Ruby Starr & Bonnie Bramlett: The Next Janis?

In music, it’s either a cross to bear or a compliment to be called “the next (FILL IN THE BLANK).” In far too many cases, singers who were compared to a legend had impossible shoes to fill.  Such were the cases of singers Ruby Starr and Bonnie Bramlett; they were labeled “the next Janis Joplin.”

Ruby realized that her birth name of “Constance Mierzwiak” didn’t roll off anyone’s tongue. She became “Connie Little” and fronted Connie & the Blu-Beats, then the Blue Grange Ramblers.  Hoping to change her luck, she again changed her name to “Ruby Jones.” But the vastly talented Ruby never achieved “rock legend” status, despite her career being launched by the legendary Curtis Mayfield.

Curtis signed Ruby to his label and released Ruby’s self-titled album in 1971. Curtis even provided her with “Stone Junkie,” a perils-of-drugs ditty that could’ve fit into Mayfield’s 1972 Super Fly album.

Jim “Dandy” Mangrum, Black Oak Arkansas’ swaggering singer, found Ruby wailing in an Evansville, IN club and coaxed her to join his group.  Today, she’s remembered for throatily rooting “Jim Dandy”, BOA’s wondrous one hit (#25 in December 1973).

But Ruby tired of being BOA’s background singer and went on to front Grey Ghost.  On a 1975 episode of The Midnight Special, while performing “Old West Outlaws,” Ruby (in a tiny miniskirt) unleashed a couple of high kicks for an audience who looked too stoned to even attempt to bat an eye.

Ruby sadly died at the age of 45 from lung cancer and a brain tumor.  In the 2014 BOA Rockumentary, Mangrum, 77, drawled: “That was a sad day for kids who used to think about her in the sheets in ’74.”

Like Ruby, Bonnie Bramlett had the vocal chops. She and husband/co-worker Delaney also chopped loads of lines of cocaine. Bonnie stated, “Deals were made with ounces of cocaine on the table, and it was the suits who furnished it for us. There is an old joke in rock ‘n’ roll that says you can tell who has the best record deal by who has the best cocaine.”

Delaney and Bonnie had more hits than Ruby, thanks to “Never Ending Song of Love” (#13 in 1971), followed by “Only You Know and I Know” (#20 in 1972).

D&B alumni include Duane and Greg Allman, Bobby Keys, and members of Derek and the Dominoes. Their highest charted album (On Tour with Eric Clapton, #12 in 1970) is due to their association with the guitarist, although Bonnie noted of her time with Eric, “He was a heroin addict when I knew him. He was dying and very depressed.”

Pat Thomas, curator of the Real Gone Music record label that released D&B’s Motel Shot: Expanded Edition album, stated, “There’s this story of Delaney visiting his dad in the Deep South. And he couldn’t find [D&B’s 1969 album] Accept No Substitute for sale in his Mississippi hometown. So he threatened [Elektra head] Jac Holtzman with his life, and Jac immediately dropped Delaney and Bonnie from the label.”

In the course of her five-year marriage and three years of recording with Delaney, Bonnie might have wondered if she should have never left Ike Turner. In a 2005 interview with Creative Loafing, she said of Ike, who picked her to be the first white Ikette, was “…kind, but very stern. When James Brown found out there was a white Ikette, he went out and got a white bass player. They were really in competition on the circuit.” 

Bonnie, who — with Leon Russell– co-wrote “Superstar” (made famous by the Carpenters) and Clapton’s “Let it Rain,” got herself straight and then, a recurring acting gig on Roseanne, thanks to a rehab center’s fundraiser.  Bonnie recalled: “We were in a play together. Actually, it was a play that had to do with recovery. [Roseanne Barr’s then husband] Tom Arnold was in recovery, and I had a little more sobriety than the average bear at the time. Roseanne said she had always been a fan of mine and would I do her show, and I said yeah, in a heartbeat.”

Bonnie is no longer compared to Janis Joplin.  But when asked what she thought of the doomed singer, Bonnie did not paint a pretty picture. In a 2000 interview with Swampland.com: “I was so jealous of her I couldn’t see straight because they said she was the best blues singer since Billie Holiday. I just went berserk and said, ‘Why didn’t they know me?’ I was 23 when I met her. I realized that I was her and she was me. It was not a contest. I understood her, and I felt sorry for her. She was pathetic to me. She was in so much pain that I could not breathe the same air almost. Her toenail polish was chipped, and she smelled bad. I would look at her closely, and when she perspired, her hair would wave. She had naturally curly hair. She was built like a brick-house, and she looked at me one day and said, ‘Mind if I sleep with your husband?’ I just didn’t know what to do with that. I had to get off the train. It was more than I could bear that kind of behavior.”

-Mark Daponte

-Photo: Bonnie Bramlett, 2012 (Takahiro Kyono from Tokyo, Japan via Wikimedia Commons)