De Mon, Elli
Wild Women Don't Have The Blues
"Wild Women Don't Have the Blues" is essentially the follow-up to the previous album "Countin' the Blues" (Area Pirata, 2021), which received excellent reviews from the press, especially in the UK, and was even featured on the BBC, in connection with the book "Countin' the Blues. Donne indomite" (Arcana Edizioni), which focuses on the queens of the blues from the 1920s. Following the release of her latest album, "Raìse" (Rivertale Productions, 2025), in which she explores her roots in the Vicenza dialect, Elli de Mon returns to the English language, accompanied by raw guitars and minimalist beats, to a place where the blues is not yet fixed history but living, restless matter, full of forgotten names and voices left on the margins: the African American women of early blues. She performs ten traditional songs by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Jesse Mae Hemphill, Mary Alice and Alan McGowan, Mattie Mae Thomas, Mississippi Matilda Powell, Mamie Smith, Sister O.M. Terrell, Ida Cox, Etta Baker, Billie Holiday. Here, and in the pages of the book, lies the courage of those who sang against their assigned fate, defying social, moral, and even musical conventions. A story of resistance, even before it is a story of music.