Blogging about this highlight of Maria Muldaur’s career ’til the evening ends…
Any Old Time
Maria Muldaur’s solo album was a long time coming. Her career had initially started in the ’60s as Maria D’Amato when she performed with not one – but two Jug Bands. The Even Dozen Jug Band happened to include John Sebastian, who would later reference those early days in The Lovin’ Spoonful’s Jug Band Music in 1966. She then sang and played the fiddle in Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band, which is where she met her husband Geoff Muldaur (although the two divorced in 1972, Maria kept the married name).
Maria’s debut is a series of shrewdly chosen covers, the first of these being a version of Any Old Time, which was written by the ‘Father Of Country Music’ and yodelling supremo, Jimmie Rodgers. Maria’s wide-ranged tone suits this well, as one minute she’s huskily crooning in a lower register, and then the next in a falsetto tone that successfully emulates Rodgers’ original high pitch.
Maria’s debut includes a fair whack of acclaimed session peeps, and on Any Old Time alone, Jackson Browne favourite, David Lindley and slide guitar legend Ry Cooder provide sterling guitar work.
Midnight At The Oasis
If I’d heard a track I liked on the radio, I would then buy the parent album in the hope of the rest of it being as good. Midnight At The Oasis was one of those which popped up on the radio regularly when I was a kid, so coming across Maria’s eponymous LP in a record fair box in 2001, I decided to give it a whirl.
Some modern day listeners may misconstrue this as a ditty about seeing the clock striking twelve with the Gallagher Cavemen – which sounds more like a terrifying threat. But as Maria explained in a 2007 Living Legends interview, Midnight At The Oasis struck more of a chord with listeners than she could have possibly imagined. “When people come up to me every, uh, every night after a performance when I’m signing autographs or signing CDs, I hear so many stories about that song people lost their virginity to it,” she explained. “I have pictures of babies that were conceived to it… I have people who got married to it… had their first romance it… it just was a song that captured everybody’s attention and and Imagination.”
Not bad for what was only an afterthought for Maria’s album – the producers, Lenny Waronker and Joe Boyd wanted one more track for the list, and so David Nichtern’s sultry jazz shuffle was it. Still irresistible – Maria’s purring vocals mesh perfectly with the tip-top instrumentation, with Amos Garrett’s evocative guitar solo being the cherry on the cake.
And as a totally useless factoid of the day, backing warbler Greg Prestopino co-wrote Matthew Wilder’s Break My Stride!
My Tennessee Mountain Home
Maria’s first album draws heavily from a wide pool of influences – jazz, blues, pop… but a notable genre is country. We’d had an opener from the Father of Country, so to balance the scales, here comes one from the Mother.
Dolly Parton originally wrote My Tennessee Mountain Home months previous for the album of the same name. While it wasn’t a big a hit as say, Jolene or Nine To Five, it did become a Parton favourite. Maria covers this faithfully and with style.
Sadly, as I’m writing this, it’s just been announced that Dolly has gone up to that great porch swing in the sky. That extra ray of sunshine in an increasingly gloomy world has just dimmed.
I Never Did Sing You A Love Song
Also country-tinged, this plaintive David Nichtern-penned ballad provides a great opportunity for Maria to show just what she can do with her extraordinary vocal range.
Muldaur resists the temptation to holler at the top of her voice, instead reacting sensitively to the material she’s given. Whereas this track could have been a melodramatic laughing stock, instead, it’s a goosebump-giver, thanks to Maria’s superb vocal turn.
The Work Song
I’ll confess that I’m not that au fait with folk favourites, Kate and Anna McGarrigle. The Work Song is the only Kate McGarrigle-written track I’ve heard, so I’ll have to check out some of their other stuff. Never let it be said that this blog ain’t an education.
The Work Song is one of the most ambitious on the album – a heady mix of country, folk and gospel. It’s a strangely moving fusion that on the one hand, looks at the origins of black music, while on the other, pulls no punches with the effects of plantation work. The lyrics in the chorus speak for themselves: “Backs broke bending, digging holes to plant the seeds/The owners ate the cane and the workers ate the weeds/Putting wood in the stove and water in the cup/You worked so hard that you died standing up.”
If one or two of the lyrics may horrify spluttering Millennials and Gen-Z-ers with less PC terms, on the whole, this is a success. Muldaur knows how to pitch the tone – playful and light-hearted in the verses, and then with great empathy in the rousing but downbeat choruses. A first-class interpretation.
Don’t You Feel My Leg (Don’t You Get Me High)
Said complainers will also find much to scream about in this cover of Blue Lu Barker’s racy standard from 1938. Written with husband Danny and legendary blues producer J Mayo Williams, Don’t You Feel My Leg isn’t backwards in coming forwards with its suggestive lyrics – although compared to some of the stuff floating around in the charts today, it’s positively coy.
Maria has great fun vamping it up, and the brassy arrangements add a kitsch kind of grandeur. However, Muldaur quickly stopped performing the track live in fear of being typecast as a “sexy singer”. In a 1974 interview with Rolling Stone, she explained that after seeing a Marilyn Monroe TV special (and with Shelley Winters suggesting that Monroe could have gone a lot further if she’d ditched the sex symbol tag), she decided to pull the track from her setlist: “You can’t rely on physical image alone,” she said. “That’s sure as shit gonna fade.”
Walkin’ One And Only
A real highlight of the album, Walkin’ One And Only travels further back in time to those feelgood 1920s jazz sounds. The Dan Hicks number perfectly sums up those old style jazz clubs, and the session playing captures this ambience to a tee. Ed Shaughnessy’s fast and loose drum shuffle… David Nichtern’s distinctive acoustic guitar twang… Best of all, what sounds like an authentic double bass from Ray Brown.
Maria gives one of her finest vocal turns on the album, and I love the multi-tracked harmonies in the last salvo. It’s reminiscent of those old wartime girl groups, as those overdubbed Marias evoke that period to perfection.
Long Hard Climb
Taking the pace down a little, Long Hard Climb doesn’t however, squander the quality. This reflective ballad is sung beautifully by Maria, and the downbeat musicianship is in perfect sympathy. David Nichtern continues to be a breakout star player on the album, pitching in with a melancholic slide guitar that drives the tune forward.
What’s interesting is that a fair chunk of tracks covered on the album were relatively new in 1973. Long Hard Climb had originally featured on singer-songwriter Ron Davies’ UFO album from earlier that year, and would also later be covered swiftly after by Helen Reddy. Whether it was Muldaur or producers Waronker and Boyd who decided on the final tracklist, they clearly had their fingers on the pulse of some of the undiscovered track gems doing the rounds.
Three Dollar Bill
Now putting on her best soul singer hat, Maria acquits herself very well on this Dr John shuffle (although the Doc’s credited under his own name, Mac Rebennack on the album). As well as writing the thing, he also arranges and hammers the keys. It’s a credible stab at ’60s soul, with Maria more than holding her own against the gospelly backup from the likes of Gloria Jones and Bettye LaVette.
The perfectly pitched mix of Maria’s album was what US and Canadian record buyers were after, racing to Number Three in both countries. While the LP performed moderately well in Australia (Number 30), it mysteriously sank without trace in the UK. In fact, the only brush that Maria had with the UK charts was with an average Number 21 placing for Midnight At The Oasis in Summer 1974.
Vaudeville Man
Scroll back to my word salad waffle about Linda Ronstadt’s Hasten Down The Wind and you’ll come across the band, Bryndle.
I only mention Bryndle again, because apart from Ronstadt-writer-of-choice Karla Bonoff and Ronstadt collaborators, Andrew Gold and Kenny Edwards, the line-up included Wendy Waldman, the writer of both Vaudeville Man and the following farewell. Waldman had also sung backup on Hasten Down The Wind, proving that pretty much every album I’ve blogged about has some weird Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon link entwining them.
Waldman’s background wasn’t in the vaudeville scene – her dad, Fred Steiner, was a renowned composer who wrote the themes for Perry Mason and The Rocky And Bullwinkle Show – but she makes a convincing case pretending otherwise. This fun little ditty also includes her old Bryndle mucker Andrew Gold on acoustic guitar, Dr John tinkling the ivories and also Manfred Mann member and Revolver cover designer Klaus Voormann on bass.
Revolver. You see? Six Degrees Of Blog Bacon again!
Mad Mad Me
Maria’s excellent debut ends on a wilfully subdued note with Mad Mad Me. Stripping the support back to a bare minimum with Greg Prestopino’s maudlin piano and Larry Packer’s morose violin and viola combi, Maria relies on her voice to sell the emotion of the piece. Weaving between a fragile murmur and a full-throttle bawl, Muldaur makes this Wendy Waldman ballad her very own.
A fine closer, Maria Muldaur’s debut remains the must-have of her collection. She’d reappear in the album charts with the likes of Waitress In A Donut Shop and Sweet Harmony, but with diminishing sales returns. This 1973 classic, however, is 45 minutes of Maria at the top of her game.
(Cover design credited to Michael Wood and Ginny Winn)
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