Maria Muldaur jotted “2014” on a document.
That’s all — a person filling out routine paperwork, making note of the year before attaching a signature. But this was Maria Muldaur.
“I thought ‘oh my God,’ it’s been 40 years,” she recalled.
Yep, four decades since the powerful vocalist dominated top 40 radio with her hit “Midnight at the Oasis.”
Maybe you had to be there to understand why a sultry voice draping the airwaves with lines such as “sing your camel to bed” and “I’ll be your belly dancer, prancer, and you can be my sheik” would captivate a nation of AM radio devotees. Perhaps it was a matter of timing, with pop culture stuck in a lull between the wild, relevant ‘60s and the looming era of disco and big hair.
Or maybe it was the realization that Muldaur could lend meaning to any lyric with that voice. And that she was confident enough to pull it off.
Some people just wear their cool equally well in the spotlight and in pop culture’s shadows. Muldaur has been on the cover of The Rolling Stone. She also took up with jug bands playing old-timey mountain music. She versed herself in roots music long before hipsters discovered the likes of Robert Johnson and the Carter Family. Over the years she has belted tunes with Dylan, the Dead, Bonnie Raitt and Bill Wyman. She even sang with Hoagy Charmichael.
“It’s been a long and rambling odyssey,” she said while rolling along a Florida highway in yet another tour bus, this time heading for New Orleans—and ultimately for the Soper Reese Theatre in downtown Lakeport, where her “Long Past Midnight” tour stops on Dec. 5.
Unlike those bitter musicians, recoiling when fans call out for that one big hit, Muldaur embraces the song.
“I’m not one of those spoiled types who complain about the tedium of playing a song for 40 years,” she said. “Once I had a pop hit I used it as an opportunity to expose audiences to the music I love.”
To hear her perform a languid, back alley blues piece is to have a voice physically grab your shoulders, force you down into a chair and command your full attention. However, it’s a willing submission. You may never have been interested in a song like “Bessie’s Advice,” but the moment the first lines slink over and slide in beside you, there is nothing else in the world but those words and that voice.
“This is music—blues, country, mountain, R&B — that is of the people, by the people and for the people,” Maldaur said. “It’s not contrived. When people hear it, it resonates.”
She never left the road, recording 40 albums since 1974, exploring blues, folk and the intriguing blend of delta infused sounds she calls “Bluesiana.” In fact, Muldaur received three Grammy nominations over the past dozen years.
“As long as I come up with interesting ideas, I will keep making albums,” she said.
Her current tour is in some manner a retrospective, one first conceived when she realized that 40 years had passed since “Midnight at the Oasis.” It is more, though: an exploration of country, folk, blues, R&B and pop; a multimedia expression of music and culture; an opportunity to tell a few stories from tours past.
Yes, she will perform the popular favorites. But This goes well beyond, searching through layers of attitide and hipness for the fundamental truths that reside in a song, its presentation and the way it reaches out to an audience.
“We’re looking forward to it,” Muldaur said.
Dave Faries can be reached at 900-2016
