Forgotten blues women, unforgettable voices

“I’m a travelin’ woman, I got a travelin’ mind”: on the page, the words evoke a free spirit, scorning convention. Sung by Mattie Delaney, though, a different, more troubled story emerges.

Delaney, an unknown girl with a guitar, recorded “Down the Big Road Blues” for the Vocalion label in New York City in the early 1930s. The penetrating head notes and the bottleneck slide foreground the melody, which was borrowed from a popular standard of the time. Any singer-songwriter would be proud of the pathos Delaney conveys. But in The Rough Guide to Blues Women, a compilation released next week by World Music Network, her track stands out as telling a particularly female story.

“I asked him, ‘How ’bout it?’, and he said, ‘All right’ / I asked him, ‘How long?’, and he said, ‘All night’.”

Delaney’s travelin’ woman is looking for a travelling companion, but the man she picks up warns her, “I will do you, mama, like a calf would do a cow.”

“I feel like crying,” she moans, each time with achingly subtle variations, notes blue enough to flirt with tonal chaos. Generations of spirituals pass through Delaney, field melodies and work songs drift through her lyrics, and her musicianship brims with sophistication. On the original flip side of the disc was “Tallahatchie River Blues”, a topical track recording a flood in the Mississippi area. After the recording, Delaney picked up her guitar and was never seen or heard again.

The blues revival of the 1960s helped unearth many long-lost musicians. Unfortunately, Delaney was not one of them. Beyond a sleeve note stating that she was born in 1905 — no date or city — all anyone can say of her is that she was an obscure blues woman of the 1930s, who accompanied herself on guitar and sang self-penned songs, both rare attributes for a woman performer at that time.

The singers, like Delaney, whose early recordings are compiled in The Rough Guide were pioneers in bringing early blues to mainstream, white culture — just as, 30 years later, male blues singers set rock-and-roll in motion. But more than the men’s, the women’s story has been marginalised. The greats — Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey — tend to have their own albums. It is fascinating to hear lesser-known performers, like Ida Cox and Lottie Kimbrough, who are each given one track in this collection. Kimbrough’s yodelling is engaging, its hillbilly harmonies backed by a tuneless, thumping rhythm on the bass string.

Counterpoint melodies, which the singer Mamie Smith called “hum and head arrangements”, are heard on Smith’s track “Crazy Blues” from 1920. It was the first ever blues vocal recording and was a huge success, selling more than a million copies and proving there was a market for black singers. The song’s composer, Perry Bradford, wrote: “The sound that Mamie and my Jazz Hounds planted that February morning in 1920 had such ‘down home’ original corn in it that it has sprouted, grown and thrived all down through the years.” Mamie was dubbed the “Queen of the Blues”, but only aficionados remember her now.

When a form is in its heyday, even the minor players know how to play it. In fact, they steal the show

On the new release, Bessie Smith — known, in a case of epithet inflation, as “Empress of the Blues” — is upstaged by Hattie Hart, who follows after her with “Cocaine Habit Blues”. Yet many of the singers here eschew their forcefulness and flamboyance: Victoria Spivey’s quavering voice and lyrics about death and violence, for example, make her a creature of remorse and mood swings. More typically, Ma Rainey has a voice that will grip you in a headlock, and here offers the last, consoling word.

But when a form is in its heyday, even the minor players know how to play it. In fact, they steal the show: small-town singers such as Memphis Minnie, mistress of the six-string guitar, and Irene Scruggs, with her song “Itching Heel”. The crackle of 78rpm envelops the tracks, but Scruggs’ voice is nervy, jumpy and immediate.

Another forgotten star is Geeshie Wiley, who saunters through “Pick Poor Robin Clean”, telling her duet partner Elvie Thomas about men, money and moving on. To this day, blues archivists do not know Wiley and Thomas’s real names. There are the sketchy handed-down memories of one or two ancient Mississippians, pointing to the southern half of that state. Some say that Thomas was, in fact, Lillie Mae Scott, who stabbed her husband to death in Houston in 1931. Perhaps she was on the run. Scholars think they hear hints of Louisiana or Texas in the guitar playing, or in the pronunciation of a lyric. As for Wiley, the word “Geechee” can refer to a person born in the African-inflected coastal islands off Georgia and the Carolinas. But nothing on these two women has turned up there or anywhere else. Just a handful of recordings.

‘The Rough Guide to Blues Women’ is released on July 28

Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images; Gilles Petard/Redferns