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BluesWax Sittin’ In With

Tracy Nelson

Part One

“A Bad White Girl” Comes Home

By Don Wilcock

In April Tracy Nelson released her twenty-sixth album in five decades, Victim of The Blues on Delta Groove. Although the album title comes from a Ma Rainey song and was chosen before the devastating fire that destroyed most of the mementoes of her career, the title does seem to offer an eerie reference to that event.

The cover photo of a standup piano in what appears to be a decaying room next to a window with a photo of Ma Rainey also seems to offer an oblique reference to this traumatic fire.

Produced by her long-time creative partner and husband Mike Dysinger, Victim of the Blues is not at all about the fire but rather a return to her first love, classic blues with covers that include Howlin’ Wolf’s “Howlin’ for My Baby,” Jimmy Reed’s “I Know It’s A Sin,” and Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Feel So Bad.” While the arrangements all sound authentic, they don’t necessarily mimic the originals. All are songs that Tracy says she wanted to release while she’s still able to because at age sixty-six, she has no guarantees this won’t be her last recording.

Nelson began her career as a teenager of Norwegian descent in Madison, Wisconsin. She wanted to call her first electric band Siddhartha and The Mandellas, but the rest of the group outvoted her, and they became Mother Earth. While she insists today that the name was never intended to be a reflection on her specifically, she became the proverbial “earth mother” in a group that shared bills with the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix at the Fillmore West in 1968. This was four years after her solo debut, Deep Are The Roots, produced by the iconic Sam Charters and featuring her then boyfriend Charlie Musselwhite.

Many of the songs on Victim of The Blues help cement that image of a somewhat vulnerable but strong-willed woman who never phones home her vocals but delivers them with conviction, gusto, and heart. It is not surprising that she chooses to quote Etta James’ assessment of her in Etta’s Rage to Live biography as “a bad white girl.” Nor is it a surprise that she sang “Mother Earth” at Memphis Slim’s funeral with its lyric: “I don’t care how great you are/I don’t care what you’re worth/When it all comes up/You’ve got to go back to mother earth.”

Nelson released six albums with Mother Earth on three major labels: Mercury, Reprise, and Columbia. As a solo artist she’s recorded for a number of independent labels, including Rounder, some of which wanted her to be the next Janis Joplin. To their commercial disappointment, she stuck stubbornly to a personal vision that’s more about the song and how it hits her than the genre. Her 2007 LP You’ll Never Be A Stranger at My Door is entirely country, including Don Gibson‘s “Oh, Lonesome Me,” Johnny Cash’s “I Still Miss Someone,” and the Everly Brothers’ “I Wonder If I Care as Much.”

While her tenacious insistence on following her own muse has been problematic enough that she admits one year she survived on the royalties of one beer commercial, in the last decade Tracy Nelson has also done a high-profile Grammy-nominated album, Sing It; a subsequent tour with Marcia Ball and Irma Thomas; and toured with the Chicago Blues Reunion, consisting of fellow vets Barry Goldberg, Nick Gravenites, Harvey Mandell, Sam Lay, and Corky Siegel.

In our interview, she was an open book. I felt I’d known her for years and that Victim of The Blues is a return to her original comfort zone, but with renditions that push the boundaries of that zone and confirm Etta James’ assessment of her as “a bad white girl.”

Don Wilcock for BluesWax: I understand that listening to WLAC as a teenager had a great effect on you.

Tracy Nelson: At night we got WLAC, and it was just incredible music that in Wisconsin we never heard otherwise. It was just really fascinating.

BW: Take me back to there. What did it feel like? Here you are, you’re a young teenager in Wisconsin, and you’re hearing this music come across the airwaves. Did it feel like it was coming from another universe to you?

TN: Yeah, it was like music from Mars. It was music I had never ever heard before.

BW: What were some of the songs that broke the ice?

TN: Oh, I couldn’t tell you that, but it was early James Brown. They played Muddy Waters, a lot of gospel music. I particularly loved the gospel shows. They were on Sunday, like James Cleveland and Etta James. I remember the first time I ever heard Etta James was on that show. They pretty much played what in a year or two I was playing in a fraternity band, early ’60′s R&B, but they also got into some of the blues folks that were actually recording in the day, the Chess stuff like Bobby Charles, who just died recently, God bless him.

Bobby Charles wrote “Walking to New Orleans” and, oh, “I Don’t know Why I Love You Like I Do,” wrote a bunch of Fats Domino hits back in the day. I’ve done several of his tunes. “Tennessee Blues” is his song. Just a great songwriter, but after a point he became a record plugger for Chess. So Bobby would come into town with the Chess records and get Hoss (WLCA deejay) to play ’em, and that would be Etta and Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, those folks.

BW: You said you were in a fraternity band. I was at Tufts University around 1962 to 63. I remember seeing Bo Diddley at a fraternity house, and I can remember taking a girl from B.U. that liked to drink a lot. I said, “F*** the fraternity system. I’m gonna suck up their booze during rush week,” but to see Bo Diddley in the basement of a fraternity house just blew my mind completely.

TN: Yeah, I’ll bet they paid him pretty well for that time, but, no, fraternities in the mid ’60s, even though they could never have a black person in their fraternity outside of a service capacity, loved black R&B.

BW: Yeah.

TN: Well, I guess there wasn’t any other kind.

BW: Not in ’62 there wasn’t.

TN: I don’t know there still is really, although I sometimes call myself an R&B singer.

BW: No, I disagree with that. I think there’s a lot of white people. John Nemeth for instance, is doing some great R&B stuff.

TN: You’re right. There are a lot of folks that are great that way, but that was what they wanted to hear, what they call “beach music” now.

BW: Right, right.

TN: The first band I was in, I had already gone through the folk thing before I was in this band, but that’s all we played. We played Bobby “Blue” Bland and James Brown, and I’d throw in a few Irma Thomas songs.

BW: Really?

TN: Yeah, that’s what we did.

BW: No “Louie Louie?”

TN: No, no. We were kind of snobs. We were kind of R&B snobs. We didn’t do “Louie Louie,” and we didn’t do “Mustang Sally” either.

BW: Oh, no. There was a line between the soul artists and the classic R&B back then. Like today it always surprises me…

TN: What they call R&B?

BW: Yeah, now as the editor of a blues ezine I can write a review of Joe Tex or Sam & Dave or all of those guys.

TN: Yeah, that’s blues. I love Joe Tex. Joe is one of the people I got turned on to on WLAC. He recorded in Nashville. Yeah, I mean I love Joe Tex.

BW: You do one of his songs, “The Love You Save (May Be Your Own),” on your new album.

TN: I do, and it took me years and years and years to do that song. I finally just said, “Okay, this could be – I’m sixty-six years old. So anything I do could be the last time I ever do it, and I thought I’m gonna record that song, but it’s so specifically a song about a black man’s experience in the south that I thought, “I can’t do that song. That’s absurd for me to do that song.”

“If I went with my instincts all of the time

instead of just most of the time, I’d be a disaster.”

BW: It’s the best song on the album, Tracy.

TN: Oh, bless your heart.

BW: It’s the best song on the album.

TN: I almost left it off.

BW: Oh, my God, girl!

TN: My husband told me – he rattled off about twelve songs that I’ve done that absolutely the lyrics have nothing to do with me. I did ’em because I love the song, like “Stand By Your Man.” So when I talked about taking it off the record, he produces me.

BW: I know.

TN: He said, “If I have to stick it on there and do a Bob Johnson…which Bob Johnson did to me once.

BW: Really? What did he stick on that you didn’t want?

TM: I couldn’t even tell you because I’ve totally put it out of my head because I go crazy when I think about it.

BW: You blacked it out?

TN: He got me to demo a song that he wrote, and then he put it on my record.

BW: Wow!

TN: Without telling me, without asking me, without telling me. I didn’t know until I got the record in the final released record. That’s when I found out the song was on there.

BW: Why did you not want to put the Joe Tex song on there?

TN: Because I was still very insecure about me doing that song.

BW: Because of the lyrics?

TN: Because of the lyrics. I love the song. I’ve spent forty years singing that song in my car.

BW: And never did it on stage?

TN: Nope!

BW: Whoa!

TN: It just seemed completely – I was just stuck on the idea that it was inappropriate for a white Norwegian woman to do that song, and the only other person I’ve heard do it was Etta, and Etta of course just owned it as well, but I was just very insecure about it. I’m glad to hear what you have to say about it, but I’m still expecting – I still think I’m gonna get some blowback on that.

BW: No.

TN: Somebody’s gonna say, “Who does she think she is?”

BW: No! To the contrary, I’ve been listening to you for forty-some years. I’ve seen you live with Irma Thomas. I’ve seen you at the Chicago Blues Festival. I have all your early albums. What turned me on about you was the fact you didn’t phone it home on the songs that were deeply mournful. I mean you get carried away, and it’s not about how classically done the song is or whether – and you’re never copying anybody else. It’s just that you get carried away, and I can remember when your band Mother Earth first came out, I said, “That’s the perfect name for your band because that’s what you are. You’re Mother Earth.

TN: Oh, it took me years to live that image down, too, ’cause we didn’t take the name to be reflecting on me. I didn’t even choose that name because the band members said, “Well, that would be a great name for the band.” We didn’t even have a name for the band yet. I wanted to call the band Siddhartha and The Mandellas.

BW: I’m glad you didn’t do that.

TN: Well, you know ’60s hippies didn’t have much of a sense of humor. So we didn’t go with that, but I didn’t even choose the name. Then, of course, it sort of got stuck on me. We should have seen that coming, but we really didn’t.

BW: Wow!

TN: If I went with my instincts all of the time instead of just most of the time, I’d be a disaster. “You’re happy. Why aren’t you more famous,” and I’d say, “Because I go with my instincts.”

BW: You totally do not see yourself the way others see you. I don’t know that for a fact, I’m just blowing smoke, but…

TN: But people say things to me, things that they read into my songs and impressions they’ve gotten over the years, and it’s just like, “Who are you talking about?” And I’m sure that’s true of most people in the public eye. The public eye is going to be completely different from your internal eye.

BW: Okay, let’s…

TN: Are we gonna delve into that?

BW: Yeah, let’s delve into that.

TN: Sorry I opened that box.

BW: Yeah, you might as well just lean back and go with it because we’re going there. So what were you comfortable with on this recording? You say right in your liner notes that you didn’t feel comfortable doing one of the classic Willie Dixon songs where you said Koko Taylor did it. But you weren’t sure you could do it justice, the Willie Dixon “You’ll Be Mine” song. What did you feel comfortable with?

TN: I can’t remember which one I said that about. I don’t think it was “Will You Be Mine” because I don’t think Koko ever did that. It might have been “Howlin’ for My Baby.”

BW: Hang on a minute.

TN: I should probably read my own liner notes.

BW: Yeah, “You’ll Be Mine,” you say right here, “He was an imposing presence, scary really, and I always found the thought of doing one of his songs quite daunting.”

TN: I’d never done a Howlin’ Wolf song before that one. That’s true. Wolf songs were, as you say, daunting. Muddy’s songs were much more melodic.

BW: Right. I feel “One More Mile” you did by Muddy was another one of the songs like “The Love You Save.” That is in your comfort range in terms of you completely losing it. That’s what I love about your stuff. You lose it. You get into it so that…

TN: Yeah, that’s what singing should be all about, but you know the version of “One More Mile” that I know, I’ve never heard Muddy’s version. It’s Otis Spann.

BW: And you knew Otis, right?

TN: Yeah, well I met him.

BW: Uh-huh.

TN: I dated Charlie Musselwhite for a while when I was still in college and he was down in Chicago, and I’d go down to Chicago weekends, and we’d hang around and we’d go to clubs, and Charlie knew everybody, and everybody knew Charlie. We went to Pepper’s one night where Muddy was playing, and I was nineteen, had a fake ID from this woman that lived in my dorm named Marion Shewlo. She was twenty-one and had short, black hair. I mean she didn’t look anything like me. They weren’t too picky.

So I’m standing at the door to Pepper’s showing the man my I.D., and he’s looking at it, and Otis Spann walked up and said hi to Charlie, and Charlie started to introduce me, and I stuck him in the ribs and said, “Hi, I’m Marion Shewlo,” so I wouldn’t use the wrong name ’cause we’re standing in front of the guy holding my fake ID. And so we went and sat down at a table with Otis and Muddy. I was introduced to Muddy, and Charlie introduced me by my real name, and Otis said, “I thought your name was Mary or something like that,” and we explained to him I was under age at nineteen, blah, blah, blah. And Muddy got up do the next set. Second or third song in he did…

BW: “She’s Only Nineteen Years Old!”

TN: Dedicated it to Charlie’s woman.

BW: [Laugh]

TN: Is that a cool story or is that a cool story?

BW: Did the bouncer come and kick you out at that point?

TN: No, I’m sure there were fifteen-year-old girls in there.

BW: Yeah, yeah. That’s funny. Yeah, I just got finished doing the obit on Pinetop Perkins.

TN: Oh, dear, yeah.

BW: I can remember thinking back in those days when Otis left Muddy, I’m saying to myself, “Who is he going to get to replace Otis? Nobody’s gonna be able to replace Otis.”

TN: Yeah.

BW: I mean Pinetop never did try to do Otis. He was his own man.

TN: Well, it’s like there was one Otis. There was one Muddy. There was one Wolf. There was one Little Walter. It’s not like – when those people all played together, Wolf never played with Muddy that I know of. I think they did some things together, but I don’t remember if they ever played together. That’s inevitable. You get that kind of talent, and they’re gonna go somewhere else, and that kind of talent just isn’t replicable, but here’s my favorite Pinetop story.

We did a tour of Hawaii together, this band I was in and the Muddy Waters Allstars, and Pinetop was in his late eighties then, and we were playing a huge club and he was sitting way in the back of the club in a little booth. I think we were getting ready for the show. And I went by, and they put out a sort of buffet for us, and I said, “Do you want me to go get you some food,” because it was too far for him to walk even, and he said, “I’ve eaten, but could you go get me [a drink]?” So I went to the bar, got him a drink, brought it back and handed it to him. He said, “You’re so sweet, and I ain’t even tasted you yet.” “Okay, you ninety-year-old sweet talker.” He was a rascal!

BW: I wish I’d gotten that quote for our obit. We had a hundred different homages for him.

TN: I mean, yeah. There’s a million of ’em. How could you put ’em all in?

BW: The one we kept getting the most on was the fact that he loved McDonald’s hamburgers and apple pie.

TN: Who doesn’t?

BW: Me, I can’t eat that stuff anymore.

TN: [unintelligible}

BW: It’s gonna kill you, man.

TN: Of course it will, but so what? My husband loves Crystal’s.

BW: Ooh, that’s even worse.

Don Wilcock is the editor in chief of BluesWax. He would like to see your comments below.

“If I went with my instincts all of the time instead of just most of the time, I’d be a disaster.”