Query That Rocked: West (Los Angeles Times Magazine)
The Magazine: West (Los Angeles Times Magazine)
The Writer: Andy Meisler
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The Query:
Wrapped In The Arms Of The Blues Our story in an absurdist nutshell: two years ago a middle-aged black woman named Margaret Ann Long Dolan, a/k/a Ann the Raven,* was handling announcing chores at a Los Angeles-area blues festival. She introduced her old friend, blues legend Etta James, who needed an electric scooter chair to make it up onto the stage. On her way back to the wings Ann tripped over the ramp hastily installed for Miss James, landed on her knee and tore her cartilage. She has no health insurance, so she still limps.
Ann the Raven is the blues incarnate. Unlike most talented people who arrive in Los Angeles, then achieve artistic success, then loftily declare that they’re remaining true to their artistic principles, Ann — the most knowledgeable and hypnotically entertaining practitioner of her niche art form in Southern California–would love to sell out. The only problem is that nobody’s buying.
In the meantime she does what she does best, and does it hypnotically well. Listeners to her two weekly programs (Sundays 8 p.m. to midnight and Mondays 9 to midnight) on public radio station KCSN are likely to hear a splendid set of recordings by such artists as James, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and perhaps Janis Joplin or Billie Holliday. Or maybe her signature song, Blues In The City,” by Larry McCray. Then Ann cuts in:
“This is Ann the Raven, in case you just tuned in, darlin’, and I’m dishing out the blues for you this Sunday night. This is a holiday weekend, yeah! And for you people who work — hey! A long weekend. You should be out there playing, having fun. I’m thinking about the things I used to do all those Sunday nights — before I got fat, you know. I used to be one wild chick! And I was thinking: I want that back! I gotta get rid of this fat! [choked sound from deep in her throat that might be laughing, might be crying]
“Life in the big city hasn’t been pretty for the Raven, but she’s hangin’ in there. She’s doin’ the best she can. She’s gonna make you happy tonight, though. I know I will. Because I’m gonna try. Earlier of course you heard Larry McCray with ‘Blues In The City,”– and honey, let me tell you that the Raven’s got blues in the city. L.A.’s a city to have blues in. Let me tell you: I’ve no money, fat, black, hey — what can I say? Broke, no career, no life, love — oh, I need love so bad!
Hey, my city is not pretty, I can tell you that. But I’m gonna hang in there ’till it gets better.”
Or maybe more to the point, on a special “love-themed” Valentine’s Day blues show:
“I don’t know, guys, about playing all this ‘love’ music tonight. It’s just not doing it for me. It’s just not doing it. I want to feel the blues. I guess I’m not happy unless I’m unhappy. [approximately same choked sound as above] I just can’t figure it out. I need to hear something tough. But I gotta remind myself that it is other people out there who’re in love and I gotta play it for the lovers. So darlin’, I’m going to stick with it for a while. I myself, I admit that I — I keep hoping that one day I’ll have someone who I’ll feel strong about. Feel good about. I don’t know. I can’t give up. I ain’t gonna give up. I can’t give up on love.”
Quite an act, you say? Except it isn’t. Margaret Ann Long Dolan, who of course gets no money from KCSN, the low-to-medium power (on a good day) radio station at Cal State Northridge, hasn’t had a real job for over a year. She scrapes up whatever income she can by babysitting and doing other off-the-books chores and shares the rent for her tiny Pasadena apartment with her roommate, a white Belgian guy she can barely understand. She drives a 1984 Mustang convertible with a duct-tape collage top, three bald tires and one undersized spare. She sometimes has to borrow gas money to get to the station. She is indeed overweight; she huffs and puffs as she pulls her wheeled suitcase filled with her personal collection of blues CDs into KCSN’s tiny studio, located in the bottom lef hand corner of a dormitory building.
How she got into this fix is a blues CD in itself. She was born and raised in Stillwater, Oklahoma, where her mother, a blues fanatic, force-fed her the canon. Sufficiently bummed by her surroundings, she headed west in her early 20s. Seque to an interesting five-year marriage, her first and so far her last, to an Irishman in Sausalito. Messy divorce over, she moved down to L.A. and stumbled into a good administrative assistant job at Pasadena City College, where she enrolled part time and — most importantly — got her own blues show on KPCC. Ann the Raven had a long-running show on this perennial competitor to public radio’s Alpha L.A. station, KCRW, for fifteen years. She attracted thousands of steady listeners and became a fixture on L.A.’s small-but-persistent blues performance scene. During those fairly happy years she got her degree at PCC, transferred her credits to USC, and got her B.A. — just in time to watch KPCC get acquired by Minnesota Public Radio and transmuted into an all-talk format.
And oh, yeah: Did I mention that Ann’s USC degree is in Humanities?
Good morning, heartache. She sent her resume to KKJZ, the popular blues-and-jazz station at Long Beach State, and discovered that “somebody there definitely doesn’t like me.” She caught on at KCSN, if not in the job market, and now has hundreds of fans in Germany via the Internet. Also, several half-formed schemes to become a professional child custody mediator; open a combination coffee bar/blues performance space; get a job as a DJ in Europe, etc. She’s also very open to working in the jazz, rock or even country radio formats: but her bluesy job history, she says, keeps her behind the eight ball in those arenas, alas.
In the short time I’ve spent with her I’ve definitely detected a strain of masochism and/or self-destruction: for instance, in directing me to our first meeting she told me that Cal State Northridge, which I’d never before been to, is at the corner of “Lesson and Zephyr.” It’s actually at Lassen and Zelzah. She got caught in traffic and was a half an hour late to our interview.
And yet.
If Ann was the just the Voice of Depression in Los Angeles she would be unlistenable. She’s far from that. She’s a big fundraiser during the station’s fund drivers; as she sits and does her show she gets many calls from listeners; many of them lonely and lovelorn Angelos who turn to her for moral support. She gives it to them; she’s also beloved by her public radio co-workers and by this country’s under-recognized and hard-working corps of blues musicians–many of whom she’s extensively interviewed and whose tape-recorded recollections disappeared forever, big surprise, when Ann’s storage shed was burgled recently.
My guesstimate is that Ann’s about 35 per cent victim, 35 per cent survivor, and a sneaky 15 per cent cockeyed optimism.
That raises the chicken-and-egg question: does Ann play the blues so well because she’s so blue, or is she blue because she plays the blues so well? Either way, she seems to make it back to the studio every week. How? Why? Those are the journo-existential matters I plan to explore in this piece.
And if you don’t give me the assignment, I just don’t know what I’ll do.
Best,
Andy
*Ann won’t reveal the genesis of her nickname, which she says is “mortifying.” I have a good idea how she got it, and she’s right.
