(Van Zula Carter Hunt)
(3CD)
BIOGRAPHY
"My daddy, he, he come out of Virginia and stopped in Somerville,
Tennessee, you know. That's where I come up at until I left there and
come here."
Her first musical activity took place around her birthplace at an early
age, she performed for white people with her brother and cousins in a
group called Somerville Family Band. She recalled that at the age
of five she started singing and playing a song called: Mama Don't Allow Me To Confine, But I Confine Just The Same.
Her parents moved to Memphis during the 1910's and she lived there until
she died. She acquired her last name Hunt from a 1915 marriage with Arthur
Hunt, and she started a family that included several musicians. Around the
late 1910's she began her professionnel musical activity, travelling for
several years with minstrel shows. During the 1930's she had her own
travelling show named the Madame Hunt's Travelling Show with which she
toured all othe the South. She also travelled with
The Hunt Brothers Show and the Neal Brothers Show.
Also during this time she took part in the Memphis blues scene, playing
with local artists such as: Walter 'Furry' Lewis, 'Sleepy' John Estes,
Hammie Nixon, Jim Jackson, Will Shade and other members of the Memphis Jug
Band, Memphis Minnie, Frank Stokes, Dane Sane, 'Little' Laura Dukes, Jack
Kelly, Willie Morris, Gus Cannon, Dewey Corley and John 'Memphis Piano
Red' Williams.
She also teamed up with Bessie Smith and was on Bessie's last show in
1937, before her fatal automobile accident. However, stylistically she
doesn't seem to have assimilated the classic blues idiom of Bessie Smith,
for she developed and maintained her own original style....