Maria Muldaur has been a fixture in American music for over 50 years.
She’s perhaps most widely-known for the song “Midnight at the Oasis,” which has been a hit since the day it was released in 1974. But even before that song made her famous, Muldaur was a fixture in the burgeoning 1960s folk scene in Greenwich Village — there’s even a character based on her in the upcoming Timothee Chalamet Bob Dylan biopic.
Muldaur is currently on tour with a show called “Way Past Midnight,” which comes to Phoenix on Thursday. She joined The Show to discuss.
Conversation highlights
SAM DINGMAN: I hope you don't mind me saying this. I was so charmed when our producer, Ayana, told me that she was in touch with you directly to coordinate the bookings over email. And I thought, you know, that's so rare for an artist of your stature to be so engaged. What, what do you like about doing that?
MARIA MULDAUR: I'm just happy to hear from people that are interested in my music.
DINGMAN: Well, I'd have to say, you know, as somebody who is in the very fortunate position of communicating with folks like yourself a lot, there was just something very authentic about it and it was very —
MULDAUR: Well, that's the kind of music I try to do. I try to play authentic American roots music and maybe it just is part of who I am.
DINGMAN: I wanted to ask, do you remember when you realized that you loved to sing?
MULDAUR: Of course, I was about five years old and I was a little Italian American gal growing up in Greenwich Village. And my mother's younger sister loved what she called cowboy music, which was Hank Williams, Kitty Wells, Hank Snow. A lot of people named Hank, you know, Ernest Tubb, people like that.
And I remember at age five, this is my earliest memory of singing, my aunt Katie playing a sort of very fractured honky-tonk piano and me singing “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” with all my little heart and soul.
DINGMAN: Wow. Did there ever come a time when somebody said, like “Maria, I think you've really got something here?”
MULDAUR: Well, there was all around me in Greenwich Village, the emergence of a folk music scene. A lot of people in the urban north were checking out music from the, mostly from the rural south, you know, bluegrass, blues, old timey music. And I started learning some songs and playing and I learned a song from the B side of Peggy Lee called “I'm a Woman.”
And I took out my little nylon string guitar and I started plunking around with the three chords I knew and I put this funky little R&B groove to it and I started learning the song and singing it at parties and people seemed to like it and that encouraged me. In fact, a young gentleman named Bob Dylan, who had just sort of landed on the scene, liked that song. And when, whenever we'd be at a little gathering, he'd say, “hey Maria play that, I'm a woman song.”
So I think, you know, back around that time people, I started playing and people just didn't it. And you know, coming out of the 50s, what was on pop radio had become pretty insipid and vapid.
DINGMAN: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I can imagine being in Greenwich Village and being around all these folks who were part of a musical revolution that probably informed, wanting to step outside the mainstream sound that was coming out of the radio.
MULDAUR: Yes, I was so blessed to be right at the epicenter of, of, of a scene in which I got to meet people like Doc Watson and Mississippi John Hurt, a lot of the early pioneers of what we call Americana music today.
DINGMAN: Yeah. When you meet somebody like Doc Watson or Mississippi John Hurt, I mean, these are mythic names. How does meeting somebody like that, whose music you've been playing, how does it impact the way that you, you think about a song by one of those folks?
MULDAUR: Doc Watson's father in law invited me down to North Carolina after a concert because I just kind of fell in love with a very simple, sweet way he played the fiddle and he said, well, “why don't you come down to North to Deep Gap, North Carolina? And I'll teach you everything I know.”
So I had the opportunity to do that. I went down there with my boyfriend and we stayed at Doc Watson's house and that was a whole experience in itself for a little Italian gal from New York City who had never been past New Jersey, to suddenly find myself in the Appalachian Mountains, experiencing a lifestyle that was just something almost out of another century. You know, they, his relatives would come on down after supper and sit on the porch and they'd all sing these amazing Appalachian hymns and songs and play fiddle tunes. So I just sort of absorbed and osmosed the whole experience and it changed me forever.
DINGMAN: Yeah. One of the things that I find really remarkable about your career is you have released so much music under your own name, but you have also done so much work to reinterpret the music of other artists like Peggy Lee, like Blue Lu Barker, and I'm curious how you approach the challenge of connecting with the music of another artist, but putting your own stamp on it?
MULDAUR: I think, you know, being that I don't write songs. I, I did happen to develop the knack of knowing what a good song is and who the good songwriters in this country are. I also have done a bunch of albums paying tribute to my musical heroes, people like Memphis Minnie, who was a phenomenal blues singer who also she was, came out of the '30s and right around the Memphis area and not only sang the blues, but she wrote and recorded over 200 of her own songs and played absolutely b-tchin' guitar.
The one I want to do now on my bucket list is to do one on Victoria Spivey, who was a contemporary of Minnie. And as far as I know was the first artist savvy enough to have her own record label. And she spotted me in Washington Square Park playing the fiddle and singing and took me under her wing, took me to her apartment and she'd play me these old 78s of different blues women. She thought she was trying to find songs that would be suitable to my young voice.
And she would give me, she say, “now I want you to listen to me,” She said, “when you get up there, it ain't enough to sound good. You got to look good too,” She said, “you got to get up there and stretch your stuff and make all eyes on you.” And then she looked me straight in the eye and said, “that's what they call stage presence.”
And I said, “yes, ma'am.” And I took her advice to heart.
And so when I think about it, now you asked the question at the very beginning of the interview about, you know, if said anyone that said “you've really got it.” And actually, that's what Victoria Spivey was saying that you've really got something, she spotted it when it was in its most, you know, green and beginning form.
