The popular music of the 1970s, even as it came to baste in glam and disco, heavy metal and punk, also hosted an unlikely revival of swing music and related throwbacks. We hippies emerged musically from the folk revival, and one version of that took on the history of non-classical American music as possible material, including the popular music of our grandparents. Versions included the early Pointer Sisters, the slick Manhattan Transfer, Leon Redbone, Texas swing revivalists Asleep at the Wheel, gypsy swingers Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, and eccentrics R. Crumb and the Cheap Suit Serenaders.
Among the greatest of these was Maria Muldaur, who emerged from the folk and jug band scenes in Greenwich Village in the 1960s to surprising commercial success in the 70s with the song "Midnight at the Oasis." That was an excellent piece of revivalism with enough hokum and Errol-Flynn era throwback sexiness to catch the imagination. Maybe it also hit at a time (1974) when musical culture was a bit confused or incoherent, grasping for the next thing. Rock 'n’ roll had been perfected, in a way, in southern California (a la Eagles and Fleetwood Mac), or ratified in the UK by bands like Yes; Motown had relocated; the Beatles were gone; black music was between dominant styles, including slick Philly soul and gutbucket James Brown funk. In the general melee, waves of nostalgia emerged, including for hardcore blues and even 1950s doo-wop, a la the revivalist collective known as Sha Na Na.
"Midnight at the Oasis" ("I know your Daddy's a Sultan, a nomad known to all") had a moment on the charts, and Maria Muldaur became something of a one-hit wonder, though she scraped the charts again with a killer version of Peggy Lee's I'm a Woman and the lovely novelty tune "Waitress in a Donut Shop." It wasn't strange that she had only one major hit, because she was always indifferent to trends, engaged in her own historical explorations.
Few American musicians have as thoroughly explored the blues, and Muldaur has performed a series of tributes to great female blues singers, including her wonderful recent album One-Hour Mama: The Blues of Victoria Spivey (No, Papa, No!). I hope this is becoming a series, as it pairs now with her 2018 album Don't You Feel My Leg (The Naughty Bawdy Blues of Blue Lu Baker), featuring classics like "Loan Me Your Husband." She's beautifully rendered country music (Dolly Parton's My Tennessee Mountain Home from her debut solo album, for example). She's a natural soul singer everywhere (Clean Up Woman).
Like a lot of blues singers (Son House, for example), she may occasionally have been tortured by the sinfulness of it all, which meanwhile she revels in all the time. But she recorded a wonderful live gospel album, released in 1980 (and seemingly unavailable on iTunes or Spotify). There’s lots of jazz in her oeuvre, and I particularly recommend her 2021 collaboration with Tuba Skinny Let's Get Happy Together.
At this point it’s a vast body of work, sprawling masterfully over the history of American music. But when I was a kid in the 1970s, it was a musical education. My friends and I, little hippies of DC, bought each of her albums as they came out during that decade, and I tried to trace the sources of each song, starting in her liner notes. To take one example, I’d never heard of Hoagy Carmichael when I got hold of Muldaur's version of his Rockin' Chair ("fetch me that gin, son, before I tan your hide"). Not only did she sing it in her inimitable fashion, she introduced the old man and sang a verse with him. I think she introduced me to the music of Betty Wright (also subject of a Resounding), which I've been listening to ever since.
All the great hippie goddesses of the 1970s (Bonie Raitt and Linda Ronstadt, for example, Emmylou Harris and Tracy Nelson) were explorers as well as progenitors of American music. But the best scholar and perhaps the most consistently delightful artist of the bunch is Muldaur.
I’d finish with a playlist. It is, however, a pretty vast field by now, so let me first of all recommend Sweet Harmony (1976), a perfect album and a wide-ranging exploration of styles. It includes that collaboration with Hoagy, as well as her first real foray into gospel, the Staple Singers' As An Eagle Stirreth Her Nest, as well as a secularization of the gospel song "John the Revelator" as the sex-gospel song Jon the Generator. Also the delightful tribute to the Andrews and the Pointers We Just Couldn't Say Goodbye.
And I'll mention a couple of later moments, including A Woman Alone With the Blues: Remembering Peggy Lee (2003) and Garden of Joy (2009), which directly continues the educational eclecticism of her 1970s work.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell