Mary Dixon

The saga of the "Dusty Stevedore" was one of her most famous songs, but rest assured, blues singer Mary Dixon was not in the business of singing about historic forms of employment. Like so many other female classic blues artists of the '20s, her stock in trade was down-and-dirty blues about sex, the lyrics about as explicit as anything released on record prior to the rap era. Whether this was her artistic vision or not will never really be known, since this limited subject matter prevented later generations of blues researchers from finding the types of clues to long-forgotten...