The story is really a coin with two faces. It is one part staggering detective novel and one part fascinating biography and historical account. There are VERY few record collector's of this format of music and genre that would also have any sort of helpful leads in piecing together their collective story. Even more importantly there is a race against the clock to scavenger hunt for people who are family members or knew these women because we are fast approaching a century later. There is almost no one left alive to tell this story from first hand experience.
As it turns out, there are also very few detailed records kept for two poor, black women who may have also been lovers.
For a person like myself who wasn't terribly educated on either Blues or Gospel music, this quote from the article made me painfully aware that I had some homework to do.
"There was a place for lesbians in the blues world. Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter, Gladys Bentley, Ethel Waters, many others — you can’t tell the story of the early blues without the lesbians. And according to the music historian and gospel producer Anthony Heilbut, whose “The Fan Who Knew Too Much” gets into these questions, there was a place for lesbianism in the gospel world as well. I wrote to Heilbut and asked him what he thought about L.V. He knew “Motherless Child Blues” well and said he was confident that any black person listening to it in the late 1920s would have recognized her delivery as “butch.” But would the church have made a place for her? Could you be both?"
This mystery has it all: A child prodigy, female musicians who paved the way for other women and held their own against the best male players of their generation, lesbian history, a scavenger hunt for clues, eerie music, murder, record collectors that border on hoarders, illegal liquor, religion, and an inconspicuous furniture company from Wisconsin.
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