Maria Muldaur: She’s made the repertoires of the distaff blues singers a vital part of her identity from the time she first set foot on a stage or in a recording studio.
By David McGee
ONE HOUR MAMA: THE BLUES OF VICTORIA SPIVEY
Maria Muldaur
Nola Blue (released July 11, 2025)
Maria Muldaur holds an almost singular place in contemporary blues in devoting so much of her career to honoring the great female blues singers who preceded and influenced her. In 2001 she stirred the pot with Richland Woman Blues, a tribute to Memphis Minnie, Bessie Smith, and Mamie Smith; in 2005 she offered an entire album tribute to Memphis Minnie on Sweet Lovin’ Ol’ Soul; in 2012 she paid Minnie another tribute on …First Came Memphis Minnie; and in 2007 she surveyed the ribald side of blues from the ‘20s to the ‘40s in Naughty, Bawdy and Blue in songs associated with Alberta Hunter, Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, Sippie Wallace, and Ms. Spivey. Maria, along with Rory Block (with her Mentor Series tributes to the great male blues masters she knew and learned from), are pretty much on this trail alone.
In short, the lives and music of pioneering distaff blues singers has been a vital component of Ms. Muldaur’s vital part of her identity from the time she first set foot on a stage or in a recording studio. Let the rest of the world genuflect at the altars of Disney-trained pop tarts; Maria Muldaur sings of mature women and their inner lives and lusts. In some of these endeavors she’s been backed by James Dapogney’s Chicago Jazz Band, as she is on three tunes on this new tribute to a woman without whom there might not be the Maria Muldaur we’ve known since the ‘60s, namely one Victoria Spivey. Growing up in Greenwich Village, the young Maria Grazia Rosa Domenica D’Amato was drawn to her fellow Village resident and performer, Ms. Spivey, at the outset of her professional career. The liner notes for One Hot Mama: The Blues of Victoria Spivey recount the deep influence Ms. Spivey exerted on Maria’s entire approach to the professional musician’s life. And why not? Victoria Spivey was no mere blues singer, as Dr. Warren Davies documents in liner notes he penned for the Journal of Jazz Studies and reprinted in One Hour Mama, to wit:
She was, at one point or another: a bar room pianist, a top selling “race” recording artist, a staff composer for a music publishing company, one-half of a vaudeville double-act, a Hollywood actress, a church music director, a record producer and label owner [Ed. Note: she was the first to record Bob Dylan], a booking agent, and a jazz critic.
Victoria herself, in a column she wrote for Record Research in 1964 (Issue #63, also reprinted in the liner booklet), recalled her first impressions upon meeting young Maria, who was then playing in “a certain revival jug band”: “I studied her voice, her looks, and her personality very well. I can tell you that I found nothing but success for this little lady. I called her aside and told her to go for herself and to find a spot in which she could show off her talents instead of being in the background.”
‘My Handy Man, written by Andy Razaf; Maria Muldaur, from One Hour Mama: The Blues of Victoria Spivey
’T-B Blues,’ written by Victoria Spivey; Maria Muldaur, from One Hour Mama: The Blues of Victoria Spivey
From the short-lived Even Dozen Jug Band to the Jim Kweskin Jug Band to her duo with (and marriage to) Geoff Muldaur to the celebrated start of her solo career with “Midnight at the Oasis” on to the present day, Maria has followed Ms. Spivey’s advice to “go for herself,” and we the fans are the beneficiaries of that sage advice. Case in point, Maria’s latest album (released in 2025), a full-on tribute to her mentor in a mere dozen songs (seven written or co-written by Ms. Spivey) with the singer backed by three different groups so steeped in the sounds of Spivey’s prime years as to seem as if they plunged through a time warp fresh from the Roaring ‘20s. Three of the songs feature James Dapogney’s Chicago Jazz Band, an aggregate familiar to Muldaur’s fans. This lively outfit gets down and dirty behind Maria on Andy Razaf’s “My Handy Man,” a delightfully lusty double-entendre litany hinting at pleasures of the flesh first popularized by Ethel Waters in her secular incarnation and reprised here from Maria’s Naughty, Bawdy and Blue album. Then there’s the title track, a slow, swaggering come-on written by Porter Grainger and recorded by Spivey in 1937, in which the female protagonist credibly yearns for a 60-minute man. Spivey’s 1926 deep blues, “T-B Blues,” blurs the line between real, debilitating illness of the body and existential illness stemming from the social stigma connected to the disease, underscored vocally by Maria’s a lowdown, ominous reading, her voice deep and despairing, seemingly accepting of consumption’s creeping, agonizing toll. “T-B Blues” was also featured on Naughty, Bawdy and Blue.
‘What Makes You. Act Like That,’ written by Lonnie Johnson; Maria Muldaur and Elvin Bishop, from One Hour Mama: The Blues of Victoria Spivey
‘Any-Kind-a-Man,’ written by Hattie McDaniel; Maria Muldaur, from One Hour Mama: The Blues of Victoria Spivey
One of the album’s most striking tunes finds the singer ably supported by the lineup featured on seven of the dozen tunes, including swinging guitarist Danny Caron, saxophonist Johnny Bones, bassist Steve Height, pianists Neil Fontano and David K. Mathews, and drummer Beaumont Beaullieu. One of many highlights with this configuration comes early in a freewheeling version of Lonnie Johnson’s comedic take on diva behavior, “What Makes You Act Like That,” wherein male and female characters air their grievances against each other, with the male voice being supplied by Elvin Bishop, strikingly weathered and weary and a bit perplexed to boot, as Maria continues the dialogue in convincing fed-up mode, all to hilarious effect. Arguably Maria’s finest performance here is with this lineup on Spivey’s tortured, self-explanatory slow blues, “Don’t Love No Married Man,” with a pronounced noir-ish ambience supplied by Johnny Bones’s dark sax rumblings and guest Chris Burns’s mournful piano. With so many themes of disappointment and deceit informing these songs, some sunshine does break through the clouds, impressively so when it appears. Consider Maria’s cheery, vulnerable vocal (with a dip into her lower smoky register to coo, “‘cause I love you” here and there) on Spivey’s “Dreaming of You” recalls the lighthearted flight she took on “Midnight at the Oasis.” The biggest surprise among the song selections is the swinging kissoff blues, “Any-Kind-a-Man,” another instance when the pianist’s ragtime-influenced jaunts add a buoyant lift to the singer’s rather cheery adieu to a feckless fellow, “‘cause any kinda man is better than you.” Recorded by Spivey in 1936, “Any-Kind-a-Man” is notable for its original 1926 recording by none other than the woman who wrote it, Hattie McDaniel, more than a decade before she became the first African-American actress to win an Oscar, so honored for her role as Mammy in Gone With the Wind. McDaniel recorded only 16 sides between 1926 and 1929 and is widely credited with being the first black woman to sing on radio in the U.S., but her recording career is only a footnote to her work in film. Nice touch to add her to the mix and with a Spivey connection to boot. And let’s not discount the incredible chemistry between Maria and Taj Mahal on a 1930 Spivey co-write with Harold Grey (aka Porter Grainger) on “Gotta Have What It Takes,” a hokum-style set-to with Taj firing back witty retorts to Maria’s potshots at his masculinity and commitment (or lack thereof). For instance:
Maria: I’m full of pep—
Taj: Oh you is?
Maria: I’m afraid.
Taj: Afraid of what?
Maria: You are so old/you can’t make the grade.
Taj: Oh yes I can!
Maria: You got to have what it takes.
Taj: I got this, baby!
It’s a great moment on the album, and between Maria, Elvin, and Taj, the senior citizens performing on One Hour Mama set a high bar for the relative youngsters backing their efforts.
‘Gotta Have What It Takes,’ written by Victoria Spivey and Harold Grey; Maria Muldaur and Taj Mahal, from One Hour Mama: The Blues of Victoria Spivey
‘Organ Grinder Blues,’ written by Clarence Williams, recored by Clarence Williams, Victoria Spivey, and Ethel Waters in 1928; Maria Muldaur, from One Hour Mama: The Blues of Victoria Spivey
The New Orleans sound is familiar territory for Maria, and she returns to it here twice, on “Funny Feathers” (a 1929 co-write between Spivey and Reuben Floyd, one of Spivey’s four husbands), a lighthearted tale of a “chicken clown” who’s “the best dressed rooster in town” and the effect he has on the “chicks…who call him pa.” The musical backdrop is a raucous clarinet-trombone-tuba-piano-driven attack by Tuba Skinny (featured on Maria’s 2021 Let’s Get Happy Together album), who give Maria that celebratory Crescent City swing in supporting her warm approach; on the Clarence Williams-penned melding of blues and jazz on “Organ Grinder Blues” (recorded in 1928 by the Clarence Williams Orchestra, Ms. Spivey and Ethel Waters alike) the same lineup dips into a more ruminative mode, appropriately injecting the je ne sais quoi to underpin Maria’s low moaning, lower-register dips bringing unusual sizzle to lubricious observations such as “if you’re tired, let mama grind a while for you” and “it’s not the organ but the way you grind,” with Shaye Cohn’s suggestive trumpet fills fleshing out, so to speak, the lyrics’ intent.
The past is not prologue in this artist’s hands. It’s the stuff of life. This One Hour Mama is timeless.
More Maria Muldaur coverage in Deep Roots
“Something Old, Something New, Lots of Blues”
Review of …First Came Memphis Minnie
“Shimmying Down the Chimney”
Review of Christmas at the Oasis
Review of Let’s Get Happy Together
