Southwest Blues Magazine - Blues with Tabasco
Wednesday August 2nd, 2000 @ 8:55 PM
Filed under: Everything, Publications
They kissed her hand. One by one, a cowboy, two college kids, an old hippie, a New York tourist–and the line was long behind them. In the background people applauded in the rain. No one left. All beheld her in astonished admiration. Two girls genuflected as they caught her eye. The diverse gathering had formed one mind, one focus, one emotion. I looked on in disbelief.
Here was an elderly black lady in a cowboy town on the high lonesome Laramie Valley, during its rodeo days. She stood on a flat bed trailer parked on the street facing the toughest bar in the state: the Buckhorn. She had arrived only hours before after riding all night from Oklahoma with her faithful friend, Doc Metcalf. They had staggered out of his pick-up wearing weightlifting belts for their worn out lumbars.
After a short nap, Dorothy Ellis, known as “Miss Blues,” marched down the street from her motel and took the stage before a wild crowd of revelers, and simply proceeded to stop them cold, mesmerize them, and leave them impaled on her piercing vocal tone. With her might and her charm she became thunder and rainbow, so whom she didn’t dazzle she tantalized.
Those who have seen her do this, know my words are true; those who haven’t need to make a pilgrimage to wherever this lady is performing and behold.
The fascinating Texas shouter hadn’t come a thousand miles just to sing a few songs in the rain, she had come to record her first CD after fifty-four years of singing the blues professionally. As we know, sometimes life is not fair, and sometimes it is ridiculously unfair. With all the twits and nincompoops we hear squeaking and squawking on MTV with their record labels printed so proudly in the corner; this captivating and dynamic woman wandered in recording wilderness fourteen years longer than the ancient Hebrews in Sinai.
Now Laramie, Wyoming, hardly looks like the promised land, but it is the home of Crying Tone Records and the blistering blues band, Blinddog Smokin’. It was the blistering quality that drew Miss Blues to Blinddog as a kindred spirit seeking a home–because this woman likes Tabasco on her blues.
She had shunned invitations to record elsewhere because as she put it: “They was gonna stick me with some tired old men, playin’ tired old blues…” She knew Blinddog Smokin’ would start up like a struck match– but we didn’t.
When she had positioned herself before the recording microphone and explained her first song, the guitarist, Jason “12 fingers” Coomes, plodded into an acoustic progression and the drums sauntered in behind him. “Chicago” Chuck Gullens peered at Miss Blues through his question marked face wondering if he was going too fast.
After a few bars the grand lady stopped suddenly and formed an awful face full of dismay, “What in the world are you guys doing?” She screamed. “You worse than the tired old men. Just because I’m a lady don’t mean I want you to play gentle and slow. This ain’t no funeral. I want the Blinddogs. I want you to play Blinddog style. Get some electric guitars and make ‘em scream. I want some energy. I want it now.”
Well, ladies and gentlemen, this woman weighs two hundred and thirty pounds and is damned near as tall as my six foot one. Her voice sounded like a locomotive coming through a tunnel and we sat up straight and begin’ “yes ma’aming” like orphans in a Charles Dickens novel.
From that galvanic moment on, the basement studio was smokin’. Miss Blues likes it hot. “I want music that will sell CDs…” She announced between songs. I believe her CD is going to do exactly that.
She wrote several original songs. Slow blues that glow like embers at midnight. Songs from her rugged past. Songs where one can feel the pathos in her tone like you feel the chill of a north wind. Songs like “Sinkin’, Sinkin’, Sinkin’, where the despair of a young and abandoned mother torque’s your soul like a spiritual wrench until it draws out the compassion that lies so often dormant in human languor.
We all begin to feel an atmosphere of reverence around this woman. We approached each song as though it were lain upon the altar. Metaphorically we were in a state of worship. She taught us. She told us to listen to the words, listen to her voice, and then let our own vision come out in the instruments. No longer were we playing notes, we were telling a story–her story. The guitarists forgot their practiced licks and begin to mirror her voice, her soul, her words. If she sang of a mountain stream, then so did each instrument, and soon she was painting pictures with song and we were her brushes and paint, and the black electric recording boxes stacked against the wall with their myriad and dancing colored lights were her canvas.
An odd orchestra it was: an old black woman; a young black drummer; a guitarist of eighteen years, dubbed “The Kid;” a young white bassist nick-named “Junior” from the yuppie town of Boulder, Colorado; a stoic and stern master of guitar who also served as technician; and me, the raconteur philosopher. We had nothing in common, except our gathered souls. In that almost eerie atmosphere of concentration, everything, all that one is, all that one can be, lines up into a single purpose and anything outside that purpose disappears. It is not something you can walk into a store and buy. Neither is it something that can be dictated or decreed.
By contrast, time between songs was filled with joviality and outrageous banter. Some of this was captured on tape and will be included on the final CD release. It is this buoyancy and vivacity and merriment that make Miss Blues profoundly lovable, despite how intimidating her stage persona can be. This is a woman who loves to laugh and has every reason to be bitter instead. I think she loves herself and truly gets a kick out of Miss Blues. Because of that everybody else finds it easy to love her too. I am reminded of a quote from William Makepeace Thackeray who wrote: The world is a looking glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.
The faces that look back at Miss Blues are happy faces because hers is happy. They are inspired faces as well, and faces that reflect deep feeling. They are faces revealing certain expression perhaps for the first time because they have never looked into a face like that of Miss Blues. I lament that more people can’t participate in her reflection, or that those of us who do, can’t do it more. The world needs that. Too often we look into faces reflecting self-pity and self-loathing, anger and angst.
When I reminisce about those four July days we spent recording with this beautiful old Texas Shouter, and I hear the dozen songs we made together with her fire and our smoke, I think of another beloved quotation I found years ago by Ralph Waldo Emerson: The days come and go and they say nothing, and if you do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.
Dorothy Ellis has been a gift each day in many peoples lives for over fifty-four years of professional singing, yet she grew old having never made a record of her own. If Blinddog Smokin’ does nothing else with our precious time on this mysterious earth than to make sure she is not carried silently away, I will know we have not lived in vain.
Look for Miss Blues’ first CD on the Crying Tone Record Label sometime around the end of November. Blinddog Smokin’ will be appearing with her at varied times and locals in Oklahoma and Texas this fall and winter.
Posted by Carl