Women have strong history of belting out the blu

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Women have strong history of belting out the blues
Marilyn Bauer

It was the fall of 1977 in Greenwich Village. The wind blew cold and wet, making the bleary honey lights in the Cookery look too convivial to pass by.

Seated in a corner not far from the bandstand, I felt time stop when 82-year-old Alberta Hunter began to sing the blues. I inhaled every phrase from “Second Hand Man” to “You Can’t Tell the Difference After Dark.” The more she sang, the more I was mesmerized.

I had discovered the blues.

Hunter ran away from home when she was 12 because she learned she could make $10 a week singing in Chicago. Like the other great women singers of her time, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, the blues was a way out — out of poverty, out of trouble and into a new life.

The same could be said of Janiva Magness, who comes to the Sunrise Theatre’s new Black Box Theatre at 8 p.m. Nov. 12 to promote her CD, “What Love Will Do.”

“Both my parents died when I was 13. I was put in 12 foster homes in two years,” Magness told me. “At 17, I became an emancipated minor and was working as a hotel maid, waitressing and bussing tables at the International House of Pancakes. It was a pretty bumpy road. The music has everything to do with my salvation.”

Women have sung the blues since the turn of the last century. Unlike their counterparts — the male country blues singers who traveled the dusty back roads of the deep South alone — women who sang the blues took to the stage, fronting jazz bands and moving the melancholy music away from its folksy origins into narrative ballads, almost always about love gone wrong.

Ladies who sing the blues never forget. The good ones bring the bad times into their music, into their voices, into their songwriting.

“Those tough times inform my craft and music,” said Magness, 52, whose expressive intensity rides on a rough but silky voice. “When my parents committed suicide there was a lot of tragedy. That part of my life doesn’t define me, but it is a lot of fertilizer.”

That fertilizer is working. In May she won the Blues Music Award for B.B. King Entertainer of the Year — only the second woman to take this honor. (The late KoKo Taylor was the other.) And she headlined Bluzapalooza, the first blues concert tour to perform for American troops in Iraq and Kuwait.

“I really, really understand what my job is. It is human connection through music,” Magness said. “I am charged with telling the truth. Music takes us on a journey. It lifts up the listener in that three- to five-minute song.

“If I do my job right you are going to forget your worries, remember the love you lost and know you are not alone.”

That took me back to Alberta Hunter and her gutsy, truthful songs. As a young teen she sang in a Southside club patronized by pimps and crooks, but hung in there until a murder caused “Dago Frank” to close. Magness lived on the streets and was a teenage mother bouncing from place to place. They both kept on going taking the hits, making the music.

“Female blues is riveting. Some of the most moving performances I have ever seen,” said Magness, who started sneaking into blues clubs when she was 14. “There is a vulnerability that women are more willing to bring,”

I asked Magness what she was going to bring to the Sunrise and she said: “A butt-rocking good time.”

I believe her, because she tells the truth. Just listen.