mary flower

It's not just that Mary Flower finger-picks an elegantly mean fingerstyle blues, ragtime and jazz guitar. And it's not just the gentle, controlled warmth of her voice. There's something else special going on here, and it may have to do with the fact that she traveled from her home base of Portland to a studio on the south end of New Orleans to make this record, and was joined in the process by such local A-listers as Henry Butler (piano), Jon Cleary (piano, organ) and Dr. Michael White (clarinet). The music that came out of these sessions is unfailingly sweet, hot and sassy -- not a single track fails to impress and several are deeply moving. Her rendition of "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" is brilliant, and her original guitar composition "La Grippe" is both subtly complex and viscerally exciting. Check out the wonderful brass band accompaniment that fills up the space behind her guitar on "New Orleans Hop Scop Blues" and Cleary's spooky Hammond organ on the dark "Last Kind Word Blues". But every track on this album has something about it that will give you shivers, and taken as a whole this is one of the most satisfying albums of the year.
- All Music Guide

"...a first-rate fingerpicker who also plays fine bottleneck.

Flower straddles the line between blues and jazz, recalling the spirits of Memphis Minnie, Blind Blake, and Louis Armstrong. She exudes a subtle but sultry vocal presence on album opener "Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me" and even discovers something new to say in well-worn songs such as "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" and "Nobody's Fault but Mine." Flower alternates vocal tracks with self-penned guitar instrumentals that offer a taste of her virtuosic playing, including "La Grippe" and "Terminal Rag." - Blues Review

"It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive characteristic." So says 1930's Black Manhattan. And so might agree Denver's Mary Flower. A hopeless mistress of the blues, she plies her trade wherever she might find kindred spirits -- fellow travelers on a life journey called the blues. But Flower doesn't content herself with rehashing the well-trod southern soil-borne wailings of a by-gone era. But neither does she forsake its rich tradition. Flower is one of those rare artists who manages to create a tincture of the aged authentic with the freshly original.

Back in full bloom with a new recording, Flower's Honey from the Comb [Time & Strike], features self-penned pieces that would make believers of even the most jaded of blues aficionados. This delightful recording showcases Flower's restrained, but impeccable fingerstyle technique, smoky slide playing, and down-to-earth vocals that are stirring without seeming affected. But more impressive is the compositional weight she brings to the table. A fixture on the Denver music scene for more than a quarter of a century, Flower now spends six months a year on the road, delivering her simultaneously smooth and gritty stylings to listeners across the nation. And after many years in the trenches, her efforts are finally paying off. This year alone, Flower has not only signed with Time & Strike Records, but performed live on a broadcast of the National Public Radio staple Prairie Home Companion, dazzled the competition at this summer's National Fingerpicking Championships in Winfield, Kansas, and filled a slew of slots at some of the country's more revered blues festivals.

In the process, she's played alongside an A-list of steel-string pros, including John Hammond, Junior Brown, Taj Mahal, Geoff Muldaur, and many others. "My career really has skyrocketed in terms of doing gigs that I had only dreamed of doing in the past," Flower says. "It's been great. And coming home is what I call the universal post-touring syndrome -- that hard adjustment from traveling and having incredible things happen to you, to being back home, taking out the garbage." Flower is also well known in the Rocky Mountain region for her role in the founding of the Mother Folkers, the ever-popular revolving-door band of mile-high women who've entertained locals for many years.

Since leaving the venerable group in 1993 to pursue her current solo career, she's been rolling along a musical path paved by such legends as Skip James, the Reverend Gary Davis, and Blind Blake. "This is not Delta blues," Flower notes of her music. "It's Piedmont blues. Piedmont is more upbeat, almost with a ragtime influence, with a lot of finger-picked melodies and syncopation with the thumb."

Flower contrasts that with delta blues, which is slower, and, as she explains, "somebody dies or somebody's woman left them. Being a female, I can't sing a lot of those lyrics, because the themes don't make any sense for me to sing. There were women doing this, like Memphis Minnie, but it was a male-dominated form of music. It would be really hard for me to don the costume of a seventy-year-old black man. I can't pull that one off, and I don't want to try. So this is where my writing comes in. I use this base and create my own contemporary themes."

Flower has no delusions about how far her music will take her she's actually content with the vistas it's already offered.

"This music," she says, "has never been mainstream, and it never will be. It's the music of the underdog. I mean, why would anyone want to play this kind of music? It's hard for me to define why I have this passion for it. I guess it's the challenge of the syncopation, and the unusual chord shapes, but it's also the people who make the music. There's something about the people who have decided to carry on this tradition that I can relate to ... people who sing this music that used to be sung by oppressed people."

To help keep these traditions alive, Flower spends a large amount of her playing time in front of students; she conducts instructional seminars while touring (including her Women in the Blues workshops), and serves as a faculty member of Denver's Swallow Hill Music Association. If that weren't enough, she can be found at seven major summer guitar camps across the country. - Fingerstyle Guitar Magazine

“With her immaculate guitar playing and warm contralto, Mary Flower finds the sweet spot between modern and rootsy in 12 tunes bred of back porches, parlors, street corners, juke joints, and country churches...” - Acoustic Guitar

Mary Flower's career can be neatly divided into a "before" and an "after," but it's what happened in the middle that should be of particular interest to budding guitarists.

Flower, a gifted fingerpicker and rising star on the acoustic-blues scene, speaks in reverent tones about attending a music camp - one of those room-and-boardwork shops where novices hand out and play with the pros - at a crucial time in her artistic development. She says simply: "It changed my life."

Flower, 57, had come of age musically in and around Denver, Colorado. In the early 1970s, she toured the college coffeehouse circuit around the country, playing an eclectic mix of folk and roots music as part of a duo with Texas born singer and guitarist Katy Moffatt. In the late '70s, she got married and, before long, put her larger musical aspirations on hold to raise two children - although she did continue to play gigs in Denver, where she founded the Mother Folkers, a celebrated local woman's folk cooperative.

Around 1993, recently divorced, and with her kids in high school, Flower decided to jump-start a career that had never really quite taken off. As fate would have it, she was invited that year to the Augusta Heritage Center Blues Week in Elkins, West Virginia, as a "visiting guest artist" to play alongside the camp instructors - blues luminaries like John Cephas, Steve James, Paul Geremia, and John Jackson. Flower says the camaraderie and energy of the camp and the professionalism of her fellow musicians had a profound effect on her. "I realized that there was something out there that nurtured these players who weren't professional but had this love of acoustic blues in common," she says.

Flower had been building a growing repertoire of country-blues and ragtime tunes, and with the jolt of confidence that resulted from realizing she was far from alone in her musical pursuits, she suddenly knew what to do with it. "I came home and went right into the studio with a vengeance and recorded my first CD," she says.

She never looked back, and since then her career has maintained an upward trajectory. Flower has released five more CDs in the last 12 years, several to critical acclaim; she twice (in 2000 and 2003) took home a third-place trophy at the National Fingerpicking Guitar Championships in Winfield, Kansas; and she recently signed with Yellow Dog Records (www.yellowdogrecords.com), which released her latest CD, Bywater Dance, in late 2005.

Flower is now a regular instructor herself at an increasing number of guitar camps in the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom. She recommends the experience highly, not just as a way to learn from accomplished artists, but also for the vibe that results from living and breathing the music for days at a time. "If you spend one week at a guitar camp and you watch ten experts play, you just get that spirit," she says.

Although possessed of a husky, warm singing voice, Flower does not try to emulate Bessie Smith or, for that matter, any of the old blues masters. "There are a lot of white people who sing and try to sound like they're from Mississippi, and it sounds phony," she says, offering the following tip for neophytes: "If you're singing, never drop your Rs [for example, po' instead or poor], because that's when you get into trouble."

Her guitar style owes a great debt to such Piedmont blues and ragtime players as Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller, but Flower gets her own signature sound by using open strings and unusual partial chords up and down the neck to create a lot of movement and syncopation in both her covers and originals.

Surprisingly, given her penchant for writing original rags, Flower says she hardly ever thinks in terms of chords. "I follow my ear," she says. "It's like figuring out a puzzle until the last piece is in. It's trial and error, hit or miss, and when you hit on something that works, you move ahead."

Several years ago, Flower settled in Portland, Oregon, in part to be closer to her son, Jesse Withers, who plays bass in the popular Portland bluegrass band Jackstraw. Flower always keeps a guitar on hand in her living room, in case inspiration hits, the way it did at the first guitar camp. "You never know," she says, "when that little spark is going to happen." - Acoustic Guitar