Lady Singing The Blues Poem by gershon hepner

As intellectual as a poet who is beat,
as musical as singers who are bop,
the lady sings the blues creating heat:
“Let it rain, ” she sings, “and never stop”.
Who is the lady with the voice impassioned?
she sings the blues and doesn’t sound depressed,
Although her songs appear to be old-fashioned
as blowsy and as witty as Mae West,
she catches our attention like a fly ball,
and makes us read her, while she’s singing deep
within her outfield, Gideon with a bible,
as blueness makes imagination leap.



Margo Jefferson writes in The New York Times, October 16,2000 about Patricia Barber and her latest CD, “Nightclub” (“Ladies Singing the Blues (and More) , But Their Way”) . She writes: This is what Patricia Barber has: adventurous piano playing (she is not a woman who just accompanies herself gracefully) , a low-vibrato alto on perpetual rhythm and timbre alert and smart songs about the way we think and live, not just about the way we love. Put that together with her black suit jacket, pants and (at times) beret, and we have a beat musician and a bop intellectual. (Let's not forget that bop innovators like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were intellectuals, just as beat poets like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg strove to put their instincts above their intellects. 'Postmodern Blues' is a lament for modern thought and art, from Marx to Mayakovsky, Isadora Duncan to Cézanne. And 'Company' is a satiric list of intolerably chic contemporary pastimes, from 'a cell-phone conversation/short enough to slip in the cracks of/the call-waiting generation' to 'French philosophy/deconstructive obscurity/formalized, canonized and dignified by the university.'

10/16/00