"The so-called classic blues of the early 1920s were very much an urban creation," Ted Gioia writes in his deeply informed historical survey Delta Blues (2008), "more at home in a Northeastern theater or cabaret than on a plantation or in a humble juke joint." The classic blues, accompanied by piano and often by jazz band, is associated with female vocalists, foremost Mamie Smith, whose "Crazy Blues" (cut in New York City on Aug. 10, 1920) played a decisive role in establishing blues as a ubiquitous big-city music genre.

Born in Houston in 1906, Victoria Spivey worked on the entertainment circuit in Dallas (where she performed on occasion with destined-to-be legendary folk-bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson) and St. Louis. She moved on to New York in the mid-1920s, recording raunchy uptown tunes such as "Black Snake Blues" (which Jefferson later cut and for which he controversially claimed credit), "Organ Grinder Blues," and more for various first-generation record labels. She also had a role in the pioneering director King Vidor's first sound film, Hallelujah!, in 1929.

After a career that encompassed recording (with, for example, Louis Armstrong, Lonnie Johnson and King Oliver), movie acting and headlining stage shows, she retired from show business in 1951 to focus on church matters. When the mid-century folk revival caught Spivey's attention a few years later, it brought her back to found Spivey Records, a vehicle for vintage and current blues-and-adjacent artists. A famous photograph shows a 19-year-old, guitar-clasping Bob Dylan standing next to Spivey, who is seated at a piano. She died in October 1976, just days short of her 70th birthday.

Maria D'Amato joined the folk revival at a young age, most famously as fiddler and vocalist in Jim Kweskin & the Jug Band. After marrying and divorcing Geoff Muldaur, over the decades she would survive professionally as a singer of blues in all its variants alongside occasional excursions into r&b, country, folk and more. Now in her 80s, she boasts a deep catalogue of sturdy, accomplished albums, many for the Edmonton, Alberta, roots label Stony Plain. One Hour Mama is, I believe, her first solo for the Lancaster, Pennsylvania-based Nola Blue Records.

Mostly, as the title cut will warn you, these are blues at its most, let's not mince words, horny. "Erotic" is far too high-toned to characterize these lascivious exercises, which are covered in the thinnest possible of metaphors, communicated in a leering tone that details desires, demands, and delights without beating around the ... um, I don't mean to add my own only faintly cleaned-up contribution to the discourse. It's hard to listen to this album repeatedly over two days, as I've been doing, without starting to think like it.

As you will know if you're versed in Muldaur's way of handling a song, you will expect something close to perfection in the delivery of its particular spirit. But should you give that statement a second thought, you will be hit with the thought that this is not, remarkably, the creation of a young woman. Yet the evidence of age's inevitable effect, while there, won't emerge unless you listen very closely, and probably more than once. The dozen cuts are gems, and hilarious in their wit and brazenness. Lots of laughs are waiting for listeners who, surely knowing what to expect, are more likely to be amused than shocked. (The faint of heart figured out long ago, or at least they should have, that the blues does not have their comfort in mind.) The funniest of them all, to my taste, is "Gotta Have What It Takes," Muldaur's duet with Taj Mahal. Muldaur, singing, lists Taj's sexual shortcomings (real or suspected) while he, speaking in an ever more frantic voice, swears that he is ready and able to hold up his end. The premise sounds borderline sadistic, but it isn't.

As always Muldaur works her magic in front of a crowd of superior trad-jazz players. I don't know that scene all that well, but I do recognize James Dapogny's Chicago Jazz Band (present on three numbers) -- I used to see those guys on occasion when I lived in that city -- as well as guitar-banjo master Rod McDonald, plus a particular favorite of mine, electric-blues guitar hero Elvin Bishop, on a couple of others.

At this stage, because Muldaur's recordings are effectively reviewer-proof, I'll spare you the superlatives and let you fill them in after you've had a chance to acquaint yourself with One Hour Mama. As you're listening, you might shake your head as you reflect that in this world some poor souls actually believe that the blues is sad.