When singer, songwriter and guitarist Dianne Davidson hit Nashville 50 years ago, she got a publishing deal on the strength of her songs and a cassette she had recorded of them in her kitchen in Camden, Tenn. Davidson has mostly been in Nashville ever since, with a few interludes that have everything to do with her relationship to the music business. Her early work, cut here between 1971 and 1974, has stood the test of time. Today she remains a consummate singer and thoughtful songwriter who can nail a blues performance. It’s been more than 30 years since Davidson released a new album of studio recordings, but on Friday she’ll release Perigon: Full Circle, a superb collection that builds on the strengths of her previous work.
Perigon isn’t the first release from Davidson this year. 1974, an LP she cut in Nashville in 1974, finally saw the light of day in the spring. Her new music is a continuation of a career that’s been devoted to the pursuit of her muse. Davidson remains a visionary exponent of folk-blues-country-pop, and she’s been searching for her ideal musical vocabulary since she began performing.
Davidson was born in Memphis on Feb. 7, 1953, and grew up in Camden, a town about 75 miles west of Nashville. She started her first band when she was 11, and by the time she was 15 she was writing songs. She nailed down her aforementioned publishing deal when she was 16, and she moved to town in 1970, securing a recording contract with Janus Records shortly after arriving in Music City.
“I listened to Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and all of those people when I was young,” Davidson tells me in her wide, relaxed West Tennessee accent. She’s at her home near Nashville, and says she moved back to town from North Carolina in 2016 after spending time there and in upstate New York.
“So I kind of learned to sing from them, and then I started hearing R&B more,” she continues. “When I did my first record, it was a lot of pop R&B.”
Davidson’s 1971 debut album Baby demonstrates Davidson’s range. Her big, perfectly controlled voice tended to the contralto range, and she wrote material like the album’s amazing Celtic-country-folk tune “You Might as Well Be Free.” The song would fit comfortably on, say, Fairport Convention’s Unhalfbricking album, released around the same time.
Davidson’s follow-ups to Baby — 1972’s Backwoods Woman and 1973’s Mountain Mama — established her as a first-rate blues singer who could easily dip into country and folk. She cut the tracks that would become 1974 at Jack Clement Recording Studio on spec, but Janus, which would soon fold, passed on the record.
“On that record was a love song to a woman,” says Davidson. “I thought people, I guess, would be happy for me.” Listening to the record today, you’re struck by the range of Davidson’s songwriting. In the remarkable track “Ain’t Gonna Sing Rock and Roll,” Davidson makes her case for the spiritual aspects of her music, as she sings: “I ain’t gonna be a slave / And I ain’t gonna be a worker / And I ain’t gonna be no man’s wife.”
By all rights, the sheer quality of Davidson’s 1974 tracks should have ensured her a career as a solo artist. But as she says of that period, she felt doors closing on her. She continued to record and perform, working on the road and in the studio as a backup singer. After leaving music, and Nashville, in 1995 to work at a corporate job, she began performing again in 2015.
Perigon, which Davidson cut in 2018 and 2019 at Nashville’s Sundog Recording Studio, shows off Davidson’s post-blues vocals, which evoke the likes of Bessie Smith and Mavis Staples. Davidson’s judicious use of vibrato matches her first-rate phrasing on the album’s “Solitary,” a classic blues shuffle.
The album peaks with “True Believer,” a superb piece of folk-blues songwriting and singing. The New Age tendencies of Perigon come to the fore in this track, which also evokes the jazz-folk of Joni Mitchell, as Davidson sings: “You set sail for the island of my heart / Blessed by the stars to guide you safely to me.”
Elsewhere on Perigon, Davidson covers songs by Bob Dylan and Gretchen Peters, and she makes the record cohere through the sheer conviction of her singing and songwriting. Perigon is a blues album with a reason to exist. Listening to it, you won’t feel like a tourist.
