Lady Dottie Sings the Blues

Dorothy Mae Whitsett has been singing the blues for six decades. San Diego just might be her band’s stairstep to stardom.

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THE BAYOU RESTAURANT made a short but determined stand on Market Street, near the corner of Fourth Avenue, shortly after the turn of the century. For five years, the cramped, two-room joint specialized in Cajun food and Dixieland beers. It had a bartender who sold high-grade weed out of his apartment; otherwise it was unexceptional—save for the late-night entertainment: a three-piece blues act that drew a small crowd of post-shift bartenders from the Gaslamp Quarter.

On a dilapidated piano, with his back to whatever audience the joint might muster, was a white kid (half-Mexican to the few who knew him) with longish black hair and a wispy goatee. His name was Joey Guevara, and he was a dropout from the prestigious Berklee School of Music in Boston—the victim of yet another re cording dream gone bad. He was killing time, hawking loaves at The Mission café’s bread counter in North Park and waiting—hoping—for one of his new music endeavors to reach touring maturity.

Quiet and intense, Guevara was a brooder who came off as having a chip on his shoulder. Offstage, he kept his head down and stayed away from crowds. He chain-smoked cigarettes, talked little and drank excessively. There was a smoldering look in his eyes, one that betrayed an underlying sense of rage—at exactly what, he couldn’t put words to.

The management at The Mission had a peripheral interest in the Bayou, and somebody gave Guevara the nod to play there a few nights a week. Lady Dottie (née Miss Dynamite) was working the kitchen at The Mission and eventually joined Guevara on stage. The pay was a pittance, and the two began with little more than simple jazz standards, but they made a quick, unspoken connection. And as Whitsett would later point out, that was as ironic as seeing the devil at Sunday services.

She was a living vestige, an honest-to-God product of the kind of life that bled the blues—and a de facto spokesperson for the genre. Guevara was the son of a musician-turned-lawyer who’d sent him to the private St. Augustine High School and the exorbitantly priced Berklee. The sexagenarian saw through the comfortable constructs of the younger man’s middle-class background and picked up on the underlying angst that compelled him to the stage—one of the few vents he found for that undefined rage that made him a stranger in his own skin—and made him a madman on the keyboard. She also saw through the hardened exterior of recklessness and disillusionment, to a genuinely sweet (and introverted) kid who’d become as devoted to music as she was.

In Whitsett, Guevara found a muse. He knew he would never be a repressed minority who’d grown up picking cotton and suffering the ignominy of segregation, but she had. And he realized quickly that through her (and for her) he could write music—the genuine-article blues—and have it channeled by one of the genre’s bona-fide remnants. He was a rock ’n’ roll kid with a gift for the piano whose only real musical association with the blues was a few college courses. But the genre came easily—as did his role with Whitsett.

Then Stephen Rey happened onto the scene.

The James Dean look-alike was another San Diego product from a comfortable middle-class background with Mexican roots—but one would never know it from his lifeline. Though he didn’t grow up under the same musical influence as Guevara (who’d begun piano lessons when he was 5), Rey had been beguiled early by the guitar. Shortly after high school he pawned everything and absconded to San Francisco with an older girlfriend, where he used his charm and a stylish suit to sneak into clubs and play with journeyman musicians twice his age.

That period of his life was marked by sincere poverty and hunger, but artistically it was a movable feast—generating the kinds of memories Hemingway might regale a bar crowd with. By the time Rey stumbled upon Whitsett and Guevara, he’d become a fixture in the San Diego scene. FM 94.9 deejay and local music expert Michael Halloran, who’s helped along the careers of Jewel, blink-182 and Jason Mraz, among others—and who managed one of Rey’s former bands—says the bass-guitar player had been looking for an act like Lady Dottie for years: one with grit that played “rootsy American music.”

Rey was quickly incorporated, and he brought with him built-in connections. The new act soon had a regular gig at Henry’s in the Gaslamp Quarter (where it’s played on Wednesday nights for years). Nate Beale, a Guevara friend, was a guitar-player transplant from Detroit (he also plays with the highly touted act Dirty Sweet). He landed a spot in the Diamonds rotation, and the band’s current lineup was nearly set. Brian “Nucci” Cantrell, the hardest-working showman in Southern California (Guevara calls him The Gigger for the prodigious number of live shows he does), filled in for the Diamonds’ original drummer—and never left.

As the new act congealed, word about it spread, and things took off. By 2005, it had taken the accolade for Best Blues Band at the San Diego Music Awards. Then, somewhere in that inchoate stage, the act landed a windfall corporate gig in Atlanta—where Whitsett still has family. It was both a highlight and a harbinger of bizarre events to come.

“Dottie’s nephew, Pete, who was like 45—and an awesome guy—he wanted to take us out and show us the town,” Rey explains. “He really took care of us; didn’t let us pay for a thing. We were partying and having a good time, and I was actually getting a little nervous. All night he kept saying, ‘You three white boys stay next to me,’ or ‘You three white boys stand over there.’

“I was pretty tired and had thought about staying back at the hotel room, but I didn’t. It was me, Joey and Nucci, and I told Pete, ‘I don’t give a damn where you take us, I want some soul food . . . just get me some greens.’ Well, we didn’t eat all night.

“We ended up at this place, across the train tracks, called the Nude Emporium. Big Boi—the rapper from Outkast—was coming down; it was his night at the club. There was a pro basketball player in there and a pro football player, peeling C-notes off these big rolls of cash like they were nothing. It was insane. I’ve never seen a strip joint like this in my life.

“We go in there, and everybody’s black. There’s not one Mexican, not one white guy, and Pete says, ‘All right, you three white boys stand next to me.’ “I said, ‘You know what, man? A couple of us are from the hood, and we can take care of ourselves. And actually there’s only one white boy here—me and him are Mexican.’

“And he goes, ‘Look around: Tonight you’re a white boy.’ ”

SAN DIEGO is no stranger to the national music scene. Louis XIV, P.O.D., Pinback and Switchfoot are the most recent bands to make ripples on the Billboard charts. They follow in the wake of Rocket From The Crypt, Black heart Procession and Drive Like Jehu, in the 1990s, and the Beat Farmers in the 1980s, all of them specks on the national scene augmenting the few ounces of gold—Tom Waits, Eddie Vedder and Jewel among them—mined from local ore. So in a market with a national presence and clamorous with good acts (Spin called San Diego “the next Seattle” in the 1990s), what sets Lady Dottie apart?

“It’s because it’s real,” says local pundit Halloran. “It’s not a gimmick, not the flavor of the month—it’s real. It’s like The White Stripes. They’re the real deal, and so is Lady Dottie & the Diamonds. They’re going back to the roots of what it all comes down to. Dottie usually doesn’t act her age; onstage, not at all. Sometimes bad words come out of her mouth and it’s like ‘Whoa, Dottie . . .’ She’s truly one of a kind.

“This band is like getting together the ’66-era Rolling Stones, and as opposed to backing up Mick Jagger, they’re backing up a 60-something black woman who’s frankly a much better singer and artist than Jagger ever was. In essence, that—blues singers—is who Mick Jagger’s been ripping off all these years anyway.”

If there’s one thing Whitsett isn’t doing, it’s ripping anybody off. After 60 years in choral boxes and dimly lit clubs, the spotlight is her real home—the place where she’s logged more hours than any other. And that shows in her performances. Lady Dottie is virtually the same person on stage as she is on the street: a commanding presence. Her no-nonsense, cut-to-the-chase demeanor shows clean through, and with it, she’s afforded a lofty superiority—the genuine-article blueswoman—while never coming off as even a notch above any person in her audience.

Cantrell likens the band, with more power than finesse, and the pulmonary moxie of a gospel choir, to “a sloppy MC-5 backing up a street-version Etta James.” And street version is fine with Whitsett. The recent retiree knows where she comes from—and it’s the same place that gives her live show its gritty, inimitable spirit. While the Diamonds always have one eye open, looking for a takeoff that Halloran believes is as close as a lucky break, the venerable diva is happy just to have stage time, and adoring disciples to preach the blues to, a few times a week.

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