By Rosalind Cummings-Yeates
BLUES LANE
Mary Lane
T
he Logan Center in Hyde Park has
established a full commitment to the
blues all year round with the intro-
duction of the Second Monday Blues
series hosted by Billy Branch. The free
series features a live concert and a brief
conversation with a local artist. The five-
part series kicked off in November with
90-year-old blues guitar master Jimmy
Johnson and continues in the new year
with noted West Side blues woman Mary
Lane on January 14.
“My original proposal for south side
blues shows was to create a series of per-
12 illinoisentertainer.com january 2019
formances with interviews,” said Billy,
explaining the creation of the series. “That
idea lead to the Logan Center Blues Fest.
They were doing a jazz series, and I want-
ed to see if they were open to blues and to
my delight, they were. John Logan is a
blues fan and harmonica player. We
skipped over the original idea and went
right to the blues fest. So they came back
and asked if I wanted to curate a blues
series. It’s the second Monday of each
month through April. I do a brief inter-
view with each artist, which they video-
tape for the archives and I join them for a
few acoustic songs.”
The Logan Center blues series show-
cases a cross-section of local blues stars,
including Lurie Bell (February 11), Jamah
Rogers (March 11) and Jimmy Burns (April
8). “Some of these artists are being intro-
duced to this audience for the first time. A
lot of these people haven’t been going to
the clubs where they would see these per-
formers,” said Billy. “ I always wanted to
do a concert and lecture series with the
elders but I was engrossed in my own
career, and before I knew it, a lot of the eld-
ers were gone.”
With the Logan Center Blues Fest
established as an annual event, this blues
series really expands the blues presence on
the South Side. “This is a way to keep
blues in the community. It’s more accessi-
ble than the clubs because children can
come, it’s free, it’s in the early evening,
and it’s centrally-located in Hyde Park.”
Mary Lane will inaugurate the Logan
Center blues series for 2019, and there’s no
local artist more deserving of the position.
A blues pioneer who started singing in
1935 in Arkansas, her voice pours out the
history of pain and life that personifies the
blues experience. At 83, she has lived the
quintessential blues lifestyle; singing on
cotton plantations street corners and in the
church, moving North and raising seven
children as a single mother while perform-
ing in small blues lounges. The power and
emotion of Mary’s voice are what sepa-
rates her from the typical blues singer. She
does not sing so much as she opens up a
heart valve and pumps out the contents.
Throughout her long career, Mary sang
regularly with legends like Robert
Nighthawk, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James,
Junior Wells, and Buddy Guy. She has
always been recognized for her pure,
kinetic vocals by the blues community but
recognition from the industry has been
slower to arrive.
But 2019 looks like the year that that all
changes. A new documentary, I Can Only
Be Mary Lane, by filmmaker Jesseca Ynez
Simmons, was screened in London as part
of the Women of the Lens Film Festival and
will be shown across the U.S. The film
follows the recording of Mary’s second
album, Travelin” Woman, which launches
the new Women of The Blues Records and
dips into the daily life of a blues artist. As
one of the last blues women with lineage
in the Delta blues tradition, Mary reflects
living history. She has survived Jim Crow,
Northern racism and being ignored by the
blues industry to finally reap the rewards
of singing the blues for eight decades. “If
you don’t dig the blues, you got a hole in
your soul,” Mary tells the camera. The film
shows her soldiering on after her husband
Jeff, bass player for her No Static Blues
Band, is felled by a stroke for eight
months, and it shows how her strength
and comfort in her identity has served her
over the years. “When Mary sings, I
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