Victoria Spivey

Victoria Spivey was one of the more influential blues women simply because she was around long enough to influence legions of younger women and men who rediscovered blues music during the mid-'60s U.S. blues revival brought about by British blues bands as well as their American counterparts, like Paul Butterfield and Elvin Bishop. Spivey could do it all: she wrote songs, sang them well, and accompanied herself on piano and organ, and occasionally ukulele. Spivey began her recording career at age 19 and came from the same rough-and-tumble clubs in Houston and Dallas that produced Sippie Wallace. In 1918, she left home to work as a pianist at the Lincoln Theater in Dallas. In the early 1920s, she played in gambling parlors, gay hangouts and whorehouses in Galveston and Houston with Blind Lemon Jefferson. Among Spivey's many influences was Ida Cox, herself a sassy blues woman, and taking her cue from Cox, Spivey wrote and recorded tunes like "TB Blues," "Dope Head Blues" and "Organ Grinder Blues" in the 1920s. Spivey's other influences included Robert Calvin, Sara Martin and Bessie Smith. Like so many other women blues singers who had their heyday in the 1920s and '30s, Spivey wasn't afraid to sing sexually suggestive lyrics, and this turned out to be a blessing nearly 40 years later in the sexual revolution of the 1960s and early '70s. She recorded her first song, "Black Snake Blues," for the Okeh label in 1926, and then worked as a songwriter at a music publishing company in St. Louis in the late 1920s. In the 1930s, Spivey recorded for the Victor, Vocalion, Decca and Okeh labels, and moved to New York City, working as a featured performer in a number of African-American musical revues, including the "Hellzapoppin' Revue.'' In the 1930s, she recorded and spent time on...