Tracy Nelson - Life Don't Miss Nobody (2023)

Tracy Nelson, one of the most powerful voices in American music, has emerged from a lengthy recording hiatus with the album of a lifetime, a musical self-portrait spanning her entire career. Life Don’t Miss Nobody is a 13 track collection that stretches back to her start as a guitar-picking Wisconsin teen playing coffeehouses through an unparalleled career, now in it’s sixth decade, singing blues, country, New Orleans R&B and gospel, and performing in such storied music meccas as 1960s San Francisco and 1970s Austin in her epic, genre-busting musical journey.

But this is no nostalgia trip. The title song is a brand-new composition from the woman whose “Down So Low” has become a modern standard. She’s kept busy performing and recording with long-time musical friends in projects like Corky Siegel’s Chamber Blues and with the freewheeling all-star Blues Broads – Angela Strehli, Annie Sampson and Dorothy Morrison. Even so, roots lovers have waited a long time for a new Tracy Nelson album, and no one’s more excited than Tracy.

“I haven’t made a record in over 10 years,” she says. “I’ve been wanting to do every one of these songs for a really long time. I wanted to get a little bit of everything, all the kinds of music that I love.”

Life Don’t Miss Nobody is Tracy Nelson’s own Great American Songbook, featuring iconic composers like Hank Williams, Ma Rainey, Willie Dixon, Allen Toussaint, Chuck Berry, Doc Pomus, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Founding Father of American Song, Stephen Foster. Foster’s “Hard Times” in here in two settings, both featuring Tracy on 12 string, the first time she’s recorded on guitar since her 1964 debut, Deep Are The Roots.

Tracy’s labor of love includes the album’s personnel. Produced by Roger Alan Nichols (Steven Tyler, Larkin Poe) and tracked at Nashville’s Sound Emporium in just three days, Life Don’t Miss Nobody features the state-of-the-art roots rhythm section of piano masters Kevin McKendree (Delbert McClinton, Brian Setzer) and Steve Conn (Bonnie Raitt, Sonny Landreth), upright and electric bassist Byron House (Robert Plant’s Band of Joy, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band), Nashville A-list drummer John Gardner (Dixie Chicks, Taylor Swift), Larry Chaney (Edwin McCain) and Mike Henderson (SteelDrivers, Chris Stapleton) on guitars.