In a city littered with blues-based performers, there may be none as sublime as Di Anne Price. A prime attraction on the city's club scene, Price is a genius singer, knocking out jazz and blues standards with the soul power of a modern-day Bessie Smith and the light touch of Ella Fitzgerald, yet she never puts her sublime voice ahead of putting across a song. In a city full of great singers, no one digs deeper into the guts of a song. In a city overflowing with roots-flavored acts, Price is simply sui generis. With her own bone-chilling barrelhouse piano and the ultrasympathetic backup of her Boyfriends (three jazz-schooled cats who are, on their own terms, among the city's most accomplished musicians) laying the foundation, Di Anne Price is both the city's safest musical bet and the one most likely to deliver greatness.
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THE SONG IS HERS
She's been called the best-kept secret in Memphis, but singer Di Anne Price just thinks of herself as a storyteller.
By John Floyd
The music lilts gently down the dimly lit staircase of Cielo, the eclectically appointed restaurant where Memphis chanteuse Di Anne Price has a Friday-night residency. The tune is familiar, "Our Love Is Here to Stay," a popular standard that has been essayed by revered vocalists from Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday to Dinah Washington, but at the top of the Cielo stairs, behind a baby grand piano, Price is doing something different with the evergreen hit. The lyric, as delivered in her husky, smoky voice, almost hurts, belying the romantic kiss of the words, and her accompanying piano work rejects the buoyant bounce the song usually receives for something more contemplative. Her left hand carries the rhythm, while the right picks at the melody, adding light dollops of improvised notes, each tone from the keyboard acting as a complement to Price's warm, fluid vocal.
It's a miraculous soundtrack, and if it doesn't fall exactly on deaf ears, the diners in the room adjacent to Price and her piano aren't interested in toning down their collective chatter. Nor does it seem to make a lot of difference to the three or four people in the nearby bar area.
Some people are listening, though. A couple make the trek up the Cielo stairs, obviously looking for their evening's dining party, and after the obligatory head-poke into the three upstairs rooms, they stand in front of Di Anne and her piano as she summons a kind of melancholy blues from "The Man I Love." The man extends an arm around the object of his affection. Arms embraced, they listen until the song drifts to a close, then take the stairs back down to the main dining area. A friend of the singer arrives, orders a martini from the bar, then takes a place next to Di Anne at the keyboard. He beams approval as she eases into a playful version of "Besame Mucho," and soon a few other fans arrive, taking a seat near the singer on a second set of stairs. Everyone is smiling, and the whole scene has the feel of an after-hours get-together among good friends.
And for Price, that's exactly how she feels about her small but intensely loyal audience.
"I have a lot of people out there who are kind to me and truly love me," she says a few days after her Friday gig at Cielo. "My kids, I call them. They support me, and I love that. They come just for the music, and they listen. That's what I want. I want to play for sincere, sensitive listeners. I want them to get into the music. I'm playing for you, and it's intimate between you and me."
She's been called the best-kept secret in Memphis, yet Di Anne Price has spent nearly 30 years on the city's live-music circuit, playing everywhere from hotels and restaurants to outdoor festivals and nightclubs. A native Memphian in her early 50s, Price is a product of the city's musical melting pot. Like Jerry Lee Lewis, she has a dazzling command of American popular song: bawdy hokum blues and ferocious big-band swing; honky-tonk weepers and red-hot R&B shimmering torch songs and vaudeville hand-me-downs. At any of her myriad live gigs as well as on her three self-released albums, Price's versatility is boundless yet never showy: Whether purring through Nina Simone's lascivious "Sugar In My Bowl" or contemplating the pain in the Ray Charles classic "You Don't Know Me," Price makes the songs her own.
"I think of myself as a storyteller," Price says on a dark December afternoon at the Blue Monkey, nursing a tequila on the rocks, dressed casually in olive and khaki, dragging occasionally on a cigarette. "I don't think of myself as a singer with a great voice or a big voice, because I don't. My speaking voice is my singing voice. But I like to tell stories. I need to reach you the listener with what I'm saying. It has to do with articulating the feel and the soul of the piece. To me, jazz and blues are all about life experiences, and I'm all about telling those stories."
She learned many of those stories from her family, a musically inclined clan who instilled in Di Anne an appreciation for what she calls simply "good music."
"My mother and father were really into music, all kinds. My mother writes lyrics, and my dad played guitar and sang. It was a part of our growing up. A family thing. My sisters played. It was just the thing to do, and I always knew what I wanted to be. Some kids want to be doctors or nurses or lawyers. I always wanted to be an entertainer, because music has always made me feel so good. Not that it's always treated me so good, but I have to do it. I always wake up with a song in my heart, and I go to bed with a song in my heart. It's always been there, and it's always got to be there."
At age six, she made her public debut playing piano in church at Avery Chapel. Three years later, she and her sister Denise were at a now-defunct Midtown recording studio. Two singles were released, each funded by the Price family, and though neither exactly shook the world, Di Anne soon was spending her junior high-school days in neighborhood groups while playing Sundays in church. But she quickly realized she wasn't cut out for a career as a cover-band musician, playing versions of the radio hits of the day.
"Those bands would play everything on the radio," she grumbles. "And I hated it. I always thought, `If you've heard it on the radio 50 million times, why do you want to hear me do it?' I couldn't get into the music just because it was on our song list. I've got to be in the music.
I don't just do songs because they're popular on the radio. I've never done that, and I won't do that."
Instead, Price gravitated early on toward the more idiosyncratic blues and jazz singers, in particular Billie Holiday, Memphis Minnie, and Sippie Wallace, who tended to perform in small-group settings (or, in Minnie's case, to the accompaniment of her own guitar). "Those girls, they didn't have the 17-piece band," she says, a wide smile warming her face. "They'd just have a few instruments behind them, and it was just wonderful to me. It went all over my body, made my back tingle. I grew up with that sound. That's my element. Even as a child, that's what I wanted."
That time would come, but first Di Anne honed her skills in a few local bands, and settled into residencies as a solo artist at several Memphis hotels, including long stints at the Marriott, the French Quarter Suites, and the Hyatt-Regency. She sat in with Herman Green's revered jazz band during the 1983 phase-one grand opening of the refurbished Beale Street, singing a song written by her mother, Kathryn, "Home of the Blues," a remembrance of the famed Southern epicenter of African-American culture and commerce. "That was such a rush," she recalls, "playing before 15,000 people. It's a high that is unsurpassed."
She admits, though, that she's far more comfortable in a more intimate setting, a reflection of Price's modesty and shyness, not to mention her own musical savvy: She really is at her best in a small venue, with the lights down low and an appreciative audience lending the attention her art deserves. "I'd like to bring more people into the fold," she admits with a bit of reluctance. "But I want it to be genuine. I really want them to appreciate what I'm doing. That may be a fantasy world, but that's my ideal."
She's too self-effacing to admit it, but she's gradually been turning that fantasy into a reality, amassing a core audience that happily follows her from gig to gig, from restaurant to nightclub to fund-raiser. And for that, a lot of thanks should go to Di Anne's band, named, suitably, Her Boyfriends. She beams when talk turns to the trio which has backed her for the better part of the last 10 years: saxophone master Jim Spake, bassist Tim Goodwin, and drummer Tom Lonardo, collectively one of the most formidable ensembles in town, and a group sympathetic to Price's unique musical vision.
"I've got the best," she says of Her Boyfriends, who drifted into Di Anne's world one by one, beginning with Lonardo, who first played with her during a lunchtime concert series at the University of Memphis in the 1980s. "I'm very comfortable with them. I've played with at least ten bands over the years, but this is a perfect mix for me. They are the men in my life, and they give me everything I need. Playing with them, it's like making love. They don't leave me hanging, and I don't have to tell them to give me more. They can feel what I need. It's all about the groove. It's not about showboating, itÃs about the music. About making it right."
That they do. Achieving a just-right balance between a loose, joyful noise and a focused pursuit of rhythms and riffs, Price and Her Boyfriends follow one another intuitively, with Lonardo holding down the bottom as Goodwin adds supple grace notes to the melody. Spake's playing is a subtly forceful presentation of the history of jazz saxophone, sometimes wild and cacophonous, other times lush and smoochy, exploring the possibilities within the melody without losing it. PriceÃs piano work is equally expansive and impressive, with roots in the barrelhouse blues of Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons as well as the ornate bebop flourishes of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. Like Spake, she'll establish the song's melody, then play with it a bit, finding something new in songs as entrenched in the public mind set as "The Days of Wine and Roses," "All of Me," and "The Lady Is a Tramp."
It's perhaps the quintessence of spontaneous, improvised ensemble playing, and fittingly, the band never use a set list. Of course, you can always expect a handful of songs from Price's recorded oeuvre, Wild Women, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and To Hell With Love, but the songs are played as they come to Di Anne. And the playlist has to feel right. "This is no rehearsed floor show," she says. "I'm not an out-front kind of person, and I can't wow the crowd with my rhetoric. That,s just not me. I don,t spend a lot of time in the mirror getting my face together, and I don,t have a spiel prepared for the crowd. Every performance for me is like a series of vignettes, it,s about telling the story. The band waits for me to start it, and wherever I am, whatever is going on in my life , that's where the story goes. And by the time I get to my last song, I want that story told completely."
It's getting late at Cielo, and Di Anne Price is still at the piano, a group of six or seven fans sitting nearby, on the piano stool beside her, perched on the staircase to her left. Because itÃs early December, some Christmas music is in order, and Di Anne offers a warm, yearning "I'll Be Home for Christmas" which melts like a snowbank into a tearful "White Christmas." These are not easy songs for her, as her father, George Price, passed away some time back during the holiday season. The melancholy seeps into every number, particularly "What a Wonderful World," which becomes an almost funereal prayer, betraying the lyric's toast to world harmony. During "Silver Bells," Price's genius as an interpreter and inheritor of classic American music reaches a resounding, if gut-wrenching, climax. She takes it slow, nearly whispering the words, singing to herself. "Soon it will be Christmas day," she groans, lost in the sad glory of the music, lost in the story.
John Floyd is a Memphis-based writer and author of Sun Records: An Oral History (Avon, 1998). A former editor with The Memphis Flyer, he has contributed to The Journal of Country Music, Musician, and Rock & Rap Confidential, among other publications.
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WHY I LOVE THE BLUES
She may not know it, but Di Anne Price's devotion to the blues is scarcely distinguishable from her devotion to her mother.
"My mom is a wonderful lyricist, and I do a lot of her songs when I'm performing," says Price, over the din of happy hour at Wang's Mandarin House, where her cool voice and barrelling blues piano had lingered like a spell until Michael Bolton on the radio jarred the air. "I just love her. She's been a lyricist, for, well, all my life and long before I came into the world. She's talented. Very talented."
Yet Di Anne Price is a woman who learned to play piano and the blues when she was 4 years old. She started playing it for money when she was 5 or 6, made her first tape when she was 9 and has recorded several others since then. In fact, she hasn't gone a week in the 42 years since without a musical paycheck.
"Both my parents were very much into the music, and so if I hadn't wanted to do it, I wouldn't have had a choice," she says. "But I always wanted to do it. And I guess I don't play any better now than I ever did, but I love it. I don't know of anything I would want to do other than this."
Born and raised in Memphis, Price can be found most nights of the week stupefying Memphis audiences along with "her Boyfriends" - drummer Tom Lonardo, Tim Goodwin on upright bass, and saxman Jim Spake. No music festival or fish-fry free-for-all is complete without them.
Though she is not yet a huge international star, Price thinks she's having a good career, and like everything else about her, her success is inextricably bound up with her mother.
"My mom decided when I was a little person that I needed to learn how to read," she says, "because I claimed that I loved music so much."
To Price, "reading" means reading notes, and she speaks of her mother and music in a long, slow rubato, itself almost a song."I would wake up in the middle of the night as a little person, and I would sit straight up in the bed, and I would want to play the piano," she says. "And my mom would be ready to go with me. And we would go and play piano all night long. We had a big ol' ramblin' two-story house, and downstairs it was cold and dark. I would put on my clothes and my trousers, my socks, my shoes, my muffler, my coat, and my gloves. I can play with my gloves on. This was in the middle of the night. My mother never said she was too tired, she never said, 'This is not the right time.' She never said that."
Price's music, barrelhouse piano and "good times" blues, harkens back to the '20s, '30s, and '40s, and she takes as her models everyone from Fats Waller to Memphis Minnie to Tony Bennett. Her songwriting mother is in there, too. Price describes her own voice as "a throwback to another time. It's smoky, it's sultry, it makes you think of Jack Daniel's and bars."
"The first song I ever learned was the blues," she says. "My mother asked me, she said, 'Do you want to do this?' And I said, "Yes'um." I always had the blues. I love the blues. I love the blues. But the blues don't make me sad. I've often thought - and, of course, my mother wrote a song for me - what would have become of me if it hadn't been for the blues? The pitfalls that the blues tells of, I didn't fall in that because of the blues. It says, 'Don't do this, Don't do that."So I didn't."
But ever since she was a little girl, the blues was more than an accidental lesson in social behavior."It's a sustenance, a warmth that engulfs me," Price says. "It takes me where I need to go."
It's something she wants to share with the world. Price recalls the time when she used to bring her kittens to her choir rehearsal at church so they could hear the music. "When I was at home, they always sang with me. So I would stick them down in my purse, and they would go with me. But one night I was at choir rehearsal, and they got out, got down under the choir stand. As the choir was singing, they were singing, too. I had to send a couple of kids down under to get the cats out. There we were in the middle of a sermon, you know, with the cats singing as loud as the choir. And my minister told me, he said, 'This is the last time. This is the last time.'"
So for Price, performance offers the chance to share her music. In a moment of silence, she reverts to her refrain, "I love the blues. You know, when I'm in a bar, smoke-filled, you can smell the Jack Daniel's all around, and I'm singing something that's right just for the moment, that's working just for that moment, and people are really listening, that's everything I need."
Check out the artist's website:
http://www.dianneprice.com
Track List:
1. Halleluah, I Love Him So
2. Tonight's the Night
3. Fever
4. I'm Just a Lucky So and So
5. I Love Being Here With You
6. Ain't It a Crime
7. Why Don't You Do Right?
8. Makin' Whoopee
9. A Good Man is Hard to Find
10. Never Make Your Move Too Soon
11. Someone Else is Steppin' In
12. That's All Right
13. Fishin' in the Sea
14. Wild Women Don't Have the Blues
15. Right Side of the Wrong Bed
Suggested CDs:Other Genres:
__________________________________________________________________________________________
THE SONG IS HERS
She's been called the best-kept secret in Memphis, but singer Di Anne Price just thinks of herself as a storyteller.
By John Floyd
The music lilts gently down the dimly lit staircase of Cielo, the eclectically appointed restaurant where Memphis chanteuse Di Anne Price has a Friday-night residency. The tune is familiar, "Our Love Is Here to Stay," a popular standard that has been essayed by revered vocalists from Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday to Dinah Washington, but at the top of the Cielo stairs, behind a baby grand piano, Price is doing something different with the evergreen hit. The lyric, as delivered in her husky, smoky voice, almost hurts, belying the romantic kiss of the words, and her accompanying piano work rejects the buoyant bounce the song usually receives for something more contemplative. Her left hand carries the rhythm, while the right picks at the melody, adding light dollops of improvised notes, each tone from the keyboard acting as a complement to Price's warm, fluid vocal.
It's a miraculous soundtrack, and if it doesn't fall exactly on deaf ears, the diners in the room adjacent to Price and her piano aren't interested in toning down their collective chatter. Nor does it seem to make a lot of difference to the three or four people in the nearby bar area.
Some people are listening, though. A couple make the trek up the Cielo stairs, obviously looking for their evening's dining party, and after the obligatory head-poke into the three upstairs rooms, they stand in front of Di Anne and her piano as she summons a kind of melancholy blues from "The Man I Love." The man extends an arm around the object of his affection. Arms embraced, they listen until the song drifts to a close, then take the stairs back down to the main dining area. A friend of the singer arrives, orders a martini from the bar, then takes a place next to Di Anne at the keyboard. He beams approval as she eases into a playful version of "Besame Mucho," and soon a few other fans arrive, taking a seat near the singer on a second set of stairs. Everyone is smiling, and the whole scene has the feel of an after-hours get-together among good friends.
And for Price, that's exactly how she feels about her small but intensely loyal audience.
"I have a lot of people out there who are kind to me and truly love me," she says a few days after her Friday gig at Cielo. "My kids, I call them. They support me, and I love that. They come just for the music, and they listen. That's what I want. I want to play for sincere, sensitive listeners. I want them to get into the music. I'm playing for you, and it's intimate between you and me."
She's been called the best-kept secret in Memphis, yet Di Anne Price has spent nearly 30 years on the city's live-music circuit, playing everywhere from hotels and restaurants to outdoor festivals and nightclubs. A native Memphian in her early 50s, Price is a product of the city's musical melting pot. Like Jerry Lee Lewis, she has a dazzling command of American popular song: bawdy hokum blues and ferocious big-band swing; honky-tonk weepers and red-hot R&B shimmering torch songs and vaudeville hand-me-downs. At any of her myriad live gigs as well as on her three self-released albums, Price's versatility is boundless yet never showy: Whether purring through Nina Simone's lascivious "Sugar In My Bowl" or contemplating the pain in the Ray Charles classic "You Don't Know Me," Price makes the songs her own.
"I think of myself as a storyteller," Price says on a dark December afternoon at the Blue Monkey, nursing a tequila on the rocks, dressed casually in olive and khaki, dragging occasionally on a cigarette. "I don't think of myself as a singer with a great voice or a big voice, because I don't. My speaking voice is my singing voice. But I like to tell stories. I need to reach you the listener with what I'm saying. It has to do with articulating the feel and the soul of the piece. To me, jazz and blues are all about life experiences, and I'm all about telling those stories."
She learned many of those stories from her family, a musically inclined clan who instilled in Di Anne an appreciation for what she calls simply "good music."
"My mother and father were really into music, all kinds. My mother writes lyrics, and my dad played guitar and sang. It was a part of our growing up. A family thing. My sisters played. It was just the thing to do, and I always knew what I wanted to be. Some kids want to be doctors or nurses or lawyers. I always wanted to be an entertainer, because music has always made me feel so good. Not that it's always treated me so good, but I have to do it. I always wake up with a song in my heart, and I go to bed with a song in my heart. It's always been there, and it's always got to be there."
At age six, she made her public debut playing piano in church at Avery Chapel. Three years later, she and her sister Denise were at a now-defunct Midtown recording studio. Two singles were released, each funded by the Price family, and though neither exactly shook the world, Di Anne soon was spending her junior high-school days in neighborhood groups while playing Sundays in church. But she quickly realized she wasn't cut out for a career as a cover-band musician, playing versions of the radio hits of the day.
"Those bands would play everything on the radio," she grumbles. "And I hated it. I always thought, `If you've heard it on the radio 50 million times, why do you want to hear me do it?' I couldn't get into the music just because it was on our song list. I've got to be in the music.
I don't just do songs because they're popular on the radio. I've never done that, and I won't do that."
Instead, Price gravitated early on toward the more idiosyncratic blues and jazz singers, in particular Billie Holiday, Memphis Minnie, and Sippie Wallace, who tended to perform in small-group settings (or, in Minnie's case, to the accompaniment of her own guitar). "Those girls, they didn't have the 17-piece band," she says, a wide smile warming her face. "They'd just have a few instruments behind them, and it was just wonderful to me. It went all over my body, made my back tingle. I grew up with that sound. That's my element. Even as a child, that's what I wanted."
That time would come, but first Di Anne honed her skills in a few local bands, and settled into residencies as a solo artist at several Memphis hotels, including long stints at the Marriott, the French Quarter Suites, and the Hyatt-Regency. She sat in with Herman Green's revered jazz band during the 1983 phase-one grand opening of the refurbished Beale Street, singing a song written by her mother, Kathryn, "Home of the Blues," a remembrance of the famed Southern epicenter of African-American culture and commerce. "That was such a rush," she recalls, "playing before 15,000 people. It's a high that is unsurpassed."
She admits, though, that she's far more comfortable in a more intimate setting, a reflection of Price's modesty and shyness, not to mention her own musical savvy: She really is at her best in a small venue, with the lights down low and an appreciative audience lending the attention her art deserves. "I'd like to bring more people into the fold," she admits with a bit of reluctance. "But I want it to be genuine. I really want them to appreciate what I'm doing. That may be a fantasy world, but that's my ideal."
She's too self-effacing to admit it, but she's gradually been turning that fantasy into a reality, amassing a core audience that happily follows her from gig to gig, from restaurant to nightclub to fund-raiser. And for that, a lot of thanks should go to Di Anne's band, named, suitably, Her Boyfriends. She beams when talk turns to the trio which has backed her for the better part of the last 10 years: saxophone master Jim Spake, bassist Tim Goodwin, and drummer Tom Lonardo, collectively one of the most formidable ensembles in town, and a group sympathetic to Price's unique musical vision.
"I've got the best," she says of Her Boyfriends, who drifted into Di Anne's world one by one, beginning with Lonardo, who first played with her during a lunchtime concert series at the University of Memphis in the 1980s. "I'm very comfortable with them. I've played with at least ten bands over the years, but this is a perfect mix for me. They are the men in my life, and they give me everything I need. Playing with them, it's like making love. They don't leave me hanging, and I don't have to tell them to give me more. They can feel what I need. It's all about the groove. It's not about showboating, itÃs about the music. About making it right."
That they do. Achieving a just-right balance between a loose, joyful noise and a focused pursuit of rhythms and riffs, Price and Her Boyfriends follow one another intuitively, with Lonardo holding down the bottom as Goodwin adds supple grace notes to the melody. Spake's playing is a subtly forceful presentation of the history of jazz saxophone, sometimes wild and cacophonous, other times lush and smoochy, exploring the possibilities within the melody without losing it. PriceÃs piano work is equally expansive and impressive, with roots in the barrelhouse blues of Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons as well as the ornate bebop flourishes of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. Like Spake, she'll establish the song's melody, then play with it a bit, finding something new in songs as entrenched in the public mind set as "The Days of Wine and Roses," "All of Me," and "The Lady Is a Tramp."
It's perhaps the quintessence of spontaneous, improvised ensemble playing, and fittingly, the band never use a set list. Of course, you can always expect a handful of songs from Price's recorded oeuvre, Wild Women, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and To Hell With Love, but the songs are played as they come to Di Anne. And the playlist has to feel right. "This is no rehearsed floor show," she says. "I'm not an out-front kind of person, and I can't wow the crowd with my rhetoric. That,s just not me. I don,t spend a lot of time in the mirror getting my face together, and I don,t have a spiel prepared for the crowd. Every performance for me is like a series of vignettes, it,s about telling the story. The band waits for me to start it, and wherever I am, whatever is going on in my life , that's where the story goes. And by the time I get to my last song, I want that story told completely."
It's getting late at Cielo, and Di Anne Price is still at the piano, a group of six or seven fans sitting nearby, on the piano stool beside her, perched on the staircase to her left. Because itÃs early December, some Christmas music is in order, and Di Anne offers a warm, yearning "I'll Be Home for Christmas" which melts like a snowbank into a tearful "White Christmas." These are not easy songs for her, as her father, George Price, passed away some time back during the holiday season. The melancholy seeps into every number, particularly "What a Wonderful World," which becomes an almost funereal prayer, betraying the lyric's toast to world harmony. During "Silver Bells," Price's genius as an interpreter and inheritor of classic American music reaches a resounding, if gut-wrenching, climax. She takes it slow, nearly whispering the words, singing to herself. "Soon it will be Christmas day," she groans, lost in the sad glory of the music, lost in the story.
John Floyd is a Memphis-based writer and author of Sun Records: An Oral History (Avon, 1998). A former editor with The Memphis Flyer, he has contributed to The Journal of Country Music, Musician, and Rock & Rap Confidential, among other publications.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WHY I LOVE THE BLUES
She may not know it, but Di Anne Price's devotion to the blues is scarcely distinguishable from her devotion to her mother.
"My mom is a wonderful lyricist, and I do a lot of her songs when I'm performing," says Price, over the din of happy hour at Wang's Mandarin House, where her cool voice and barrelling blues piano had lingered like a spell until Michael Bolton on the radio jarred the air. "I just love her. She's been a lyricist, for, well, all my life and long before I came into the world. She's talented. Very talented."
Yet Di Anne Price is a woman who learned to play piano and the blues when she was 4 years old. She started playing it for money when she was 5 or 6, made her first tape when she was 9 and has recorded several others since then. In fact, she hasn't gone a week in the 42 years since without a musical paycheck.
"Both my parents were very much into the music, and so if I hadn't wanted to do it, I wouldn't have had a choice," she says. "But I always wanted to do it. And I guess I don't play any better now than I ever did, but I love it. I don't know of anything I would want to do other than this."
Born and raised in Memphis, Price can be found most nights of the week stupefying Memphis audiences along with "her Boyfriends" - drummer Tom Lonardo, Tim Goodwin on upright bass, and saxman Jim Spake. No music festival or fish-fry free-for-all is complete without them.
Though she is not yet a huge international star, Price thinks she's having a good career, and like everything else about her, her success is inextricably bound up with her mother.
"My mom decided when I was a little person that I needed to learn how to read," she says, "because I claimed that I loved music so much."
To Price, "reading" means reading notes, and she speaks of her mother and music in a long, slow rubato, itself almost a song."I would wake up in the middle of the night as a little person, and I would sit straight up in the bed, and I would want to play the piano," she says. "And my mom would be ready to go with me. And we would go and play piano all night long. We had a big ol' ramblin' two-story house, and downstairs it was cold and dark. I would put on my clothes and my trousers, my socks, my shoes, my muffler, my coat, and my gloves. I can play with my gloves on. This was in the middle of the night. My mother never said she was too tired, she never said, 'This is not the right time.' She never said that."
Price's music, barrelhouse piano and "good times" blues, harkens back to the '20s, '30s, and '40s, and she takes as her models everyone from Fats Waller to Memphis Minnie to Tony Bennett. Her songwriting mother is in there, too. Price describes her own voice as "a throwback to another time. It's smoky, it's sultry, it makes you think of Jack Daniel's and bars."
"The first song I ever learned was the blues," she says. "My mother asked me, she said, 'Do you want to do this?' And I said, "Yes'um." I always had the blues. I love the blues. I love the blues. But the blues don't make me sad. I've often thought - and, of course, my mother wrote a song for me - what would have become of me if it hadn't been for the blues? The pitfalls that the blues tells of, I didn't fall in that because of the blues. It says, 'Don't do this, Don't do that."So I didn't."
But ever since she was a little girl, the blues was more than an accidental lesson in social behavior."It's a sustenance, a warmth that engulfs me," Price says. "It takes me where I need to go."
It's something she wants to share with the world. Price recalls the time when she used to bring her kittens to her choir rehearsal at church so they could hear the music. "When I was at home, they always sang with me. So I would stick them down in my purse, and they would go with me. But one night I was at choir rehearsal, and they got out, got down under the choir stand. As the choir was singing, they were singing, too. I had to send a couple of kids down under to get the cats out. There we were in the middle of a sermon, you know, with the cats singing as loud as the choir. And my minister told me, he said, 'This is the last time. This is the last time.'"
So for Price, performance offers the chance to share her music. In a moment of silence, she reverts to her refrain, "I love the blues. You know, when I'm in a bar, smoke-filled, you can smell the Jack Daniel's all around, and I'm singing something that's right just for the moment, that's working just for that moment, and people are really listening, that's everything I need."
Check out the artist's website:
http://www.dianneprice.com
Track List:
1. Halleluah, I Love Him So
2. Tonight's the Night
3. Fever
4. I'm Just a Lucky So and So
5. I Love Being Here With You
6. Ain't It a Crime
7. Why Don't You Do Right?
8. Makin' Whoopee
9. A Good Man is Hard to Find
10. Never Make Your Move Too Soon
11. Someone Else is Steppin' In
12. That's All Right
13. Fishin' in the Sea
14. Wild Women Don't Have the Blues
15. Right Side of the Wrong Bed
Suggested CDs:Other Genres:
- BLUES: Blues Vocals
- JAZZ: Jazz Vocals
- FEATURING PIANO