I just bought a bunch of CDs on sale from Document, and a rather unexpected one has caught my attention: Blue Girls Volume 3. Three of the artists included, Anna Lee Chisholm, Cora Perkins, and Ruby Smith, would be instantly recognizable as "blues" to a modern listener. Their performances are pleasant, with Anna Lee Childs accompanied on "Cool Kind Daddy Blues" by Louis Lasky on guitar, flatpicking even at this early date (1924), and Cora Perkins accompanied by Lonnie Johnson on violin. Virginia Childs sounds white, and is accompanied by Riley Puckett and possibly Clayton McMichen from the Skillet Lickers. But the two singers who really stand out for me and keep me coming back to the disk are Eva Parker and Lulu Jackson. Neither of these singers could remotely be called a blues singer.
Eva Parker sounds like someone who studied voice in college. She recorded at two sessions, one in 1926 and the other in 1928. On both she's accompanied by "unknown" on guitar, but from the similarity of playing on both dates and the very rudimentary guitar skills displayed, I'd be willing to bet that Eva herself is the guitar player. On the 1926 session, Parker is accompanied by a very "sentimental" violin player, and on the 1928 session by the Pace Jubilee Singers doing discrete hums again in a very "sentimental" style. Parker's repertoire consists of popular songs, "Careless Love", and one blues song. One imagines her to be the wife of a Chicago doctor or merchant, someone who regularly performed for church fundraisers and amateur theatricals. I especially love her "I've Seen My Pretty Papa", though it always makes me think of W. C. Fields wickedly parodying the sentimental song genre in "The Fatal Glass Of Beer".
Lulu Jackson could be Eva Parker's teenage daughter, someone who learned her repertoire and guitar skills from Worrall's Guitar Tutor or some other such publication and who hasn't yet had any vocal training. She doesn't have Eva Parker's vibrato, breath control, or sense of phrasing, but her guitar skills and repertoire are remarkably similar to Parker's - both women do "Careless Love" and "You're Going To Leave The Old Home, Jim" (Jackson does it twice, once at her first session and once again at her last).
One of the reasons I'm so taken with these two singers is that they seem to be a window into a facet of segregation era African-American life that we don't hear very much from today: the middle class, people who would go a mile out of their way to avoid going anywhere near a juke joint. Plus they both seem a bit of a throwback. One imagines them fitting more comfortably at the turn of the century rather than the mid 1920s.
Eva Parker sounds like someone who studied voice in college. She recorded at two sessions, one in 1926 and the other in 1928. On both she's accompanied by "unknown" on guitar, but from the similarity of playing on both dates and the very rudimentary guitar skills displayed, I'd be willing to bet that Eva herself is the guitar player. On the 1926 session, Parker is accompanied by a very "sentimental" violin player, and on the 1928 session by the Pace Jubilee Singers doing discrete hums again in a very "sentimental" style. Parker's repertoire consists of popular songs, "Careless Love", and one blues song. One imagines her to be the wife of a Chicago doctor or merchant, someone who regularly performed for church fundraisers and amateur theatricals. I especially love her "I've Seen My Pretty Papa", though it always makes me think of W. C. Fields wickedly parodying the sentimental song genre in "The Fatal Glass Of Beer".
Lulu Jackson could be Eva Parker's teenage daughter, someone who learned her repertoire and guitar skills from Worrall's Guitar Tutor or some other such publication and who hasn't yet had any vocal training. She doesn't have Eva Parker's vibrato, breath control, or sense of phrasing, but her guitar skills and repertoire are remarkably similar to Parker's - both women do "Careless Love" and "You're Going To Leave The Old Home, Jim" (Jackson does it twice, once at her first session and once again at her last).
One of the reasons I'm so taken with these two singers is that they seem to be a window into a facet of segregation era African-American life that we don't hear very much from today: the middle class, people who would go a mile out of their way to avoid going anywhere near a juke joint. Plus they both seem a bit of a throwback. One imagines them fitting more comfortably at the turn of the century rather than the mid 1920s.