Recorded in New Orleans in 1961, Billie and DeDe Pierce’s Riverside session brought to life the classic blues style of the 1920s associated with such blues divas as Bessie Smith and Ida Cox, with whom Billie and DeDe had once worked individually. Billie belted the blues in big, assertive tones supplying alternately rollicking and chiming piano accompaniment herself, while husband DeDe rendered sweetly ringing cornet obbligatos and solos and drummer Albert Jiles dropped loping second-line beats. The couple later joined the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and delighted audiences around the world until shortly before their deaths, a year apart, in the mid-Seventies.

with Albert Jiles