Victoria Spivey (1906 – 1976)
Victoria Regina Spivey was born on October 15, 1906, one of four daughters of Grant and Addy (Smith) Spivey, in Texas. Everybody in the family sang, and Victoria started piano lessons very early.
Her mother worked as a nurse, and loved to sing semi-classical songs and hymns. Her father worked a day job as a flagman for the railroad, but by night he was a musician with his own string band, where the little girls got their first professional experience. Grant Spivey died when Victoria was only seven, so she began playing and singing at private parties. She was just 12 years old when the Lincoln Theater in Dallas hired her to accompany films. In her teens, she worked in bars, nightclubs, private parties run by “house ladies,” and gambling houses, usually as a solo act, but sometimes with other musicians like Lazy Daddy Fillmore and Blind Lemon Jefferson. At 20, when she moved to St. Louis, she was a tall, striking woman and already a seasoned veteran. She made her first recording there, for Okeh records, of her own song, “Black Snake Blues” and it sold well, beginning her recording career. Most of her recordings would be of her own songs.
She continued to record for Okeh in New York City until 1929, when she moved to the Victor label, and was also cast by MGM director and fellow Texan King Vidor as Missy Rose in his first sound film, the groundbreaking Hallelujah!, one of the first films from a major studio with an all-black cast. All the while she was still doing regular live performances with musicians like King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Red Allen, Memphis Minnie, Bessie Smith and Lonnie Johnson. She was often billed as “the Queen of the Blues.”
She married trumpeter Reuben Floyd, the first of four marriages. Her second husband was dancer Billy Adams, who performed with her in the 1930s.
Spivey also recorded for Vocation and Decca Records from ‘31 into the 1940s. She worked in musical films and stage shows, including the 1938 hit Hellzappoppin in which she and Billy Adams both appeared. With her sisters she went on tour in vaudeville houses and barrel-houses through Missouri, Texas and Michigan. Somehow along the way, she found time to raise two daughters.
Her career slowed down after the war years, and by the late 50s she was settled in her home in Brooklyn, working as the administrator for her church and devoting time to the church choir and playing the organ. Her companion, Len “Kazoo Papa" Kunstadt, was a pioneering blues and jazz historian.
During the folk and blues revival of the 1960s, she started her own record label, Spivey Records, with Kunstadt.
She produced her own recordings, but also worked with other artists, both veterans like Sippie Wallace (who she talked out of retirement), Hannah Sylvester, Big Joe Williams, and Luther Johnson, and with some promising newcomers. One of her earliest releases was “Three Kings and the Queen” (1962), which included a young Bob Dylan on blues harmonica and backing vocals. Encouraged by Kunstadt, she started writing articles for music magazines like Sound and Fury and Kunstadt’s Record Research.
In 1970, BMI awarded her the Commendation for Excellence for her “long and outstanding contribution to the many worlds of music."
Victoria Regina Spivey died in New York in the fall of 1976, just 12 days before her 70th birthday, from an internal hemorrhage. She is honored in the Texas Music Hall of Fame at the Houston Institute for Culture.
Len Kunstadt managed Spivey Records into the 1980s. The label was revived in 2007, to offer remastered versions of now-rare Spivey label recordings.
“The Queen of the Blues” once said, “The blues is life and life is the blues...Most all my blues is about myself.” In Spivey’s signature song, “Black Snake Blues" you can her hard-edged, tantalizing delivery, a vocalization she called her “tiger squall,” in both her 1926 version and in the 1963 take with her old friend Lonnie Johnson. Her smile still lights up the room.
Sources: