The great American blues singer and pianist Victoria Spivey’s long and influential career began as part of her family’s string band which was led by her father, who would die when she was just seven. After this, Victoria would perform by herself at parties and various events around Houston, and later accompanying silent movies on the organ at the Lincoln Theater in Dallas.

Although she was mostly a solo act in her early years, on occasion she would perform with accompaniment from Blind Lemon Jefferson on guitar. Spivey took her cue from “dirty” blues belter Ida Cox penning and performing bawdy songs about drugs and sex in various dives, speakeasies, houses of ill repute, gambling parlours and gay bars.
 

 
King Vidor cast Spivey as the good girl Missy in his 1929 classic Hallelujah, one of the first Hollywood films with sound. Queen Vee was a star of Broadway’s famous Hellzapoppin’ Revue in the 1930s and logged many miles of road time with Louis Armstrong as a featured singer in various incarnations of his touring groups. Spivey retired from showbiz in 1951, but when the folk craze of the early 1960s hit, she found herself in demand again.
 

 
She and her boyfriend, jazz scholar Len Kunstadt, formed the Spivey Records label in 1962. Her first release on her own label featured a young Bob Dylan as a backing vocalist and harmonica player and the label would release albums by Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, Big Joe Williams, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Lonnie Johnson, Memphis Slim, and Louis Armstrong. Victoria Spivey died in 1976 and the label was kept going until Kunstadt’s passing in 1996.

She recorded her first song, “Black Snake Blues” for the famed OKeh label in 1926. Here she is performing it in 1963 during the American Folk Blues Festival European Tour with Lonnie Johnson on guitar and Sonny Boy Williamson on harmonica.
 

 
One of Victoria Spivey’s more memorable numbers was her “Dope Head Blues”:

Just give me one more sniffle
Another sniffle of that dope
Just give me one more sniffle
Another sniffle of that dope
I’ll catch a cow like a cowboy
And throw a bull without a rope

Doggone, I’ve got more money
Than Henry Ford or John D. ever had
Doggone, I’ve got more money
Than Henry Ford or John D. ever had
I bit a dog last Monday
And forty doggone dogs went mad

Feel like a fightin’ rooster
Feel better than I ever felt
Feel like a fightin’ rooster
Feel better than I ever felt
Got double pneumonia
And still I think I got the best health

Say, Sam
Go get my airplane and drive it up to my door
Oh, Sam, go get my airplane
And drive it to my door
I think I’ll fly to London
These monkey men makes mama sore

The president sent for me
The Prince of Wales is on my trail
The president sent for me
The Prince of Wales is on my trail
They worry me so much
I’ll take another sniff and put them both in jail

 
Victoria Spivey performs her “TB Blues” on Granada TV’s ‘I Hear the Blues.’
 

 
In 1973, the 67-year-old legend sang “Paris Moan” on French TV

 
A later “TB Blues”