CD review: Sunday Wilde – He Gave Me a Blue Nightgown
Imagine a place like Gip’s in Bessemer, Alabama. A little backyard get together place. Not huge bands, not huge crowds. Now imagine some local gal on a piano, a bass player, and a guitar player. Nice huh?
That’s what Sunday Wilde’s fourth, original, and self-produced CD, He Gave me a Blue Nightgown, sounds like. This act fits in right there at Gip’s, or Hopson, a mere strut from the town Sunday Wilde resides in, uh…Atikokan, Ontario? Where the hell is that!?
Take Highway 35 north to Duluth, take 53 to International Falls, cross the border and take Highway 11 east to the swinging town of Atikokan. There’s a lot of water there. Uh, trees too. Moose, oh, and loons. And acclaimed Canadian songwriter, Sunday Wilde.
The raw naturalness of the environment is exactly what this CD gives you, in all its simplicity. An upright bass player Rory Slater and noted Ecuadorian guitar player David West appear on this record accompanying Sunday, and that’s it for the most part.
Sunday Wilde, who plays blues that sound like they could be at home in Alabama or Mississippi, with a somewhat loping honkey-tonk style in her piano and vocals. Her song Captured Me is a good example. Nothing here is gonna get you rocking. However, in the background is a bit of jazz flavor, and as Sunday’s website states, the influence of the wilderness, heartbreak, pain, suffering, Ruth Brown, and Tom Waits, among others.
There is at times an almost Hawaiian sound to the guitar work. Sort of brings to mind an Elvis in Hawaii meets the blues, as in the song I Guess I Didn’t Hear You Right, a good slow “he ain’t coming home” song.
Sunday is also one of the women who appeared on the Blues Women International recording at Hopson Commissary. There you’ll find the very same melancholia that appears on this CD, and if that ain’t the blues, what is?
From the raw, natural north, comes a raw natural CD. Sunday Wilde’s He Gave Me a Blue Nightgown.