There’s a famous film clip of Billie Holiday toward the end of her career singing with tenor saxophonist Lester Young. Holiday’s not doing well: her voice is ravaged, she looks haggard and hollow-eyed, you wonder if she can even finish the show. But at one point, when Young takes off into one of his dreamlike ballad improvisations, Holiday shuts her eyes and smiles, her face suddenly transformed with beatific ecstasy. The care seems to melt away as she gently sways on the ascending beauty of his lines, carried for a precious moment from the hell of the present into music’s sanctuary. It’s more than enjoyment–without that music, one feels, she’d die.
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As overdrawn as the image may be, though, it’s based on historical truth–about the oppression of jazz and blues musicians in America and the demands these art forms make on their practitioners for total commitment. But aside from the truth of the image, there’s the question whether someone can make a conscious decision to adopt the musical and cultural trappings of trailblazers who played and sang as they did because, in some ways, they had no choice.
Saffire–The Uppity Blues Women are a trio of self-professed “middle-aged” Virginians who’ve recently decided to make a career out of attempting just that. Although they’ve all spent much of their lives somewhat outside the American mainstream for one reason or another–ethnicity, politics, personal style, or physical appearance–none has apparently lived the hard-traveling life of a Bessie Smith or a Billie Holiday. All were enthusiastic part-time musicians with stable middle-class careers before they decided, in the spring of 1988, to take the plunge and hit the road playing the music they’d come to love.
The Uppity Blues Women seem determined to continue the spirit of early Bonnie Raitt–they often articulate their assertiveness in terms of day-to-day experience, particularly relationships with men. Like Raitt, they draw heavily on the influence of take-no-mess women blues singers like Ida Cox and Sippie Wallace. Bassist Earlene Lewis contributed a ringing “Love Me Like a Man,” originally penned by Wallace according to Lewis but credited as a Raitt adaptation of Chris Smither lyrics on Raitt’s 1973 Give It Up LP; and Adegbalola weighed in with two of Cox’s tunes, “One-Hour Mama” and the anthemic “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues.”
Saffire bring to the blues a unique and challenging vision: in their hands, it’s neither an arena for spectacular displays of technical virtuosity nor a means of exorcising demons. But it’s not a form of generic good-time entertainment, either. They attempt to free the blues from its socioeconomic and cultural origins, making it a kind of everywoman’s music even as they acknowledge and celebrate its roots.
