Miss Blues - Reminiscence Of The Blues (1997) [CD Rip]

Dorothy Ellis aka Miss Blues - Member of the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of fame and Oklahoma Blues hall of Fame. Miss Blues is not a songbird. She doesn't chirp, tweet or warble. Her diaphragm is a blacksmith bellows blowing chunks of lung and larynx, past vocal chords like cables from the Golden Gate Bridge. Her throat scores the same dainty factor as a garbage disposal unit. In a fog you could plant her at the bow of the ship singing "The Things I used To Do" and the lighthouse keeper would beam in you. Miss Blues (Dorothy Ellis) makes a blues song sound like it is supposed to sound: anguish under a bully cock whip, reverberating through fractured souls to African yesteryear.
She came into the world at a time when Texan's were struggling to recover from the great depression combined with the 12 year long dust bowl drought. Miss Blues grew up in the westTexas cotton fields hearing tales of slavery from her great-grandmother. The song Stormy Monday is no piano bar ditty, when Miss Blues puts her profound pathos into lyrics meant to reflect a baby being torn from it's mother's arms to be sold by the plantation owner. When she recorded it, her great body shook as she ripped words from her soul, like fireballs to be at fellow man. Her interpretation from T. Bone Walker's arrangement of an old slave song laments the hellish everyday of a black slave.
The recording session took place largely in Salina, Kansas at Blue Heaven Studios, a church building of some majesty converted to the religion of the Blues. ~Allison Leingh