This One Will Always Be A Favorite, (10/12/05)
(By: Art Tipaldi, contributing editor at BluesWax)

Two weeks after the wake of Hurricane Katrina's destruction of the city of New Orleans, I received Mary Flower's new CD, Bywater Dance, a musical tribute to that city. The studio she worked in was located in the Bywater district of the city and was a place the city's musicians, fresh from last spring's JazzFest, would stop by. With sad irony, Flower traveled to the Crescent City last spring and worked with many musicians who today are displaced and probably have lost everything. Henry Butler, Jon Cleary, and Dr. Michael White are only a few of the dozens who inspired Flower in her seven days of recording.

Spencer Bohren, though not on the record, is an old friend of Flower's and I'm sure lent his own ear to the project. Like adding file powder to gumbo or tasso to stews, those artistic spirits added a musical seasoning found only in this city. These 14 songs offer an introspective look at the diversity of American Roots music. There is always an elegant touch to Flower's guitar work, and her strength of voice and strength of playing are as welcome as first buds on trees.

The traditional "Crow Jane" is augmented by Amasa Miller's accordion and Kerry Lewis' strapping string bass. On "New Orleans Hop Scop Blues," Flower shows listeners the music of this city, circa 1920. Kirk Joseph, who is Anders Osborne's sousaphone player, lays down the breathy bass while Cleary, of Bonnie Raitt's band, cascades piano tones ala Fess and Fats. I'll never get tired of these Blues either, Mary.

Geechie Wiley is a relatively unknown woman Blues singer from the Delta. In 1920s she might have been the South's greatest woman Blues singer, years before Memphis Minnie. Flower's treatment of Wiley's 1930 masterpiece "Last Kind Word Blues" still resonates today. Flower's exquisite force and hauntingly poignant vocals in this archaic eight bar Blues offers a reminder of dark Delta days. Cleary's dark and errie B-3 gives this cut an otherworldly aura.

Flower is an accomplished guitar picker. With grace and texture, Flower delivers an acoustic magic on rags like "Terminal Rag" and "Hudson River Rag." White's clarinet on the former centers this in the past, while Woody Mann's second guitar on the latter flows with Flower's guitar like an inner tube coasting on the finest summer day. Remember that New Orleans is first and foremost a piano Blues city and that's what Henry Butler and Flower play on "Nobody's Fault But Mine." Then, Butler's waterfall piano and Flower's lap slide guitar recreate classic piano-guitar duets of the twenties. When Flower ends the day with "Good News Waltz," it's Miller's accordion that waltzes with Flower's nimble guitar picking. Sadly, this will always be a powerful reminder of the eclectic musical forces that always operated on the tiny streets in the back of the French quarter. While so many of today's records fade quickly, this is one CD that will always remain a favorite. 

Blues Bytes, Oct, '05

For most people down here in Mississippi & Louisiana, the past few weeks have been pretty tumultuous (especially on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where a ninety-mile-by-one-mile stretch was basically wiped away by Katrina), but most of the attention has been focused on the plight of New Orleans.

Watching the scenes of destruction on TV (once the trees were cleared and power was restored) showed as sad a scene as could be imagined and a lot of people wonder if the Crescent City would ever be the same. A couple of weeks after Katrina, Yellow Dog Records released Bywater Dance by guitar virtuoso Mary Flower.

Long regarded as an accomplished fingerstyle guitarist who also excels at lap slide, Flower recorded the disc in New Orleans, in the Bywater area downriver from the French Quarter, in May of 2005 with a host of the city's finest musicians providing assistance and it serves as a positive reminder of how things were in New Orleans not that long ago.

The music is a mixture of old-timey New Orleans Jazz, swing, and R&B, combined with Flower's own folk-blues style, and sounds modern and traditional at the same time. The guest musicians include such Crescent City stalwarts as pianist Henry Butler, keyboardist Jon Cleary, clarinetist Dr. Michael White, and Kirk Joseph on sousaphone.

Despite all the guests, Bywater Dance is Mary Flower's baby. Her guitar work is breathtaking and her vocals are warm and inviting. Flower wrote five of the fourteen tracks here and all of them are of the instrumental variety ("Raise The Devil," "La Grippe," "Terminal Rag," with White lending a helping hand, "Hudson River Rag," and the pensive closer "Good News Waltz"). The remaining songs are an interesting and sometimes unfamiliar set of covers, noteworthy among them a poignant take on Geechie Wiley's "Last Kind Word Blues," a spirited version of Leroy Carr's "Papa's On The Housetop," and the Red Stick Ramblers' "Main Street Blues" is a definite high point. Flower's cover of "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?" is particularly moving, in light of the current state of affairs in New Orleans.

While Bywater Dance serves as a reminder of the vibrancy and versatility of New Orleans' musical tradition, it also serves as a promise that this tradition will be continued with the eventual rebuilding and restoration of the city.

Yellow Dog Records will be donating a portion of the profits from sales of the album to charities working to support New Orleans musicians and preserve and rebuild the city's musical heritage.

"The Blues in Bloom"
(By: John Schroeter, Fingerstyle Guitar Magazine)

"It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive characteristic." So says 1930's Black Manhattan. And so might agree Denver's Mary Flower. A hopeless mistress of the blues, she plies her trade wherever she might find kindred spirits -- fellow travelers on a life journey called the blues. But Flower doesn't content herself with rehashing the well-trod southern soil-borne wailings of a by-gone era. But neither does she forsake its rich tradition. Flower is one of those rare artists who manages to create a tincture of the aged authentic with the freshly original.

Back in full bloom with a new recording, Flower's Honey from the Comb [Time & Strike], features self-penned pieces that would make believers of even the most jaded of blues aficionados. This delightful recording showcases Flower's restrained, but impeccable fingerstyle technique, smoky slide playing, and down-to-earth vocals that are stirring without seeming affected. But more impressive is the compositional weight she brings to the table. A fixture on the Denver music scene for more than a quarter of a century, Flower now spends six months a year on the road, delivering her simultaneously smooth and gritty stylings to listeners across the nation. And after many years in the trenches, her efforts are finally paying off. This year alone, Flower has not only signed with Time & Strike Records, but performed live on a broadcast of the National Public Radio staple Prairie Home Companion, dazzled the competition at this summer's National Fingerpicking Championships in Winfield, Kansas, and filled a slew of slots at some of the country's more revered blues festivals.

In the process, she's played alongside an A-list of steel-string pros, including John Hammond, Junior Brown, Taj Mahal, Geoff Muldaur, and many others. "My career really has skyrocketed in terms of doing gigs that I had only dreamed of doing in the past," Flower says. "It's been great. And coming home is what I call the universal post-touring syndrome -- that hard adjustment from traveling and having incredible things happen to you, to being back home, taking out the garbage." Flower is also well known in the Rocky Mountain region for her role in the founding of the Mother Folkers, the ever-popular revolving-door band of mile-high women who've entertained locals for many years.

Since leaving the venerable group in 1993 to pursue her current solo career, she's been rolling along a musical path paved by such legends as Skip James, the Reverend Gary Davis, and Blind Blake. "This is not Delta blues," Flower notes of her music. "It's Piedmont blues. Piedmont is more upbeat, almost with a ragtime influence, with a lot of finger-picked melodies and syncopation with the thumb."

Flower contrasts that with delta blues, which is slower, and, as she explains, "somebody dies or somebody's woman left them. Being a female, I can't sing a lot of those lyrics, because the themes don't make any sense for me to sing. There were women doing this, like Memphis Minnie, but it was a male-dominated form of music. It would be really hard for me to don the costume of a seventy-year-old black man. I can't pull that one off, and I don't want to try. So this is where my writing comes in. I use this base and create my own contemporary themes."

Flower has no delusions about how far her music will take her she's actually content with the vistas it's already offered.

"This music," she says, "has never been mainstream, and it never will be. It's the music of the underdog. I mean, why would anyone want to play this kind of music? It's hard for me to define why I have this passion for it. I guess it's the challenge of the syncopation, and the unusual chord shapes, but it's also the people who make the music. There's something about the people who have decided to carry on this tradition that I can relate to ... people who sing this music that used to be sung by oppressed people."

To help keep these traditions alive, Flower spends a large amount of her playing time in front of students; she conducts instructional seminars while touring (including her Women in the Blues workshops), and serves as a faculty member of Denver's Swallow Hill Music Association. If that weren't enough, she can be found at seven major summer guitar camps across the country.

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