 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
5/16/2009
Jerome Clark
Mary Flower is rooted in the soil of the rural/small-town South: country blues, ragtime, gospel and trad jazz, filtered through the folk revival of more recent history. You could think of her broadly as a female Leon Redbone, except that Redbone's singing is as defined by jazz as Sunny Crownover's. Flower's voice, which is not what one expects when one hears this kind of material (or some of it anyway), sounds like ... well, a voice, as opposed to a horn.
Not that there has to be anything wrong with that, of course. It's a perfectly respectable voice, perhaps most effectively employed in non-ragtime-blues songs such as the lovely "Portland Town," a Flower original not to be confused with Derroll Adams's anti-war ballad covered by Ramblin' Jack Elliott, the Kingston Trio and others in the 1960s.
What makes Flower and Bridges outstanding, though, is the exemplary acoustic-guitar picking. Influenced by the likes of Blind Blake and the Rev. Gary Davis on one end and John Fahey on the other, folk-blues circuit veteran Flower plays with passion and precision and creates power and beauty in just about anything those chords touch. Emmett Miller's "The Ghost of the St. Louis Blues," done with a small horn-and-piano group, manages to be both joyful and spooky. The solo original "Columbia River Rag" is the sort of perfectly realized creation that, wherever you are or whatever you're doing when it fills your ears, will carry you with it.