More than 60 years ago, Victoria Spivey heard Maria Muldaur (nee D’Amato) perform as part of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band and knew the young singer was extraordinary. Born in 1906, Spivey was a well-known blues singer, songwriter, and entrepreneur who had worked with the best acts of her day, including Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and Clarence Williams.
Spivey was celebrated in the 1920s and ’30s for her bawdy compositions and indelicate material. Or as the Allmusic Guide puts it in their biography of the singer, she was “an energetic, talented blues singer, drawn to themes of drugs, violence, and sexual deviance”. In the early ’60s, Spivey took Muldaur under her wing (along with Bob Dylan, whose first recordings were on Spivey’s label).