Singing Inside the Blues

Judy Roderick was an odd sort to be singing the blues in the mid ‘60s – white, female and young. I was surprised to realize from the photos included with the remastered CD release of her Woman Blue that she wasn’t just sort of pretty, as I’d remembered her, but strikingly beautiful.

Maybe it was the toughness and distance of that face in person. Onstage she didn’t relate much to her audience. She stood straight, four-square with her guitar, said almost nothing but sang magnificently.

A native of Michigan, Roderick spent much of her musical life in Denver. Despite a small but intense following (and early coffee house gigs with Janis Joplin in Berkeley), she never made it big. She turned out a couple of albums in the '70s and '80s and died in 1992, in Montana, of a heart attack, a complication of diabetes.

Roderick’s initial album, on Columbia, didn’t go far. But Woman Blue on Vanguard, in 1965, is as close to a perfect album as anyone’s ever put together: just her, her guitar and minimal, understated accompaniment. It’s mostly traditional blues, plus a couple of contemporary songs that fit the mold. Each piece is excellent, the mix of light and heavy balances like a seesaw, and both the opener and closer – “Someone to Talk My Troubles to” and “Woman Blue” – are songs you’ll never forget. The CD release tacks on four more session cuts, worth listening to in their own right, but nailed on to the end they seem almost an insult to a beautifully constructed work of art.

I think of artists as being divided into top down vs. bottom up; exterior vs. interior. Roderick is very much the interior, bottom up artist, the kind I usually like best. Her singing – the emotion – grows from inside, it’s never imposed. Strange for the blues, she has a ringingly clear, almost clipped articulation, each word placed like a flower in a Japanese arrangement, an individual statement within a clearly envisioned whole. Hearing her is like passing the window of a house filled with the aroma of fine cooking.

She uses lilting vocal glides for emphasis, as most blues singers do, but usually within a word or even a syllable, seldom over a whole phrase. Sometimes it approaches a medieval melisma. But when she decides it’s time, she slams it. On “Mistreated,” she belts out “you mistreater” as a blast of accusation, then slides the same phrase in as a whisper of misery. Emotional bookends.

The album is laden, but not heavy. “Walking Slow Behind Me” and “Country Girl Blues” both have a mean comic edge. “Louisville Lou” hops like a robin. “Born in the Country” is closest to the stage-lady Roderick: sad but taking-no-shit tough. And she gives Ian and Sylvia’s “You Were on My Mind” a solidity well beyond what it deserves. She even has the guts, as a white woman, to sing “Black and Blue” and make it sound both elemental and new.

For reasons that puzzle me, Roderick makes both my wife and me think of Billie Holiday. She doesn’t sound like her, she isn’t doing the same thing, but there’s something….

I picked up an expansion of her 1984 cassette, When I’m Gone, a couple years ago. Billing her band as Judy Roderick & the Forbears (with Dr. John!), she sings Western swing-infused blues. It’s fun and high-spirited but somehow doesn’t hook me in like Woman Blue. I’m not that into Western swing, and her voice here feels more pushed, less poised – though her solos with Dr. John on piano (including the title tune) have a swinging-the-monkey-by-his-tail zip.

I don’t know her other two albums, but I once had a reel-to-reel tape of an old WXPN broadcast in Philadelphia. She sang Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee,” “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor” and a few other things that, so far as I know, she never recorded. A damned shame – they were superb. And a damneder shame that I don’t still have that tape.

by Derek Davis

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