Maggie Brown, Maggie Brown (Riverwide Music, 2004)
A few weeks ago I received an e-mail from a publicist alerting me to the fact that he was sending me a new CD by an artist named Maggie Brown. The CD didn't arrive. He said he would send another one. I checked the mail every day, and finally, almost two months after the first mention of it. . . Maggie Brown arrived. Apparently it had insufficient postage and had travelled back and forth between the publicist's desk and my CD player. Well, finally it's here and I have hardly been able to stop listening to it!
The promo material quotes Ms. Brown: "I've been carrying these songs around in a paper sack for a long time. It's been years of traveling, writing lyrics on bar napkins, and all kinds of stuff. I never thought I'd have an opportunity to record an album like this."
What an album it is. Greasy bottleneck guitar. Maggie's husky vocals. Solid foundation from the rhythm section. And songs that seep into the memory the way the Mississippi River runs through the heart of the South.
A handful of guitarists play a variety of stringed instruments (Chris LeBlanc, Pat Buchanan, Jeff Ford, Wendell Tilley and Dan Dugmore) but Maggie's acoustic guitar provides a basis for each song. The guests provide stunning support, sizzling slide, tasty mandolin, a resonator here, and some electric there. Mmmmm. Mike Bugnardello plays bass, Greg Morrow supplies drums, Andy Bourgeois adds keyboards, Tim Lauer an accordion and pump organ and Jonathan Yudkin adds strings to the ballad "Nowhere to Go But Crazy." Subtle and classy. The production, by Jeff Ford, is warm and clean.
Maybe you'll sense a Bonnie Raitt influence once or twice, or a bit of Bonnie Bramlett, but this is really Maggie Brown's album. Her voice is a revelation, soaring, whispering, trained in southern churches, Texas honky-tonks, roadside bars and picnics. This is bluesy music, funky as all get out, informed by years of struggle, and shaped by the hard life Maggie shared with her disfunctional mother. Visit her Web site to read her biography.
Ms. Brown claims Jerry Lee Lewis as a hero. "I got goose bumps seein' him perform," she says. There's no sense of Lewis's '50s rock in this collection, but Maggie lays it on the line and rocks out in her own way. Listening to this CD you'll find yourself with some chicken skin, too. Rockers like "I Like It," and the bluesy "Forty Dollars" sit side by side with the country weeper "Shame" and the sensitive ballad "Jacob's Eyes." Maggie Brown has it all.
She's been carrying these songs around in a paper sack? Well it's a good thing for us all that she opened the bag and let them breathe. Don't miss Maggie Brown.
