The Spotlight Swing of the Swamp Boogie Queen

But it almost wasn’t that way: From 1964 to when he started taking The Bar-Kays on tour, Webster was part of Redding’s band, performing Carla Thomas’ part of “Tramp” and slamming the keys with her trademark double-fisted attack. When Redding died in 1967, Webster’s own dreams of superstardom died with him. He had been working to sign her to his own label (along with soul star Arthur Conley), but that deal never materialized. Webster retreated back to Louisiana and basically retired from music.

But at the urging of European record collectors and label owners in the late ’70s, Webster started her career up again, recording for small European blues and R&B labels, slowly making her way up the festival circuit and grabbing the attention of ’80s blue revivalists like Bonnie Raitt and Robert Cray along the way. By 1988 Webster had signed to the premier blues label Alligator Records and readied what would become her biggest LP: The Swamp Boogie Queen, which is the Jazz, Blues, Funk & Soul Record of the Month for January 2025. With lacquers cut from the original master tapes by Ryan Smith at Sterling Sound, the album captures Webster in all her glory. She vamps, she slaps, she stomps, and she smiles through ten songs that are impossible to not jam along to.

The album kicks off with the best use of Webster’s charms: covering old soul songs in her boogie-woogie piano style. She tackles Johnnie Taylor’s “Who’s Making Love?” as the album’s first cut, rendering it as a stomping tale of a woman out tomcatting on her man. Webster covers two of her old boss’ best cuts — “Try a Little Tenderness” and “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)” — and her reverence for the material and Redding rings out in every eighth note. “Try a Little Tenderness,” played here as a torch song ballad, is the standout of the album; a slow, sad remembrance of Otis Redding. Two other soul ballads, “Hold On To What You Got” and “Sea of Love” — the latter perhaps best known for its Cat Power cover — also stand as towering tracks here: Although Webster is at her best when she’s boogieing, the pair of ballads lends a level of earthy brokenheartedness to round out the album.

The Swamp Boogie Queen isn’t just a showcase for Webster’s distinct talents, however. Bonnie Raitt, one of Webster’s most vocal proponents in the ’80s, graces a Webster original (“On The Run”) with her signature slide playing and duets with on the Ann Peebles cover, “Somebody’s on Your Case.” Robert Cray adds extra guitar muscle to “Who’s Making Love?” and the Memphis Horns play on basically every song on the album, connecting the recording from 1988 to 1968 in a real way. The Swamp Boogie Queen sounds as though it could have been Webster’s debut if she’d been signed to Redding’s label after all.

As tragic luck would have it, Webster’s time in the spotlight was short-lived. She played Europe like crazy and toured widely in the ’80s and early ’90s, but in 1993 had a stroke that cut her musical comeback short before she passed away in 1999. But Katie Webster still got her second chance, a shot at having something resembling the career she may have had if things broke her way 25 years earlier.