>>PREVIEW
BELTLINE BLUES FESTIVAL
Big Time Sarah
June 23-25
Victoria Riverside Park
Big Time Sarah, as her name suggests, is a woman of immense self-confidence.
For more than 30 years, the venerated Chicago blues woman has been plying her trade and bringing audiences to their feet (and sometimes knees) with her energetic and raunchy stage show.
But despite the respect she receives in blues music circles, Big Time Sarah has never busted out of the scene in the same way as Koko Taylor or Etta James.
"It’s been hard for me," she says. "But I’m still trying to get there."
Born into a family of musicians in Coldwater, Mississippi, the woman formerly known as Sarah Streeter began singing gospel at the age of five. At one point, she attended her local church so often the pastor gave her a key.
At 13, however, Big Time Sarah discovered the rumbling basslines, wailing guitars and naughty double entendres of blues music when she snuck into one of the town’s blues clubs.
"I made myself up to look like a grown woman," she recalls. "I was always at the back door trying to sneak in. I wanted to get in so I could really hear and learn about the music."
Four years later, Big Time Sarah was singing regularly at another club, Morgan’s Liquor Room, where she would often perform a "Ladies Sing the Blues" revue.
"The guy who owned Morgan’s Liquor knew I wasn’t old enough to get in the club," she says. "So he was telling everybody that I was his daughter and that his daughter sang, so he used to drag me up onstage all the time. It went really well, because after that everybody wanted to start hiring me."
By the time she was in her early 20s, Big Time Sarah had worked with such greats as Taylor, James, Sunnyland Slim, B.B. King, Otis Rush, Eddie Clearwater and Jimmy Johnson.
While Sarah credits James for inspiring her contemporary blues sound, she says it was larger-than-life blues legend Big Mama Thornton who paved her way.
You can tell Big Time Sarah is still indebted to the blues great by the way she lovingly relates an anecdote of when the two shared a stage in Montreal in 1980. Still relatively new to the game, Sarah was having a tough time handling the rude, cigar-chomping men (or mens, as she pronounces it) in the audience.
"It got me down," Sarah remembers. "And then (Thornton) said, ‘Come here, let me show you what to do.’ She sat me onstage with her and gave me one of her cigars and said, ‘Have one of these, you’ll be all right.’ Then she told the guys in the front – ‘You didn’t respect her, but you’re gonna respect me. Now sit down, shut up and put out those cigars because we’re gonna do the smokin’ and blowin’ from now on.’
"That’s where I got all of my progressiveness from."
In town this Sunday as part of the Kaos Beltline Blues Festival, Big Time Sarah promises her set with the Maurice John Vaughn Band will embarrass at least one poor sod.
"I get people up onstage and get them to dance and shake with me. A lot of guys are afraid to do it, but I get them up anyway." |
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