Keep Steppin’

Published in The Rocky Road of Women in Blues from National Women in Blues.

My advice to young women that want to sing blues is this: don’t ever let anyone ever tell you what you can and can’t do. Don’t ever let people stop you from your dream. Just roll. And get as many skills as you can.

How hard is it for a woman to make it in blues. When they are not the child of a famous person and have no money, no self-esteem, and no one to guide them, no training, just guts. A woman in a man’s world. How hard? VERY. Maybe even damned impossible. My career in blues has been anything but a straight line up. Instead it has been a long climb up big rocky cliffs, a slow crawl down, and looooong winding road back up the big blues hill. But I always keep steppin’.

A woman in blues has a special meaning to me because we are the dog that gets kicked and sometimes we don't even know it.

I started singing blues in 1983 at the age of 23 years old.  I am 61 years old now and on my 7th album. Blues was like a thunderclap for me when I first heard it-- to sing these marvelous songs about depravity and trickery gave me a reason to live. And I was filled with rage. 

I grew up thinking I was nothing. I went to 14 schools as my mentally ill mother dragged me and my two sisters literally around the world. I could never catch my breath. My mother finally landed us in Dallas, Texas in the early 1970’s. But even then, we moved back and forth, back and forth.

I was terrified of life. That was my normal state.

I learned not to trust people. I learned that people were horrible.

I never had a mother that said, “You can do whatever you want—you have talent—sing!”.  Instead, she said “Get a day job and hold your breath until the day you die.”

I hated day jobs. Unless it was for a cause. Blues is a cause for me and always has been because it is the medium by which I can cut underneath my fear and then soar.

I was told by a gifted bass player that I had an enormous crush on at the age of 19, that I could never sing blues. By the age of 24 he heard me sing in a dive club in Dallas, Texas and promptly apologized to me. He was shocked. Where did this other voice come from? This scorched earth holler. When he was used to hearing me sing soft, high folk songs or sultry swing tunes.

It didn’t matter why he said what he said or what anyone else said for that matter. I knew I was for blues and blues was for me.

My advice to young women that want to sing blues is this: don’t ever let anyone ever tell you what you can and can’t do. Don’t ever let people stop you from your dream. Just roll. And get as many skills as you can.

When I was 23, I showed up at a popular night club to try out for my first blues band job. The song I sang was “Stormy Monday” and my hands were shaking so much I could not hold the glass of wine without spilling it. But I got up there and ripped through that song like it was my last. And the band hired me on the spot. The job was to sing every Saturday night at The NFL Club in Oaklawn, a middle-class neighborhood in Dallas. Every Saturday night I’d front a 5-piece band and we would play blues & soul standards to a packed house of Texas drunks.

And I went from there.

This was in the 1983. The band that backed me on those Saturday nights loved Anson Funderburg and his band The Rockets. We would go down on a Monday night to Poor David’s Pub and hang out, and sometimes I’d get up and sing a slow blues.

Anson and I got to know one another, and I took a professional liking to his singer, Daryl Nulisch. And they encouraged me.

But I watched those guys—all of them—all the blues musicians—encourage and foster other men much more than any woman.  I watched them even encourage men that were just average talents. I still see that. And it really pisses me off.

I must have been pretty scary back then with my sequins and my high heels, my “don’t carish” attitude, my see-through blouses. Those men just could not make me out. I was too smart to be a groupie. And I was too beautiful not to be.

By the age of about 25 I was starting to get into hard drugs—heroin and speed. It was all around. I was scared and broke and had a very hard time hanging onto jobs. But I practiced about 3 hours a day 6 days a week. I worked very hard at my singing which came natural to me.

I grew up hearing a piano since the age of 3. No matter how many times we moved and no matter how poor we were, my mother always made sure that we had a piano in the house. My sister was a great classical pianist and she played for hours.

I guess it taught me chords. I can hear all the notes in a chord without thinking. To this day I can hear most harmonies without thinking. I can hear what should be in a song, and more importantly, I can hear what should not be in a song.

This gave me an edge on what I call “phrasing” -- that strange gift of being able to carve out a melody simply because I can hear all the notes in any given chord—all the time. You will not lose me.

Early on I listened to the great gospel singers like Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin. Those are what I call “lick singers.” They effortless roll through lots of notes in a chord and wind it into a great melody.

I was lucky enough to see, live, some great developing talents in Dallas as a young woman.  I saw at Nick’s Uptown Stevie Ray Vaughan and even sang on stage with him and Anson.  I went backstage with Vaughan and hung out as they passed the cocaine around. Everyone called Stevie Ray “Jimmy’s little brother”. And everyone knew he would be a huge star.

In Dallas I also saw Kim Wilson and The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Lou Ann Barton, Marcia Ball, Larry “Medlo” Williams of the Cobras, Boz Scaggs, Johnny Copeland, Doyle Bramhall, Angela Strehli, Koko Taylor, Bobby Blue Bland, and the great Albert Collins.

But it was completely and utterly up to me to make something out of myself and I did not know how. I met people, I did play gigs, I even managed to book a few for myself.  I made a studio demo of six songs with Anson’s band and it was really quite good!

Then the work dried up. The clubs started to pay less and less. The only blues bands that managed to work were able to tour-- like Anson’s.

I became very depressed. So I took a nose dive into drugs and abandoned the blues for some hard life lessons.

I started hanging out and living with heroin addicts. I ended up committing crimes and running from cops.

My beginnings were a long shot. An impossible shot. I played no instrument. No one sat me down and trained me on how to be a band leader. No one ever said, “do it this way.”

So I had to learn the hard way.

When I met a new male musician and I told him I sang blues, they practically laughed at me. My dream was met with insults, private jeers, and taunts. The men looked at my ass more than they did my desire to become something—someone—a singer.

My best compliment back in those days came from Robert Ealey of The Bluebird Club, who heard me sing “Served me Right to Suffer” and took me outside to tell me that I was a “son of a bitch.”

When I look back, I now realize that I really was alone in what was and really still is a man’s world. You should have heard the way the male musicians talked about Lou Ann Barton when Jerry Wexler of Atlantic records gave her that big chance with her album “Old Enough:  They hated her for getting that shot.  They hated her for the fact that she could stand up there in her little short skirt and mesmerize an audience. They hated her for having a huge personality. They hated her for being free like a man.

I loved Lou Ann. I thought she was great! Tough and real and not at all phony.

Well, my time was running out in Dallas, Texas by 1986. So, I ran like my mother taught me. All the way to San Francisco.

I somehow wandered into The Saloon in North Beach one night, and met, shall we say, a more liberal set of musicians—men like Johnny Nitro who just loved my singing and did all he could to help me get started in San Francisco with a band.  I played music with Mark Hummel, Paris Slim, Dave Workman, and so many others. In 1987 I also was hired as John Lee Hooker’s send-off singer and did some tours with him. I did a damned good job, but I had, by then, a serious drug problem and it took me all the way down to the bottom.

Crawling up is ok. Crawling up from the bottom is just where you should be in blues.  And I remind myself of that every time I get to sing. I have been straight for years, but I have seen some things. MMM MM.

And I have also, by now, toured most of the United States.  My Band, The Lucky Losers, won in 2019 “Best Independent Blue Soul Band”, which I am most proud of. My song “The River” (from the album “Blind Spot”) made it as a finalist in the 2018 International Songwriters competition (blues category) –becoming a finalist against 19k entrants is not a small potato.

Over the years I have written and published 30 songs and collaborated with some amazing blues talent like Laura Chavez, Kid Andersen, Tommy Castro, Steve Freund, Chris Burns, and more. And the music critics have been wonderful to me—from the very beginning.

But most of my career has not been one of fame or fortune. I have stayed the course because I love the music. I always tell musicians that I don’t play music for money, and that if I wanted to make money, I would have been a bank robber.

I have never been a singer who caters to what is popular. I figure since I am not making much money that I have earned the right to please myself. And I don’t stray from that. I sing songs I write for me and my partner, Phil Berkowitz, or I dig up songs I can relate to.

And I work. I work regularly. And that is all I have ever wanted to do. Work. I have had a residency gig at The Saloon in San Francisco since 1987. Now that is an accomplishment—longevity.

Looking back if I met myself at the age of 23, I would have seen a bright, beautiful, shining star with a 3-octave range and an ear from God.  If I had been treated as an equal, I could have been a star. Instead I had to crawl into the gutter and back up. Now isn’t that a crying shame?  I endured beatings, 2 rapes, a kidnapping, and finally jail.  I had to pull myself out of a ditch.

The thing is you have to believe. There are people out there that will crush you if you let them. There are people out there that will tell you “You’re nothin’” and shine you on.

But you must believe in yourself. BELIEVE, ladies, in the magic of your great, gorgeous, sexy self, which comes in all sizes, colors, ages, and shapes! Believe that what comes from your heart is a serious matter. A worthy matter. Something worth saving. Something worth mentoring.

Believe.

And know that without heart, no matter how powerful or perfect your voice is, guess what, no one cares. It IS your heart that defines you in blues. And that is all. Protect your heart. And demand something from this world.

Self-made woman, you bet. I like the sound of that!. Rocky road? You better believe it. But I always keep steppin’.

Cathy Lemons

4/19/2020, (c) All Rights Reserved