TRACY NELSON

Victim of the Blues

Delta Groove

By Leslie Keros

In the notes to Victim of the Blues, Tracy Nelson describes the title track of her new release as “the story of my life”—a reference to the near disaster that almost prevented her new recording from seeing the light of day. After the album was recorded, a fire consumed most of Tracy’s hundred-year-old farmhouse, which included her studio. The tapes were saved, and the Ma Rainey song that Tracy had already chosen as the title track gained a new resonance.

On this album, Tracy delves deep into the blues canon, performing some of her favorites from Jimmy Reed, Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Otis Spann. The former lead singer of Mother Earth has recorded in a variety of genres, from country to R&B, and on this album she seems unhurried, drawing deeply from the well of the blues. As a student in Madison, Wisconsin, in the mid-Sixties, Tracy would head to Chicago on weekends to hang out with Charlie Musselwhite and to see Muddy Waters and Otis Spann perform at South Side joints such as Pepper’s. While on tour a few years ago with the Chicago Blues Reunion (a band featuring Corky Siegel and Sam Lay, among others), she noticed that the songs the other acts were performing were a far cry from the classics she remembered hearing back in the day, so she became determined to breathe new life into some of the old chestnuts.

On the title track, Tracy’s husky vibrato paints an interesting contrast to Mike Henderson’s spare strumming on the banjolin. “Shoot My Baby” is a disarmingly upbeat tune, with pianist Marcia Ball playing a bouncy rhythm while she and Tracy sing joyfully about taking down a lover who’s done wrong -- a promise whose dark side is reinforced by Mike Henderson’s gritty guitar. On “One More Mile,” keyboardist Jimmy Pugh seems to relish paying homage to Otis Spann, whose recording of the song with James Cotton inspired Tracy include it on her own album. “Feel So Bad” takes on a boogaloo feel, thanks in part to the irresistible groove laid down by drummer John Gardner, and “Stranger in My Own Hometown” equally benefits from his infectious shuffle beat. Tracy saves her most passionate performance for the final song, the Irma Thomas gem “Without Love (There Is Nothing),” performed in duet with John Cowan and enriched with splendid background vocals that lend an unmistakable gospel air.

Tracy proves herself an entertaining and enlightening storyteller, not only in her song selection but also in her vignettes. You can imagine the twinkle in her eye as she writes about “I Know It’s a Sin”: “Of course, we all did ‘Baby What You Want Me to Do’ in our first bands and I lost my virginity to the strains of ‘Honest I Do,’ so Jimmy Reed had to be well represented on this record.” At age sixty-six, Tracy Nelson has paid a deeply felt, perhaps overdue, tribute to the past masters, singing the blues with a soulfulness and maturity that render her not a victim but a torchbearer of the blues.

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