Mabel John - Feature in Uk Press

As you may have read in the previous news article on soul source, Mable John is currently starring as the blues singer Bertha Mae in the feature film The Honeydripper.

As part of the Uk mainstream media exposure, an article/interview by Richard Williams entitled "Drenched In The Blues" is currently featured in the guardians blues/jazz online section of its website. A few clips from the article are below along with a link to the full article.

It was Mable John who, with Smokey Robinson, told Berry Gordy Jr back in 1959 that it was time to stop schlepping his tapes around major record companies and start a label of his own. This was during a trip to New York, and when they were all back home, John used her boyfriend's car to drive the future president of Motown records to meetings with disc jockeys and record store proprietors in the Detroit area ....

...next day, at the Stax studio in a converted cinema on East McLemore Avenue, they recorded it. Hayes ran through the loose arrangement with the musicians while Porter joined John in the vocal booth, prodding her in the back when he wanted a higher note and telling her: "You said it was inside you and you wanted it to come out, so let it out...

Forty years after that heyday, Mable John is enjoying a new kind of fame. When the director John Sayles came to cast the part of Bertha Mae, a veteran blues singer who embodies the spirit of the past in his new film, Honeydripper, he chose a woman who has never commanded the acclaim granted to her friends Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight and Mavis Staples, but whose own life represents a precis of the history of African-American music in the 20th century."

Can read the full article at http://music.guardian.co.uk/jazz/story/0,,2278689,00.html

The cd My Name is Mable -The Complete Collection which was released last year is also available at £5.49 on Amazon uk (link below) http://www.amazon.co.uk/My-Name-Mable-Complete-Collection/dp/B0000TZ7TA

A more indepth online article from 2006 can be read at the B-Side Blog by Red Kelly http://redkelly.blogspot.com/2006/06/mable-john-bigger-better-stax-215.html