Lady Singers
Posted by TFG on July 2nd, 2007
There aren’t many of them that I like — Amanda Shires is one, Libbi Bosworth is another, and there are some more, of course.
One I’ve loved forever is Marti Brom, to whom I was introduced thru the Cornell Hurd Band.* Marti mostly sings rockabilly, or that’s what her fans would have you think. iTunes classifies it as Country, but iTunes is stupid. Me, I just call it Texas Music.** Anyhoo, her voice is big, strong, deep - like both Amanda’s and Libbi’s, it grabbed me by my heart immediately.
To make a long story short, here are two CDs I got in the mail last week that I’ve been listening to pretty intensely:
Both are strongly recommended - TFG gives them 5 Shiners, and there’s no higher. You gotta love tough dames with big voices and a strong twang, though. Not for the easily intimidated. Whole Lotta Lonesome from Wise to You is two minutes and fifty-eight seconds of pure honky-tonk that will make you cry. Good stuff there.
* Cornell also introduced me to Justin Trevino, a man with simply a gorgeous voice. Also highly recommended for the “crying in your beer” Texas C&W. He surrounds himself with great musicians, too, so you get a bonus. Looks like he has a couple of new-ish albums I need to buy.
** Texas is the genre I had to build into iTunes. All of my Texas artists go in there. Ease of use, and all that.
July 3rd, 2007 at 1:45 am
Try Lacy J. Dalton.
Also, and this may sound heretical, but one of the better singers in the past 40 years was Cass Elliott of the Mammas and the Poppas. Quite a bit of it was the bubble-gum of the time, but her rendition of “Dream a Little Dream of Me” is startling; she grabs the song in a way that only a few singers can. Aretha Franklin, whom I’ve not that much use for, has the same ability to grab a song.
Sarah Vaughn, not a Texas sound, but you can hear the experience in her voice. And that’s what singing is about, isn’t it? That’s why when opera singers like Kiri Te Kanawa, with a good voice, sing Cole Porter, they do a very good technical job, but it’s just another instrument in the orchestra.
Contrast the good singers to Barbra Streisand, my pet peve, who has wonderful pipes but doesn’t know how to use them. She attacks the song, to wrestle it to the ground, and kneel on its throat, and then lick the corpse to death while queens in the audience go wild in appreciation AFTER having paid $350 for a ticket.