Sometimes a musician does something you cant explain or even ...
A native of Michigan, Roderick spent most of her musical life in Denver. Despite a small but intense following (and early coffee house gigs with Janis Joplin in San Francisco), she never made it big. She turned out a couple of lost albums in the 70s and died at age 50, in 1992, in Montana. Maybe the blues were somewhere deep inside.
Roderick's initial album on Columbia didn't go far (contract problems, I read somewhere). But Woman Blue on Vanguard, in 1965, is as close to a perfect album as anyone's ever put together?just her, her guitar and minimal, understated accompaniment. It's mostly traditional blues, plus a couple of contemporary songs that fit the mold. Each piece is excellent; the mix of light and heavy balances like a seesaw, and both the opener and closer?"Someone to Talk My Troubles To" and "Woman Blue"?are songs you'll never forget. The CD release tacks on four more session cuts?they're worth listening to, but just dumping them at the end is an insult.
I think of artists as being divided into the top-down vs. the bottom-up; exterior vs. interior. Roderick is very much the interior, bottom-up artist, which is the kind I usually like best. Her singing?the emotion?grows from inside; it's never imposed. Also strange for the blues, she has ringingly clear, almost clipped articulation, each word placed like a flower in a Japanese arrangement, an individual statement with the whole clearly in mind. Hearing her is like passing the window of a house filled with the fine aroma of simmering stew.
She uses vocal lilting glides for emphasis, as most blues singers do, but almost always within a word or even a syllable, seldom over a phrase. Sometimes it approaches a medieval melisma. But when she decides it's time to hit, she slams it. On "Mistreated," she belts out "you mistreater" as a blast of accusation, then in the next second slides the same phrase in as a whisper of misery. Emotional bookends.
The album is laden, but not heavy. "Walking Slow Behind You" and "Country Girl Blues" both have a mean comic edge. "Louisville Lou" hops like a robin. "Born in the Country," I think, is closest to the stage-lady Roderick: sad, but taking-no-shit tough. And she gives Ian and Sylvia's "You Were on My Mind" a solidity well beyond what it deserves. She even has the guts, as a white woman, to sing "Black and Blue" and make it sound like something both elemental and new.
For reasons that puzzle me, Roderick makes both my wife and me think of Billie Holiday. She doesn't sound like her, she isn't doing the same thing, but there's something?
Though I don't know her other albums, I once had a reel-to-reel tape taken of an old WXPN broadcast in Philadelphia. She sang "Deportee," "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor" and a few other things that, so far as I know, she never recorded. A damned shame?they were superb. And a damneder shame that I don't still have it.
What's Out There: You can get Woman Blue without much trouble, but everything else is legend. If someone, somewhere, has that WXPN tape, I'll pay.