Vaneese Thomas is quite a singer! Her soul is deep, authentic and rooted.

Born in Memphis, TN, she is the daughter of the legendary Rufus Thomas, whose career spanned half a century and who was a major figure at Stax Records. She is also the younger sister of Carla Thomas, the Queen of Memphis Soul and of the highly respected keyboardist Marvell Thomas (R.I.P.). Since her debut in 1987, she has some ten albums to her name. Her preferred musical styles are R&B, gospel, blues, and jazz, from which she cultivates her very personal, soul-stirring style.

“Stories In Blue” is an opus of seven pieces exuding soul and dedication. She composed four of those and contributed to the other three. It seems relevant to me to mention here that, highly appreciated on the international music scene as a singer, she is also an active composer, producer, and actress. She has collaborated musically with a plethora of great artists such as Luciano Pavarotti, Sting, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Celine Dion, Eric Clapton, and Bruce Springsteen, to name a few.

Her recent release, on the brand-new Memphis label Overton Music, opens with “Do Y’all” for “Do Y’all know where the blues come from?” With her ancestors in mind, the mistreated African slaves who injected soul and sound into the blues and inspired her life and career, she sings this vibrant, beautiful and irrepressible story in a R&B groove not to be missed. The following song, “When You Were My Man,” is a post-mortem reflection on a broken love relationship, one of the central themes of blues and soul. The rather light and swinging tone serve as a distanced position from the difficult event, while remaining just as convincing. In “Wandering,” a ballad with deep blues and solid lyrical flights, Vaneese really stirs the emotions and soul of the listener by singing empathetically a song about the situation of a very lonely person who suffers deeply from that condition… From my point of view, it ties in with a central theme of the 21st century’s blues, the solitude of individuals, the lot of many in this post-modern blues world…

The song “1917” is a musical and historical return to the period of World War I. Paradoxically, jazz was played everywhere in clubs and juke joints; it was a precursor context to the “Roaring Twenties” from 1920 to 1929. It was also, especially, the year of birth of her father Rufus Thomas, who left his mark on the evolution of black music, on it’s shaping and transformative influence. “The Last Thing On My Mind” is another ballad, another story of lost love, a twist of fate that leaves deep and painful traces. “7 Miles From Home,” a walking blues enhanced with expressive acoustic slide guitar, is inspired by a poem, a personal story of one of her acquaintances. It is also the classic story of returning home after the ups and downs, the vagaries of life. In the wake of the previous piece, the last song, “End of the Road,” is an a cappella with hand clapping and supportive choir.  It completes the album on a hopeful note, namely, that at the end of the road we could be relieved and freed.

This album, which is only twenty-three minutes long, is fine quality!

– Pierre Jobin