Listening to Prestige 501: Victoria Spivey

LISTEN TO ONE: Thursday Girl

These were Victoria Spivey's last recordings for Prestige Bluesville, before starting her own record label, in partnership with her companion Len Kunstadt, a jazz and blues historian twenty years her junior. The label was to stay active for over two decades, run by Kunstadt after her death in 1976. There weren't many other blues artists, or many other female artists, or many other artists of color, who were able to assume that kind of control of the business end of a music career.

Gigi Gryce, acutely aware of how composers and songwriters, especially African-Americans, were routinely cheated out of their publishing rights, started his own publishing company and signed up a few of his fellow musicians, but he was squeezed out and became so disillusioned that he essentially quit the music business.

Charles Mingus and Max Roach started their own label, Debut Records, in 1952. They released some excellent music, including the "greatest jazz concert ever," Jazz at Massey Hall, but folded in 1957. 

Mary Lou Williams, in the late 1950s, and Betty Carter, in 1969, were two other Black women who started their own record labels and ran them successfully. Carter described the experience: 

People thought I was crazy when I did it. 'How are you gonna get any distribution?' I mean, 'How are you gonna take care of business and do that yourself?' 'Don't you need somebody else?' I said, 'Listen. Nobody was comin' this way and I wanted the records out there, so I found out that I could do it myself.' So, that's what I did. It's the best thing that ever happened to me. 

Williams and Carter both released their own records. Spivey, like Mingus and Roach, actively ran a record business, signing and recording other artists: it was an important blues label. Artists included Lucille Hegamin, Buddy Tate, Willie Dixon, Otis Spann, Big Joe Turner, and Lonnie Johnson. 

Johnson joined Spivey for the first of these two sessions; the second one was just the lady and her piano. Both of them were stripped down to the essentials. Spivey was one of the great songwriters of the blues, in addition to her talents as a performer, and this stripped-down session is an excellent showcase for her. Johnson and Spivey went way back, and his jazz-inflected blues style fit hers perfectly.

He wasn't there for the four songs she recorded on September 26. Or at least, he wasn't there to accompany her. The Prestige session log lists two songs recorded by Johnson on the 21st, and two more on the 26th, but all went unissued.

The Bluesville album was called Woman Blues. Two tracks, "I'm a Red Hot Mama" and "That Man," were also part of a compilation album, Bawdy Blues, that came out right around the same time (Woman Blues is BVLP 1054, Bawdy Blues is BVLP 1055).  This was around the time that record companies were realizing there was more to dirty songs than Oscar Brand's Barrack Room Ballads or Rusty Warren or Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts, and they just had to mine the old blues catalog to find it.