Big Mama | from Facebook and Don’s Tunes - BALL & CHAIN

 

Go on click it anyway . . . . it works tha’ knows!

Big Mama Thornton performs Ball and Chain with Buddy Guy's Blues Band.

Thornton is a mellow mountain of a woman, almost six feet tall and topping two hundred pounds. She dwarfs the men in the band, but they seem to respect her for her size, her dignity, her burden. As she sings, they keep a soulful Southern church cadence with their feet, side to side. Her voice is beautiful, but not pretty.

Sittin’ by my window, whoa, I were looking out at the rain . . .

She is regal and dignified in the sturdy blue pin-striped suit of indeterminate gender that appears tailored just for her, with a paisley ascot, a black fur toque, and her beloved rhinestone chandelier earrings. She even wears the two scars on her brow like scythe-shaped jewels, and she is beautiful. But she is not pretty. She draws her power from some old reservoir of human authority beyond the usual repertoires of romantic pain common to blues chanteuses: Why you want to do this mean thing to me? Thornton makes it clear: she is not unacquainted with human suffering, but she has no intention of letting it get the upper hand. Instead, she does what all blues greats do: she telegraphs endurance and force to whomever out there in TV land might need it at the moment. This is blues perfection. This is what this song was supposed to sound like, before it became Janis Joplin’s signature anthem to existential dread. “Ball and Chain” is irrevocably Southern in spirit. - By Cynthia Shearer

from Don’s Tunes