don't call me madam
the life and work of ray bourbon
CD Reviews
excerpt
from "A Shot of Bourbon", by John Bently Mays, Fab magazine,
#203, November 21, 2002 (Toronto, Ontario)
"For decades, Ray's recorded legacy slept in used
78 bins, attics and the collections of aficionados. But with the recent
launch of an affordable nine CD set -- it will run you about $90 U.S.
-- much of the surviving art is awake again, ready for rediscovery. Cobbled
together from the old recordings and remastered to crisp clarity by Bourbon
uber fan Randy A. Riddle, who lives in North Carolina, Ray Bourbon
features about seven hours of Ray's routines. They are a treasury of pre-Stonewall
gay humour and a celebration of Ray's exuberant ability to have fun with
everything. He was an astounding satirist of the human condition.
"If Ray knew hard times, and I'm sure he did, all the pain vanished
like mist before the hot stage lights and the studio mic. There is nothing
haunted or sad, not even a hint of the lonely old drag queen of activist
myth in the recordings, even the final ones. There is only Ray's impish
laugh and brassily gleaming falsetto, the uproarious bulesques of big
city life, the unforgettable voice of a lost world of gay pleasures that
came before this one."
01.01.03/rand@coolcatdaddy.com