awards and high critical acclaim. Along the way, she's examined the connections between jazz, gospel, blues, country, pop and just about anything else that's caught her ear, and she has, as they say, big ears.

Her new project, "A Woman Alone with the Blues," pays tribute to Peggy Lee, an artist with a similar tenure and stylistic range. In some ways it's a summation of Muldaur's own career, touching on blues, swing jazz and pop, but summation is really the wrong word, because as with every other Maria Muldaur album, it's really a promise of more wonderful music to come.

I caught up with Muldaur by phone as she was on the move in upstate New York, carrying classic sounds to new audiences as she has done for four decades.

JazzReview: You've got a brand new album to promote. A Woman Alone with the Blues came out yesterday, right?

Maria Muldaur: That's what I understand, yeah.

JazzReview: I want to talk about that, but let me touch on some of your background. Longtime fans would know you first from Jim Kewskin days, but the group that's always intrigued me was the Even Dozen Jug Band.

Maria Muldaur: Oh God, are we going back that far? Ok.

JazzReview: Well, they never really captured the public imagination but when you look at the lineup, that was an amazing collection of people.

Maria Muldaur: Amazing, I know. We just kind of came together to do that one record. Originally we were signed by the great blues diva, Victoria Spivey, who was ahead of her time in being one of the first artists I know of to have her own record label. She saw the guys bouncing around Washington Square Park doing jug band material and she told them she'd give them a record deal. I'm told by John Sebastian, who was one of the members, she said "You guys play OK, but you need some sex appeal up there." I mean, they were still all in the Clearasil phase and some of them hadn't even lost their baby fat. So she said, "What about that little gal I see out there playing fiddle with you sometimes?" So they came up to me and asked me if I'd like to be in a band and make a record and that launched my recording career.

JazzReview: That was Sebastian, David Grisman....

Maria Muldaur: Sebastian, Dave Grisman, Josh Rifkin, guys that went on to be in the Blues Project, Peter Seigel who went on to be a great producer. I find it kind of wonderful and kind of amusing that people are just discovering bluegrass and old timey music, as per the "O Brother, Where Art Thou" soundtrack, you know, and it's wonderful because it's giving a lot of great bluegrass artists of old a new lease on life as far as gigging and recording opportunities. But let it be known that in 1962, a year before the Even Dozen Jug Band, I was in a bluegrass band known as Maria & the Washington Square Ramblers with David Grisman and Steve Mandell, who was the guitar half of the famous "Dueling Banjos" that was the theme song of Deliverance. So if you want to go all the way back, there's something no one else knows.

JazzReview: Well, the revival of bluegrass and old timey music is very similar to what was going on during the Great Folk Scare when the old blues artists were being revived, guys who hadn't been heard from for thirty years were being pulled up to New York to play clubs and festivals, and you were a part of that effort.

Maria Muldaur: Yes I was, and to me blues and jazz are very inter-related. Bessie Smith, what she did was blues, but she was backed by a jazz band. In fact, jug band music was the music made in the rural south on homemade instruments to emulate what they heard coming in on the radio from the early Dixieland and jazz bands. So, I think they're inter-related and I've always been delving into them side by side. I worked with Benny Carter and an all star jazz big band in the early seventies, did some recording and touring with them, people like Harry "Sweets" Edison and all the greats that were all the "A" team back in those days, Grady Tate and Milt Hinton. People may not realize it but I have been singing jazz for a really long time. Mostly the older style jazz, jazz from the thirties and forties, that's kinda where I live, I guess, so doing the songs of Peggy Lee fit right into that for me.

JazzReview: Well, part of a writer's job is to find shorthand for artists, you know, this person is a this kind of singer or that kind of singer, and you make that pretty difficult.

Maria Muldaur: I guess so, they don't know where to put me in record stores either. Maybe if I'd just stuck to one thing, but I don't know. I have no regrets at all, because I've always done what I wanted to do and what I've felt like doing, not in a cavalier way but whatever I was feeling musically at any particular time, that's what I've had the opportunity to do. I guess I'm very eclectic but it makes life more interesting that way, and it makes the music fresh too.

JazzReview: Well, you've managed to sustain a career for forty years in a business where people are lucky to have forty days.

Maria Muldaur: These days especially! You can be a one hit wonder and be on and off the charts so fast it will make your head spin around. By kind of forging my own unique little eclectic path I've been able to keep it fresh and keep my audience interested. I feel like part of what I've been able to do is to kind of educate my audience, not to pontificate that I know so much, but in the sense that "I'm really turned on by this particular music and now I want to share it with you.' I just did an album a year ago that was nominated for a Grammy and nominated for a couple of W.C. Handy blues awards called Richland Woman Blues. That album was me paying tribute to the great blues artists that so deeply inspired and influenced me, and so many of us. I did songs by Memphis Minne, Bessie Smith, Mississippi John Hurt. I got people like John Sebastian, Bonnie Raitt, Tracy Nelson, Taj Mahal, people to help me do that that also share my love for the blues. In a certain way, it's fun for me to, for people who have not heard of Memphis Minnie, to spread the word about these great artists.

JazzReview: And that applies to the new album, choosing Peggy Lee to pay tribute to. I think the greatest bodies of overlooked singers are the female torch singers of the forties and fifties. There were so many incredible talents and we don't hear them, and Peggy Lee would be in the top handful of anybody's list.

Maria Muldaur: I totally agree. I wasn't sitting around thinking, 'Gee, if only I could do a tribute to Peggy Lee,' but what happened is our producer, Randy Labbe, called me up and said, "I just want to work with you, I've always admired your voice." He said it could be Maria Muldaur does the songs of Hank Williams or a few others that I admired, but Peggy Lee had just passed away and I was struck by how little notice was made of her passing. It just popped into my head. I said 'How about Peggy Lee? She just passed away and she'd been singing great songs and contributing to American pop music for over fifty years,' and he agreed. So that's how this album came about. I'd always been a huge fan, in fact, one of my signature songs is "I'm a Woman" which I got off the B-side of "Fever" in 1962. I took it and made it my own, made it more R&B sounding, and I've opened every show I've done with that song for forty years.

But it wasn't until I started getting ready to do this album and started delving that I was very much more impressed and amazed by all the many talents she had, not only as a singer, which had always mesmerized me, the way she sang, but as a songwriter, too. I downloaded everything I could about her and read a bunch of books and bought every album I could find. One of the articles said her songwriting was very good and she was rather prolific and she could be considered one of the first singer/songwriters, before that became a popular genre. Back in those days most singers didn't write their songs, there were Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths that wrote the songs they sang. But her stuff was really soulful and it had a really good woman's point of view, a very feminine point of view, very sexy, very sultry. So I said, 'Wow, this is going to be a very interesting and challenging project.' The more I would read about her, the more songs from different eras I would hear, the more I was in awe of her as an artist.

JazzReview: Boiling it down to a dozen tracks must have been a challenge.

Maria Muldaur: Well, it was. I could easily have done twenty-four songs. She wrote songs and she selected songs that had a very feminine point of view, that were timeless. Some of these songs are already sixty years old, like "I Don't Know Enough About You" and "Waiting for the Train to Come In," those were written in the forties, and yet, I think good material is timeless. I could have easily done another dozen songs, and I will eventually. I'll just incorporate them into my sets. A lot of people, if you mention Peggy Lee, will immediately think of "Fever" or "Is That All There Is?" and some of the more recent hits. But I also wanted people to remember that she started out as a big band singer in the swing era, and she really did swing. So I included a couple songs from the various eras that she came through. I especially love what I call the film noir period, songs like "Black Coffee" and "A Woman Alone with the Blues." They just evoke such film noir images, you know, of a woman in a black slip sitting alone on a fire escape, and you can hear a saxophone wailing way off in the distance, you know what I mean?

JazzReview: I know exactly what you mean.

Maria Muldaur: That kind of imagery, late night, alone with the blues. The title says it all. And I think she just evokes so much with very little effort. The way she sang was just flawless, it was totally in tune and totally expressive by barely doing anything but breathing the lyrics out. She didn't embellish very much. She just sang the song from the very heart of the song, from the very depth of the center of the song, she sang it and just delivered the emotion to the listener. She never showed off and said, "Look at me, I can do this lick." It became very challenging for me to try to stay true to that style and yet true to my own style, not to copy her but to bring that out in singing these songs. It was a good lesson for me as a singer, to apply the less is more principle that obviously guided her work.

JazzReview: One thing I noticed while looking over the tracks, there aren't very many people you could pick for a tribute and have a choice of material ranging from Lieber & Stoller to Duke Ellington. Like you, she went for a wide range of sources and was adept at picking the best of what they had to offer.

Maria Muldaur: Well, that's one way in which I really relate to her, as a matter of fact. I don't write at all, so I've made it my business to know who the great songwriters are, and from my earliest, you know, the Midnight at the Oasis album, I think I was the first person to ever cut a Dolly Parton except Dolly, and people from the past, and the contemporary up and coming songwriters. I made it my business to know who was a good songwriter and what their phone number was, just to make sure I was culling the very best from those sources.

I can see that, even though she wrote, when she was doing material she didn't write, I can tell that's how she went about it. Because just to go through her roster of tunes, what she picked and recorded, already you have in your lap the cream of the crop of songwriters of that era. It's like I'm culling the cream of the cream of all the great songwriting of that time. I will definitely be doing a lot of the other songs I came across when doing this project. There's way more than I could have put on the album.

JazzReview: I can only imagine. We've talked about some of the people you've played with, and you've recorded with just about everybody worth recording with in the last couple of decades....

Maria Muldaur: I've been very blessed that way.

JazzReview: The band that's on this album is not as star-studded as some of your other work, but they do an amazing job. Can you talk about how they came together?

Maria Muldaur: I knew that I had to get a superb piano player and musical director for this, so I got Dave Torkanowsky from New Orleans, and then he helped me. Part of this project was we had to record in Portland, Maine. Don't ask me why, it's where the producer lives and it's not like I knew a pool of great players in Portland, Maine, but he managed to snag Harry Connick, Jr.'s rhythm section, drummer (Arthur Latin II) and bassist (Neal Caine). I was a little dismayed when I met them because they looked so young and I thought that this material requires a very seasoned approach, you know, and I was so pleasantly surprised when we sat down and rehearsed, which we barely did. We just kind of went through the songs about one and a half times and then recorded them as you hear them. They had all the authority and authenticity that were needed to play this kind of stuff, but they put a fresh, hip spin on it I think. They swung really hard. Then we did the big band horns and the guitar and Dan Hicks' wonderful contribution on "Winter Weather." I produced those out on the west coast.

(Note: The additional players included Danny Caron (guitar), Jim Rothermel (reeds), Jeff Lewis (trumpet), Kevin Porter (trombone) and Gerry Grosz (vibes).

JazzReview: The way you captured a big band sound with a relatively small band was terrific because some of the songs just require that.

Maria Muldaur: I know, it was challenging. I worked with a great guy, Jim Rothermel, on the west coast. I just finished co-producing a tribute to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and he did the same thing. He's done that with me before. He's a fabulous player, he plays all the reeds, everything from piccolo to flute to clarinet to all the saxes. He has a knack for listening to the big band original recordings and distilling it down, remaining very faithful but simplifying it where necessary. Back in those days you could afford a big band, but it would be prohibitive for a project with this kind of budget. He just stacked the parts and we got it. I think it swings pretty good.

JazzReview: You mentioned a tribute to Sister Rosetta Tharpe....

Maria Muldaur: Well, I got approached by a wonderful guy named Mark Carpenteri who has a small record label called MC Records. He has Odetta on his label and a few other people. It's one of those small labels dedicated to preserving roots music, really. He said "I'm doing a tribute album to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, will you help me produce it?" and I thought, 'what a great idea! In a heartbeat I'd love to.' So I did the west coast sessions, and we did seven songs. I got Bonnie Raitt, Tracy Nelson and Marcia Ball, and a wonderful Texas blues singer named Angela Straley, myself and a wonderful band. On that we included two big band numbers that Sister Rosetta had done. Also on that album will be Odetta, Sweet Honey In The Rock, Joane Osborne and Phoebe Snow. That's coming out in June, and it's called Shout, Sisters, Shout, on the MC label.

JazzReview: I'll have to search that out. I was fortunate to grow up with a father who had great musical taste and Sister Rosetta was one of his favorites.

Maria Muldaur: Yeah. I got to see her. I got to meet Peggy Lee once, too, and she was just every bit the elegant and gracious person you would imagine her to be.

JazzReview: Well, you've gotten to meet just about everybody you've wanted to meet, though, haven't you?

Maria Muldaur: Well, except Elvis, yeah.

JazzReview: I mean, between the people you've worked with and the ones you've met at shows and festival, you've been around a lot of important music over the years.

Maria Muldaur: Well, music is my life, and I make it a point to be where the good stuff's happening.

JazzReview: Of course, if Maria Muldaur was all alone on a desert island, there'd be good stuff happening there every time she raised her voice in song. She's one of the best around, and her new Telarc release is one of her best ever. By making music her life, she's enriched the live of all that hear her.

For more information: http://www.telarc.com

Click here for printer-friendly version of article.

Send this page to a friend.