Mary McBride: Bringing the Blues to America's Most Blue

“Will a black woman like me enjoy a white woman like you?”

Mary McBride had faced tougher questions and certainly a tougher audience during her unconventional 25-date "The Home Tour." Just a week earlier, the blues rocker performed before 400 prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. A senior citizens residence, you’d think, would be a piece of cake for a seasoned musician.

“She did end up coming down to the show,” McBride tells Tonic of the skeptic concertgoer at her June 11 performance at We Are Family in Washington D.C. “What a fantastic audience. They were really just rockin’ and rollin’ – an elderly audience that just really wanted to hear gospel and rock.”

McBride can deliver it. Born in Louisiana, raised in D.C. and currently living in New York City, the singer-songwriter is blessed with a voice described by The New York Times as “part angel, part truck driver.” After releasing her debut, Everything Seemed Alright, into the settling toxic dust cloud of 9/11 and making an appearance onscreen and on the soundtrack of Brokeback Mountain in 2005, McBride has hit her stride, releasing a Christmas album featuring the actor Patrick Wilson in late 2009 and her fourth album, The Way Home, on June 22.

She hopes the current tour — which finds her performing at homeless shelters, children's hospitals, green housing developments and other non-traditional places of residence – not only builds exposure for the album, but gives free live music to those who don’t usually get it.

That includes the most heinous criminals on earth. “I know you don’t get into Angola for nothing,” McBride says of the prison’s nearly 4,000 inmates, 74 percent of whom are carrying out life sentences. “But I think a lot of people who have ended up there are trying to improve their lives.”

“We don’t ask questions, and we don’t know their story,” she continues. “I do know that music is universal, everyone enjoys it and everyone should have an opportunity to enjoy it.”

A week after 400 inmates sang along to a rousing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and gave her a standing ovation (“It doesn’t get much better than a standing O at Angola,” an inmate sound guy whispered in her ear), McBride performed at the Houston Area Women’s Center, a nonprofit serving victims of sexual and domestic violence based in a secret Houston location. In constant fear of being discovered by their abusers, many of the single moms and traumatized kids in attendance rarely leave the center for groceries, much less to experience live music. “I think they were particularly grateful,” McBride says of the audience.

Playing at venues not built for music in front of audiences unfamiliar with her work isn’t the challenge McBride anticipated. “It’s better than I expected,” she says. She doesn’t go into the performances with a set list. “We pick a first song, see what the response is and then go from there.... What we want is a give-and-take with the community.”

Several of McBride’s own songs have taken on new meaning in the context of the tour’s down-and-out venues. “Can’t Let Go,” which includes the chorus: “I got a big chain around my neck,” could have incited a riot at Angola. She played it anyway, to a rousing, not quite riotous response. McBride hesitated before playing “Bottle and a Bible” at The O’Brien House, a drug and alcohol treatment center in Baton Rouge, La. After feeling out the vibe of the audience, she went with it. By the end of the performance, the audience was “hooting and hollering,” McBride told The Wall Street Journal. “They ate it up.”

Audiences are also eating up covers. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Amazing Grace,” Ray Charles’ “I Don’t Need No Doctor,” and Tom Waits’ “Innocent When You Dream” have all gotten the crowd going during the tour. But the best response to a cover or an original song, McBride says, has come out of the elderly.

“I think particularly people who are disabled and can’t leave the building, can’t leave their house, that the level of immediate gratitude is probably a little stronger,” McBride says. She recounts meeting one elderly lady at We Are Family D.C. who was too arthritic to leave her bed for McBride’s performance in the lobby. “My guitar player Paul and I went to her home. She was in bed. It was one hundred degrees. I asked her what she wanted to hear: a ballad, blues, rock and roll. She said, ‘Oh, I definitely want to hear rock n roll.’ So we did a rock version of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.’ She was singing along and moving her hands and she looked at me and said ‘Thank you so much. If only my feet could move.’”

On June 29, Mary McBride performed at the Freedom House in Detroit, Mich. — a temporary home for survivors of persecution who seek legal asylum in the United States. As is true of her other shows during “The Home Tour,” McBride won’t be paid to perform, and she doubts those in attendance will ever buy one of her albums. “We’re not making any money,” McBride said ten dates into the tour. “I believed it before we left but I know it now: There’s no amount of money that anyone could pay us that would be as valuable as what we are doing this summer.”

Photos via Mary McBride.