Description
Release Date: 1956 (original)
Label: Cook/Smithsonian Folkways
Track List
1. Alexander’s Ragtime Band
2. How Could I Feel Blue
3. I Ain’t Got Nobody
4. Darktown Strutters Ball
5. Melancholy Baby
6. The One I Love Belongs To Someone Else
7. Somebody Loves Me
8. Baby Lemme Bring My Clothes Back Home
9. Lonesomest Gal
10. Strut It Babe
11. Mammy’s Little Coal Black Rose
12. Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate
13. Dinah
14. Let The Rest Of The World Go By
Notes
Even at 60, the accolades kept rolling in for Lizzie Miles: “Powerhouse singing plus some intense torching” (St. Petersburg Times), “Unlimited zest and vocal resource” (Billboard), “Can lift a commonplace tune to inspired heights” (High Fidelity). The Creole Songbird hadn’t lost the “shimmy” she made in a career she had entered when she was six years old. Classic sounds of New Orleans blues.
Lizzie Miles was a fine classic blues singer from the 1920s who survived to have a full comeback in the 1950s. She started out singing in New Orleans during 1909-1911 with such musicians as King Oliver, Kid Ory, and Bunk Johnson. Miles spent several years touring the South in minstrel shows and playing in theaters. She was in Chicago during 1918-1920 and then moved to New York in 1921, making her recording debut the following year. Her recordings from the 1922-1930 period mostly used lesser-known players, but Louis Metcalf and King Oliver were on two songs apiece and she recorded a pair of duets with Jelly Roll Morton in 1929. Miles sang with A.J. Piron and Sam Wooding, toured Europe during 1924-1925, and was active in New York during 1926-1931. Illness knocked her out of action for a period, but by 1935, she was performing with Paul Barbarin, she sang with Fats Waller in 1938, and recorded a session in 1939. Lizzie Miles spent 1943-1949 outside of music, but in 1950 began a comeback, often performing with Bob Scobey or George Lewis during her final decade.
