I suppose it had to happen. Someone somewhere out there in the big wide world of music would release an album and use its title as a concise summary of its contents. It might well be those streetwise New York smarts that motivated Boggie to give her album that title or maybe she just wanted to put me out of a job.
“Good Girls Sings the Blues” is, as the title suggests, is a blues album and, if it were not for Boggie, it would be a conventional and probably invisible blues album. However, Boggie brings something incongruous to the proceedings for when you think female blues singers you think of someone earthy even confrontational and that has been the case all the way from Etta James to Cathy Jean. Boggie instead sounds like she has just graduated from convent school and that gives her an odd advantage. When she hits her groove with that determined innocence – in “Dumb Dog Blues” for example - her band sound less like the seasoned troupers that they most likely are than hostages to a crazy chick with reinvention on her mind. It’s a new way of injecting life into the blues and that’s for sure.
So while this album does superficially sound like a good girl singing the blues, Boggie’s oblique approach makes for an interesting, if somewhat unsettling, experience. No doubt this album will not be to the taste of mainstream blues fans but credit must be given to Boggie for skipping the prerequisite 12 bars and stalking the big city blues until that restraining order lands on her doorstep.
The album is available for download from Bandcamp.