High Blues Fidelity: The Fragmentary Autobiography of 'Queen' Victoria Spivey (1906-1976)

On 29 September 1963, blues singer Victoria Spivey took to the stage for her final number at the Kurhaus in Baden-Baden, West Germany. It was the opening night of the second American Folk Blues Festival (hereafter AFBF), an all-star tour that would bring African American blues musicians to new audiences across Europe. Spivey had already appeared on stage twice that evening to sing two songs that she had recorded as a 1920s ‘race’ records star: the alluring, innuendo-laden ‘Black Snake Moan’ and her tragic ‘T. B. Blues’. Her final number, in contrast, was a new composition: ‘Grant Spivey’ (Spivey 1963), a slow, reflective blues telling the story of her father, a stevedore at the port of Galveston, Texas. The song explains how her family had fled to Houston to escape racial persecution prompted by the 1900 Galveston Hurricane and memorializes her father’s untimely death in 1913. The song lyric closes with Spivey responding to her grief by moving to New York to begin her blues career....