Featured artist: ANA
POPOVIC
The surname
Popovic clearly does not evoke Chicago’s legendary South
Side, just as the name Ana isn’t likely to conjure up an
image of a blues guitarist.
She hails
from the hell of the former Yugoslavia. As with all great blues
artists, the genre embraced her because more than any musical
structure, the blues validates and invigorates the desire to overcome:
life’s hurts and letdowns, the iniquities that cage and
make us rage. And while the lyrics are often dark and defeated,
the blues -- as both a felt and physical progression -- is cathartic:
the transition from F to G in the key of C, from D to E in the
key of A. Because creating something out of nothing is nothing
less than better than good for the soul, the blues represents
a temporary stay against the kind of life that makes us wish it
were otherwise:
“I’ve
gotta mind to give up living and go shopping instead.”
If at
one time the blues was the share-cropper, Afro-American response
to white rule and hard times, the genre today has evolved into
a universal language that speaks to trouble wherever it be.
Ana Popovic
plays blues guitar with an assurance and conviction that make
most men wish they were woman, behind a voice, whose effects,
in the best sense, are as formidable as Europe’s celebrated
acid rain eating away at worlds built on lies and deception.
Her latest
album,
Comfort to the Soul (2003)
includes Don't Bear Down on Me, Jaco, and Sittin' On Top of the
World.
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