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She used to say, you got to get up there and strut your stuff and make all eyes be on you. And then she looked at me
right in the eye, pointed her finger at me and said, “that's what they call stage presence”. And I just said, “yes, ma'am”.
I just sort of took it all in, and God bless her when I think of it now that this amazing, experienced, soulful blues
woman kind of spotted me out from afar and took it upon herself to mentor me like that. It just blows my mind. So
after all these years, I had made an album a couple of years ago with a great vintage jazz band, well, they're a band
of young people, young street musicians from New Orleans called Tuba Skinny. Fabulous band if you don't know
about them. They're just wonderful.

Anyway, and so that was my 43rd album. And suddenly I went, well, here I am. I'm in my early 80s. How many more
albums am I going to do? And it became my strongest desire, kind of like my bucket list, to do an album paying tribute
to Victoria Spivey for all the support and encouragement she gave me.

FD: Absolutely. Well, we might take a quick little break and we'll play a track. We're going to play Organ Grinder
Blues. What's the background on ‘Organ Grinder Blues’ before we come back and have a chat to you? Give us a bit
of background on ‘Organ Grinder Blues’.

MM: Well, I believe she originally recorded this song with Louis Armstrong and his band. And it's one of the many
naughty, bawdy, kind of risqué songs that she was very famous for doing. I think her first big hit was something she
wrote called ‘Black Snake Blues’. These early blues women expressed their sexuality. They liberated themselves years
before anybody dreamed up the term women's liberation. And they freely expressed their sexuality in their songs.
But they did it in a way, it was more like a nuanced way where sexual matters were referred to with double entendres
and actually it's somehow sexier; it's more playful. And I've always kind
of had a penchant for doing those kind of songs myself. I did one on my
first solo album called ‘Don't You Feel My Leg’ by another great blues
woman, Blue Lou Barker from New Orleans. But anyway, ‘Organ Grinder
Blues’ was a big hit for Victoria Spivey. And I went down to New Orleans
and recorded it with Tuba Skinny. And I think it came out just great.

Listen to ORGAN GRINDER

FD: Maria, I was reading an interview from 1976 with Linda Ronstadt,
and she names you specifically as being really the only pop/rock female
singer in the 1970s that she could call on for support both mentally and
physically. I don't think people realize just what a mentor you have been
to up-and-coming female performers like Linda Ronstadt, amongst many
others.

MM: Actually, in the case of dear Linda, I had heard about her before I
met her, when I was still in the Kweskin Jug Band, about 1966 or seven it must have been because she was in a band
called the Stone Ponies which I had recorded with the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. And we met, I guess, sometime in 67.
And we just bonded really right away because, you know, we were two, sort of on the alternative music scene, the
only two gals, you know, besides Janis Joplin that were doing it at that time. Yes, she lives in San Francisco, and we
still get together.

FD: How do you cope with being a strong, sassy, sexy female performer all these years in what is generally a
male-dominated industry? You would have encountered a fair bit of pressure on yourself to maybe perhaps tone
down the image as such or not?

MM: Well, I'm asked that question a lot, even back in the 70s, which was sort of the heyday of the emerging women's
liberation movement. Maybe the role models that I, you know, just subconsciously chose and gravitated toward;
people like Memphis Minnie, Victoria Spivey, and people like that.
Look what they had to do to emerge as successful artists in their day. I mean, they were up against racial barriers,
financial barriers, social barriers, sexual barriers. It wasn't that it was stacked against them in every way in the 1920s
which was, you know, their main era, but they've been a role model to me and not just musically, an inspiration in
what they sang about and how they define themselves as women in not just a male dominated industry but in a male
dominated society. So if they could do it, why not me, you know? But this wasn't even a conscious thing. It's just
something I absorbed, I guess.