Saffire - the Uppity Blues Women

Ann Rabson began her musical career playing blues guitar and singing while she was still in high school. Gaye Adegbalola grew up during the civil rights movement, when she often led protestors in song. When the two first met, Rabson was balancing a musical career with a soulless job as computer analyst, and Adegbalola taught eighth grade science and had been named the Commonwealth of Virginia's Teacher of the Year in 1982. According to Adegbalola, she was Rabson's "groupie" back then. She attended lots of Rabson's shows, and continually asked her for guitar lessons. It took Adegbalola three years to talk Rabson into it, and by then, Rabson herself had moved on to playing piano.

With enough guitar lessons under her belt (and the added incentive of being a single mother raising a child on a teacher's salary), Adegbalola began to perform a couple of nights a week at local venues in and around Fredericksburg, Virginia. When she was booked into a larger space, she felt the need to have someone else up there onstage with her, and she asked Rabson to join her. The duo added a third musician, Earlene Lewis, who both played bass and owned a piano (something Rabson did not). "None of it was intentional," Rabson said. "It just kind of happened by accident."

Rabson took the next step forward when she asked her accidental collaborators to go on the road with her. She explained, "I was planning to go on the road as soon as my daughter finished college. I had a day job just long enough to put her through college. So I told Gaye and Earlene, 'I'll be going on the road after this, and I'll be happy to find you a sub, and if you want to come with me, c'mon.' It never occurred to me they'd actually come, because Gaye was a career schoolteacher and Earlene was a real-estate person. I was surprised when they both said, 'Sure,' they'd like to try it. They both got leaves of absence from their jobs for a year, and none of us ever looked back."

Then in their mid-40s, the women traveled, hauling their own instruments and booking their own concerts. They were on the road for a couple of years, hawking homemade tapes from the stage, before they even tried to get a record label interested. The group sent out a bunch of tapes and were delighted when their first-choice label, Alligator, picked them up.

At first, record company head Bruce Iglauer thought their CD would be "a fun little side project" for the label. Their first CD, called Saffire - The Uppity Blues Women, surprised everyone by becoming a huge seller. Saffire has gone on to record seven more CDs whose titles reflect the band's sense of humor and feminine awareness: Hot Flash; BroadCasting; Old, New, Borrowed & Blue; Cleaning House; Live & Uppity; Ain't Gonna Hush!; and the appropriately named final release, Havin' the Last Word. In 2006, Alligator also released a 20-track "best of" CD called Deluxe Edition.