Description
Release Date: 1954 (Original)
Label: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
Track List
1 One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer
2 Lover Man
3 Hurry On Down To My House
4 Blues In The Night
5 Straighten Up & Fly Right
6 One For The Road
7 I Like That Kind Of Carryin’ On
8 Moonlight In Vermont
9 That Old Black Magic
10 Hey There
11 You’d Better Go Now
Notes
La Vergne Smith was a singer and pianist whose warm, engaging way with torch songs and bluesy tunes was a popular part of the night-life French Quarter of her native New Orleans in the late 40s and 50s. Her vocal style was intimate and sensitive, and her self-accompaniment on piano simplest, yet she still projected a sophisticated approach that delighted the clientele of the smarter, candlelight saloons that began appearing there in 1947.
In this case, the boîte was the Old Absinthe House, located at the corner of Bienville and Bourbon streets in New Orleans, and known for the worm-wood derivative for which the place was named absinthe. It was in that musty green ambience, where she started singing in early 1954, that this intimate set was recorded.
