BLUES & RHYTHM Gospel Truth March 2005 BRITISH BLUES MAGAZINE
Published on 5/8/2006
By NORMAN DARWEN
WILDSANG: Sky Dirt Speak Out Truth
It is roughly eighty years since King Oliver was wowing the denizens of the Jazz Age; around sixty years back a small coterie of white intellectuals and activists were astounded by Billie Holiday (and Josh White) performing ‘Strange Fruit”, a song about lynching. A decade or so later, the Supreme Court in America was debating desegregation, whilst towards the end of the following decade Jo-Anne Kelly was proving that a woman could also perform the hard-hitting delta sounds of a Fred McDowell, whilst the cognoscenti debated whether or not white people could sing and/or play the blues. Then the last twenty years or so have seen the development of a small, but significant number of acoustic-based African-American performers attempting to reclaim the heritage of the blues, with varying degrees of success…. And all of the above history lesson is directly relevant to this release.
Wildsang is a female duo originally out of Coyote, New Mexico, but now based in San Francisco. Singer/guitarist and songwriter Hillary Kay is a grand-niece of Joe “King” Oliver and she has a wealth of experience, both inside and outside the blues field, and her writing here has the kind of Afro-centric focus that only Otis Taylor seems to possess within the blues field these days. I can’t see (I hope) any white artists attempting to sing, “That ain’t no strange fruit, that’s my daddy” – and doesn’t that personalization make the song, and subject much more immediate?
The duo’s sound is described in their publicity as ‘Delta and Piedmont blues’, which is fine, as long as the listener realizes this does not mean that they provide straight copies of Robert Johnson or Blind Boy Fuller, but rather they work their own material into those idioms, hough the only two covers here (‘Smokestack Lightnin’ and ‘Spoonful’, of course) prove that Hillary has the voice and guitar chops to do them justice – and that much is already pretty apparent right from the ferocious slide guitar driven opening number. Aside from those already mentioned, the songs themselves deal with rape, murder, revenge, being disowned, love and the circus – the latter being a lovely wistful number, reminiscent of Sparky Rucker’s own material.
Kate Freeman is the other half of the duo, a harmonica player of north European ancestry who fell in love with the blues in 1964. Here she is very much in a purely supporting role, but one which she fills easily, her wailing harp a fine foil for Hillary’s voice, or adding to the propulsive drive of many of the songs.
I have to say that I was quite prepared to be rather skeptical about this duo – after all, the title and cover do appear ‘New Age’. But the raw, direct and accomplished musicianship and delivery, the bluntness of the songs’ and the undoubted commitment to the music make this a CD worth hearing and a duo worth watching for the future. (www.wildsang.com)
Article Credits and References
Blues & Rhythm Magazine, Norman Darwen www.bluesandrhythm.co.uk/
