Jo-Ann Kelly

God this gal could sing the blues I am a fan of her brother Dave but she sang the blues like she invented them, and in fact in a way she did because noone before or after ever had me on the verge of crying my eyes out from first track to last. she was so good that the yanks wanted to claim her. We lost her to a brain tumor far to young twenty years ago if only she was still around just think of the music we would have. So go on treat yourself but be prepared to cry at the lost talent.

Its the type of blues you love or hate me I love the music our greatest female blues singers what a sad loss when she died so young.

Simply superb. Her voice and acoustic guitar playing is raw and spell-binding, the equal of any Delta blues singer IMHO.

Amazing blues singer, tragedy she died so young

A complete eye-opener. First heard her on Radio 2 : Paul Jones Show Best in Blues, and just loved her music. Amazing talent!

She didn't like this album-I love it!

All fine

Writing in the Daily Mail many moons ago one James Greenwood wrote of British singer Linda Hoyle that `this is how Bessie Smith must have sounded had she been born at a different time' Well refer to the title of this review and you've got a similar evaluation of Jo-Ann Kelly.Equally pertinent is the notion of blue men singing the whites, especially as this white British woman sang the blues with far more conviction than a host of more touted figures. The combination of her sometimes percussive guitar and declamatory voice on Tommy McLennan's `Whiskey Head Woman' tells you all you need to know in that regard.'Fingerprints Blues' (credited to `McCoy' -I'm not sure if this is Memphis Minnie's one-time recording partner Kansas Joe McCoy) finds Kelly with a quality of lamentation in her voice which a lot of practitioners of the blues form simply wouldn't have cottoned on to, but then that's hardly surprising considering how Kelly made a lot of blues her own, so far did she get beyond the merely imitative.That's a great help if a performer's going to cover anything by Charley Patton, especially as that man's often impenetrable Mississippi accent rendered a lyric unintelligible. Kelly gets inside the thing on a 12-string in a manner that few others could match, her voice sticking to the lyrical contours even as she stamps her own identity on it.She should of course have been a national treasure, especially as she could keep musical company as fast as Mississippi Fred McDowell, with whom she recorded at the Mayfair hotel in London in March of 1969, but instead she was justly celebrated by those in the know. Join that elite group -albeit belatedly- by putting your hand in your pocket for this one.