Margaret Lewis

During the closing years of the 1950s Margaret Lewis cut a handful of little-known singles in the rockabilly and blues-inflected swamp-pop idioms for the modest Ram imprint based in Shreveport, Louisiana. Interest in those recordings stems in part from the scarcity of female voices working either style and from the broader decline in rockabilly activity among artists of any gender once the new decade began. Her selections often blended the rockabilly approach with raw blues, gospel elements, and country-soul textures, and she collaborated with established figures, supplying backing vocals both live and on record for Dale Hawkins throughout the same period. Guitarist Johnny Winter also appeared on two tracks she recorded in New Orleans, although those numbers remained unreleased until 1995.

Once Ram’s operations started to wind down in the early 1960s, Lewis moved to Capitol for a series of sessions in the middle of the decade and took up club work in Las Vegas. She subsequently teamed with Ram proprietor Mira Smith, the guitarist who had contributed to several of Lewis’s earlier sides and had co-authored material with her, to establish themselves as a songwriting partnership. Working chiefly in a country vein, the pair supplied hits for Margaret Whiting with “I Almost Called Your Name,” for David Houston with “Mountain of Love,” for Jeanne C. Riley with “Country Girl,” “The Girl Most Likely,” “The Rib,” and “The Singer,” for Connie Francis with “Wedding Cake,” and for Peggy Scott and Jo Jo Benson with “Soul Shake.” In 1995 Ace assembled a collection titled Lonesome Bluebird that gathered Lewis’s Ram-era masters together with previously unheard material, most of it dating from the same period.