Big Mama Thornton: Sassy Mama!

SASSY MAMA! (1975)

1) Rolling Stone; 2) Lost City; 3) Mr. Cool; 4) Big Mama's New Love; 5) Private Number; 6) Sassy Mama; 7) Eve­rybody's Happy (But Me).

Nearly forgotten, two decades past her alleged «prime», and having seriously lost weight, which all but forfeited the claim to the honorary «Big» prefix, Willie Mae Thornton just so happened to record the best album of her entire career. The only album, might I say — the only other time she went into the studio to cut a brand new set of tunes specially for the occasion was on Stronger Than Dirt, and, like I mentioned earlier, there were all sorts of problems with that LP.

There are only seven songs, the session players are mostly unknown, and the sales must have been so low that the recorded sequel, Big Mama Swings, was shelved upon completion, not to see the light of day before the Complete Vanguard Recordings compilation actually showed us that the sequel was not half bad, either. But it is the best possible album Big Mama could have done in the 1970s, and boy, should we ever be glad that she did do it.

How it happened, we do not know, but, apparently, Big Mama found herself uncontrolled and un­marketed by anyone — not a soul on her record label must have given a damn about what the kind of sound she should be associated with, so she just went ahead and did it all on her own. "I, I, uh... I'll do it like this", she introduces 'Private Number', singing the first bars a cappella, with the band gradually catching up with her, and that's symbolic of the entire album.

But the band is very much involved, too. The songs roll on for six, seven, eight minutes easily, not as jam sessions — as lengthy blues confessions that unroll as dialogs, trialogs, and quadrilogs between Willie Mae and her piano, guitar, and sax soloists. There's a general atmosphere of total free­dom, hearty fun, and, at the core of it, somber seriousness. 'Mr. Cool', the centerpiece, clocks in at 7:45, but there is hardly any problem with that, since Big Mama needs her bit players to warm her up gradually, until the ecstatic, climactic conclusion.

Obviously, there was no hope of the album making any kind of impression in 1975, when most of the interest in «black music» was focused on its dance aspects, but so much more the reason to clear up this mistake and recognize Sassy Mama! as one of the finest things black music had to offer in the year of 'Love To Love You Baby'. And do not make the mistake of getting it on its own, because, like I already said, the long-lost companion piece, Big Mama Swings, offers more of the same — exactly the same, which is why I refrain from giving it a separate review, but exac­tly the same level of awesomeness, culminating in 'Happy Me', which should be recognized as one of Big Mama's finest, on the same level with 'Ball & Chain' at least. Suffice it to say that it is probably the darkest, grimmest soul-blues piece ever to feature that kind of title, bizarre and in­triguing in its paradoxal nature. And if the first album already is an unquestionable thumbs up, the two together request getting your big toes up as well.

Alas, just as Mama hit that kind of peak, something happened — either her health finally gave out altogether, or the label stripped her of studio time, but, anyway, all of her post-1975 recordings are extremely scarce, hard to find, and even controversial. Discographies list an LP called Ma­ma's Pride, released in 1978, but hardly ever with a track listing, so it is not even clear if it was a new recording in the first place. There are also some archival live recordings from around 1977, said to be quite good (which I can believe) but also difficult to find. Then there was a car accident, but she still managed to perform at Newport in 1983. Then, like so many other heroes of the past, Big Mama passed away quietly somewhere in L.A. in 1984.

Check "Sassy Mama" (CD) on Amazon
Check "Sassy Mama!" (MP3) on Amazon

Big Mama Thornton: Jail

BIG MAMA THORNTON: JAIL (1975)

1) Little Red Rooster; 2) Ball 'n' Chain; 3) Jail; 4) Hound Dog; 5) Rock Me Baby; 6) Sheriff O. E. & Me; 7) Oh Hap­py Day.

Information on Big Mama's whereabouts during the first half of the 1970s is sketchy at best. There seems to have been at least one album of gospel tunes (Saved, dated in different sources to either 1971 and 1973; all I know for sure is that the release was on Pentagram Records, and yes, she does cover 'Swing Low Sweet Chariot', so do not expect huge massive surprises), and there may have been occasional guest appearances here and there.

But the «essential Big Mama» truly resurfaces only in five years time, and with another live al­bum — and a classic one. Released on Vanguard, Jail is culled from two different performances at Monroe State Prison in Monroe, Washington and Oregon State Reformatory in Eugene, Ore­gon (I am, of course, listing this detailed information just in case you ever turn up there and get a chance to chat with an eighty-year old inmate). And even if one could say that Big Mama was merely following a trend here, already well established by Johnny Cash and B. B. King and oth­ers, who's to deny that Willie Mae, with her brusque and rowdy ways, wouldn't be the perfect rhythm & blues advertiser in that kind of environment?

The emphasis here is not merely on giving the people a good time, but, as it is with the best of prison albums, on giving them a realistically good time. Two of the songs — the slow blues of the title track and the happy shuffle of 'Sheriff O. E. & Me' — relate directly to prison time issues, and then there's 'Ball 'n' Chain', whose title, in a setting like this, would be very easy to take lite­rally. 'Jail' is, of course, the album's centerpiece, with the darkest guitar solos and the grinniest grin on Mama's face, no doubt, as she introduces herself: "Well, here I am again — sitting down in this old rotten jail..." much to the inmates' delirious delight.

The album's got minor surprises — 'Little Red Rooster', for instance, is not what you'd think, but rather an entirely different, much faster boogie number, quite a kickass opener; 'Hound Dog' is probably the second best, maybe even the first best rendition in Mama's catalog, with a chuggy, funky rhythm guitar part supplanting the original accompaniment; and 'Oh, Happy Day' (which, I believe, was also recorded for the Saved album) is a rare occasion to hear Willie Mae sing gospel pop — in a reasonably restrained and fun way, with the band heartedly accelerating towards the end (too bad the record fades out for some reason).

For the record, the band includes George "Harmonica" Smith on Turkish komuz (nah, just joking), J. D. Nichols on piano, Bill Potter dominating much of the overall sound on tenor sax, and the trusty Eddie Huston on stinging guitar, augmented by Steve Wachsman on second guitar (maybe it's Steve who plays the cool funky part on 'Hound Dog', I don't really know). The album itself is generally available these days on the 3-CD long Complete Vanguard Recordings collection, a very welcome addition to your collection if you dig «Americana» at all. We'll get around to the rest of it soon enough; in the meantime — thumbs up, no questions asked.

Big Mama Thornton: The Way It Is

BIG MAMA THORNTON: THE WAY IT IS (1970)

1) Little Red Rooster; 2) One Black Rat; 3) Rock Me Baby; 4) Wade In The Water; 5) Sweet Little Angel; 6) Baby Please / Mojo Workin'; 7) Watermelon Man; 8) Don't Need No Doctor.

Now here is an album title that actually matches the contents. Recorded at some L.A. club with Big Mama's then-current touring band (including Eddie "Bee" Houston on guitar, George "Har­monica" Smith on, oddly enough, harmonica, Flip "They Forgot To Stroke My Ego With A Nick" Graham on bass, and J. D. "Not Jack" Nicholson on piano), it actually had the luck to be remas­tered and put out on CD, just so that everybody could see it as #153,288 on the Amazon Music Bestsellers List, just a tiny bit below Kidz Bop Vol. 20 in Big Mama's amazing post-mortem comeback to rule the musical world.

Other than Big Mama's, or the record label's, strange fascination with either clipping song names ('Baby Please' is 'Baby Please Don't Go', of course) or completely changing them ('Don't Need No Doctor' is really 'Goin' Down Slow') — probably for cash reasons, so that «Willie Mae Thornton» could appear on the songwriting credits without too much of a hassle — The Way It Is is really an excellent screenshot of the lady's state of affairs in 1970. And the lady was certainly in much better shape than her best student: around the same time that the teacher was belting it out like there was no tomorrow among enthusiastic L.A. clubgoing crowds, just a few miles away the Pierce Brothers West­wood Village Mortuary was busy flame-consuming the drug-soaked body of the student. Ironic, isn't it.

Anyway, this whole thing is mostly in the slow blues vein, only 'One Black Rat' breaks up the mood with a fast, classic R&B-ish beat and wild harmonica solos to remind the listener of what it used to be like on Peacock Records. But Big Mama always does slow blues the Big Mama way — the tempos may be slow, but the adrenaline level never drops below the one required for the craziest boogie. For the sakes of diversity, she includes a gospel number ('Wade In The Water') and a jazz standard (the lyricized version of Herbie Hancock's 'Watermelon Man', replete with a semi-improvised «street brawn» with the watermelon man in question), both of which are done fine — she's got enough sense not to butcher the original killer melody of 'Watermelon Man' like she did with some stuff on Stronger Than Dirt — but that's just diversity of source material for you, not diversity of approach. If there's one person in this world who'd always be talking to God in the same tone she'd be addressing a watermelon man, that's Willie Mae.

The medley of 'Baby Please Don't Go' and 'Got My Mojo Workin' is interesting in that the former is taken at a super-slow, creeping tempo (in stark contrast to the then-popular rock version), slow­er even than the original Big Joe Williams version — then, midway through, blam, we launch in­to the tribal jungle dance of 'Mojo', almost in consolatory compensation for the lull. As for longer out­standing moments, well, "Bee" Houston has a couple of fine, fluent, very «contemporary» blues solos on 'Little Red Rooster' and 'Sweet Little Angel': he was clearly the most up-to-date player in Big Mama's band, and not only is his playing here every bit as good as the notes one hears on concurrent B. B. King records, some of the climactic trills actually go well over King's technical threshold. Where is this guy's solo career?

A fun record, in general, not at all let down even by Big Mama's pompous bits of Vegas-y banter, typical side effects as they are of an overtly proud to be overtly polite black performer before an overtly proud to be overtly receptive white audience (well, that's more or less how it used to be in those still somewhat racially tense old times). Thumbs up.

Check "Way It Is" (CD) on Amazon
Check "The Way It Is" (MP3) on Amazon

Big Mama Thornton: Stronger Than Dirt

BIG MAMA THORNTON: STRONGER THAN DIRT (1969)

1) Born Under A Bad Sign; 2) Hound Dog; 3) Ball And Chain; 4) Summertime; 5) Rollin' Stone; 6) Let's Go Get Stoned; 7) Funky Broadway; 8) That Lucky Old Sun; 9) Ain't Nothin' You Can Do; 10) I Shall Be Released.

As far as I was able to dig it out, Big Mama recorded her original version of 'Ball 'n' Chain', with Edward «Bee» Houston on electric guitar in vintage Chicago-style, as late as January 1968 — curious, considering that, as we all know, fellow Texan and big Willie Mae fan Janis Joplin was already singing the song live as early as 1967 (Monterey Pop, etc.). Unless I'm missing some cru­cial facts, Janis must have caught Big Mama in a live performance. Regardless, Janis' megastar­dom in 1967, in the usual manner, brought its bit of recognition to those artists that were at least partially responsible for that stardom, and that meant new opportunities for Willie Mae, too.

Stronger Than Dirt, released by Arhoolie in 1969, is a fun, but not very successful, attempt to make use of these opportunities. A hodge-podge of oldies and contemporary songs set to a «mo­dernistic big band sound», the album is just as eclectic as the late Sixties usually required — a little blues, a little boogie, a little R'n'B, a little soul, and the song selection is calculated so meti­culously you'd think they hired a professional astronomer to do that. 'Ball And Chain' is re-recor­ded for the session, since Janis had already showed how to make it into a selling hit; and since Ja­nis had the power, it was only too natural to pass the ball back and, in Janis' own steps this time, cover 'Summertime'.

'Born Under A Bad Sign' — a hit for Albert King, then popularized among white audiences by Cream. 'Funky Broadway' — Wilson Pickett had been really hot with that one not more than one year ago. 'Let's Go Get Stoned'... odd choice for a straight working black gal from the heart of Texas, but who cares? She even tries on a little Bob Dylan, because, well, you weren't really supposed to be a solid commercial proposition in those days unless you tried on a little Bob Dylan. (Of course, you could be exempt if your name sounded anything like Paul Mc­Cartney or Mick Jagger, but that was obviously not the case here).

The results are mixed and, overall, sort of pathetic. In 1969, Willie Mae was as powerful a singer as she'd been twenty years earlier, but she was every bit as unsuited to varying the original for­mu­la. Case in point — the nightmare-awful rendition of 'I Shall Be Released', a song that dies on the spot and slowly decays in a cloud of heavy stinking once it is deprived of subtlety; Big Mama, as is her custom, charges through the tune like a brave cavalry regiment, and one in which every sin­gle soldier and every single horse have just had ample access to the local pub as well. 'Born Un­der A Bad Sign' is brawny, but also thoroughly flushed of its doom-laden atmosphere — with the elimination of the song's original monster riff (that Cream, by the way, took great care to preserve and build upon), it retains plenty of volume but loses most of the «presence». For 'Summertime', Willie Mae tries to preserve the atmosphere of poorly hidden depression and sarcasm that Janis gave the song, but, again, lacks the appropriate finesse. And so on. Finally, why in the world would we need yet another re-recording of 'Hound Dog'?

It is quite telling that not a single one of these numbers (except for 'Hound Dog' and 'Ball And Chain', of course) became a live staple for Big Mama, as the next year's live album would soon demonstrate — unlike the awesome repertoire displayed on her 1966 recordings. It is still interes­ting to listen through it at least once, for instructive purposes: to understand what an artist's artis­tic limitations may look like, in the flesh (since, under normal conditions, artists tend to hide these limitations rather than flaunt them in our face) — and, perhaps, to gain a better appreciation for the original songs, in a comparative perspective. But other than that, it's a flip-floppy thumbs down all the way.

Big Mama Thornton: With The Muddy Waters Band

BIG MAMA THORNTON: WITH THE MUDDY WATERS BAND (1966)

1) I'm Feeling Alright; 2) Sometimes I Have A Heartache; 3) Black Rat; 4) Life Goes On; 5) Everything Gonna Be Alright; 6) Big Mama's Bumble Bee Blues; 7) Gimme A Penny; 8) Looking The World Over; 9) I Feel The Way I Feel; 10) Guide Me Home; 11) Black Rat; 12) Wrapped Tight; 13) Gimme A Penny; 14) Big Mama's Shuffle; 15) Since I Fell For You; 16) I'm Feeling Alright; 17) Big Mama's Blues.

Chris Strachwitz, president of Texas-based Arhoolie Records, was, in 1966, best known for secu­ring the publishing rights to Country Joe & The Fish's 'Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die', a song that millions of draft dodgers were only too happy to pay good money for if it helped them better ar­ticulate their arguments. Not being too sure about where and how to spend all that money, Strach­witz, a good person at heart, considered caring about Texan dispossessed, and, as fate would have it, fell upon Big Mama's freshly issued In Europe.

Like every good American patriot should, the Silesian-born Christian Alexander Maria, Graf Strachwitz von Groß-Zauche und Camminetz was a wee bit annoyed about blossoming American talent only able to secure a market in Europe. Thereupon, he personally got hold of Big Mama, flew her to San Francisco, and there, on April 25, 1966, teamed her up with the-then current back­ing band for Muddy Waters: Sammy Lawhorn on guitar, the fabulous James Cotton on har­monica, the magnificent Otis Spann on piano, a less-known but no-less-fluent Luther Johnson on bass, and Francis Clay on drums. Muddy himself adds some guitar on a few of the tracks, but ne­ver sings one note, leaving all the juicy bits to the lady.

The session was originally released in 1967, possibly (it is hard to find concise information) under the presumptuous name The Queen At Monterey (presumptuous and misleading — any album like that in 1967 would have given the impression that Big Mama performed at the famous Monterey Pop festival, when, in fact, the whole thing was not at all up her alley; but, considering that Janis Joplin did perform her 'Ball And Chain' at the venue, the misleading may have been in­tentional) and containing ten tracks; today, it is widely available under the quoted name as a 17-song CD edition, although three are just alternate takes. And, naturally, every serious blues lover should take advantage of that availability while it lasts.

The big difference from In Europe is that, this time around, there is no mighty fine aspiring young guitar superstar to outshine the rest of the performers: in fact, Muddy and Sammy are all the time kept relatively low in the mix, rarely, if ever, get to solo, and the emphasis the whole time is on collective playing, with the guitars, Spann's jazz-influenced pianos, and Cotton's relent­less harmonica blowing all going on together at the same time — and still, over all that din, Big Mama has them all beat whenever she opens her mouth.

The proceedings are also much more sternly blueslike, with no 'Hound Dog' in sight, just lotsa 12-bar and straightforward blues-rock and blues-balladry. We do get to evaluate Willie Mae's harmonica-blowing skills once more, on 'Big Mama's Shuffle', but overall, this is not a highly di­verse affair, and individual songs are not particularly discussable. Not that it matters. What mat­ters is that you should download yourself the first twenty seconds of 'I'm Feelin' Alright', and then decide for yourself if the connection between shuffling piano, blues harmonica, heavy as hell bass guitar, and Mama's tough brawn is as unique and rousing as it seems to me.

Because, in a way, Big Mama was the female blues performer to correlate almost directly with Muddy Waters as the male blues performer, and the decision to team her up with Muddy's perfect backing was a stroke of German genius on the part of Graf Strachwitz. Alas, the teaming up was performed a decade too late for the whole venture to succeed commercially — in 1967, few peo­ple had retained an active interest for Muddy himself, let alone a former one-hit wonder appro­priating Muddy's band — but today, now that time has flattened out past decades, the proud blues connoisseur can boast of this little jewel as the best pure blues album of 1966-67, if he so wishes, and even maintain that this was Willie Mae's finest hour, even despite the lack of Leiber-Stoller pre­sence. Thumbs up.

Check "With The Muddy Waters Blues Band" (CD) on Amazon
Check "With The Muddy Waters Blues Band" (MP3) on Amazon