The blues was all Ursula Ricks had the first time she sang at the now-defunct Full Moon Saloon in Fells Point.
“It’s the blues. It’s emotion music, and everybody in the room has emotion, so nobody’s exempt. It’s all inclusive. You can find joy in it. You can let go of your pain in it. You can understand your sorrow in it. You can find peace in it. It’s all there,” Ricks says now. But she didn’t quite know that yet when she walked into the bar. Swimming in too-baggy clothing, a hat pulled down over her eyebrows, she walked in as Heidi, a young woman curled inward, fractured from years of abuse and displacement.
“Poor self-esteem can kill you, and that’s where I was at. I didn’t want to be feminine, and I didn’t want to be masculine. I just wanted to be an it, and I felt like an it,” recalls Ricks, who faced debilitating body image issues due to sexual abuse. She’d also just been through a breakup, which resulted in the split of her all-female band, ArJuHei, which she says people compared to the Wilson Phillips of Baltimore.
“It’s the blues. It’s emotion music, and everybody in the room has emotion, so nobody’s exempt.”
Ursula Ricks
At the suggestion of a local blues musician Jamie “White Lightnin” Hopkins, who had seen ArJuHei playing at The 8×10, she had come to the Full Moon Saloon that night for a typical jam session.
She began with T-Bone Walker’s “Stormy Monday” in the style of The Allman Brothers Band, singing with her back turned to the audience:
“They call it Stormy Monday / But Tuesday’s just as bad. / They call it Stormy Monday / But Tuesday’s just as bad. / Lord, and Wednesday’s worse / And Thursday’s all so sad.”
Eventually, Ricks turned around to face the crowd. The late Zeke Phillips, owner of the Aliceanna Street bar, wasn’t fazed by her apparent lack of stage presence. He loved her voice.
“He said I was a killer. Every time I walked into a room, when I would walk in, he’d go ‘Killer,’” she remembers.
He suggested that she use her middle name onstage, as Heidi was, in his eyes, “not a blues name.” She was Ursula from then on.
“I came to the Full Moon Saloon, this person that has so much to say but has always been scared to say it, scared to let people know who’s really inside, and here’s this place that’s just accepted me right where I’m at. That built my self-esteem,” Ricks says. “That hat went away. My pants got a little tighter. I wore shirts that actually fit. I started discovering who I am. I found me, and I had lost me when I was very young.”
George Hebron, a Baltimore drummer and vocalist known by the stage name Rastabla (and my father), was one of the encouraging — and absolutely wonderstruck — musicians in the crowd that night.
“I’ve been a staunch supporter and admirer of Ursula from day one, and I’ve always recognized her enormous talent and her ability to supercharge an audience with just raw, visceral blues,” Hebron, now retired, says.
“We’ve done some wonderful gigs together. Pound for pound, I put her up against any singer out there, professional or amateur. She can fucking sing her ass off. She puts her heart and soul into it. Back in the day, I knew that if I was gonna be on a gig with Ursula, we were gonna have a great gig.”
I’ve been lucky to see Ricks perform a few times, and was one of the admirers who came to see her farewell show in Fells Point at The Cat’s Eye Pub on July 6, 2024. Backed by her band, this force of nature, a woman with a voice like full-grain leather, was performing sitting down, hooked up to oxygen. After 30 years of living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a progressive lung condition caused by damage to the lungs, marked by restricted airways, frequent coughing, and difficulty breathing, her form had visibly diminished. It was difficult for Dad and I to watch as she would amble, out of breath, from the bar’s backroom to the small stage in between sets.
But in spite of her weakened state, eyes glassy with the weight of what would likely be her final day on stage, all eyes were locked on Ricks. She warmed the crowd up with a few originals, then belted “Honky Tonk Women” as if she were an army of Mick Jaggers:
“I met a gin-soaked barroom queen in Memphis / She tried to take me upstairs for a ride / She had to heave me right across her shoulder / ‘Cause I just can’t seem to drink you off my mind.”
Ricks’ farewell show was 19 months ago. Since then, her COPD has progressed to end-stage. Last November, when I learned that she was dying, I reached out to Ricks in hopes that she would let me share her life story.
Born 61 years ago in East Baltimore, Ricks grew up on Chapel Street, not far from E. North Avenue. Her early aspirations were to maybe be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an actor. Singer wasn’t even on that list. But Ricks loved Elvis Presley movies and the “Donny & Marie” show. She was drawn to all Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals — “The Sound of Music,” “Carousel,” and “South Pacific” were some of her favorites — and loved imitating Sammy Davis Jr. in the mirror. Her mother and grandmother, the latter a professional opera singer, sang around the house when Ricks was growing up.
“My most distinct memory of ever feeling joy with my mom is when she used to sing to me. My mom would drink some wine and loosen up, and put on blues records, and one of the tunes she would put on was called ‘Early One Morning,’” Ricks remembers.
“It was early one morning, I was on my way to school/Early one morning, I was on my way to school / I met a magic woman, and she broke my teacher’s rule.”
“She would put that record on, and it would play, and she’d be wiggling and dancing; you know, feeling free. That was, I think, the only time I could see freedom in my mother.”
Throughout Ricks’ life, her mother, who struggled with various mental health challenges ranging from hallucinations to severe depression, was in and out of hospitals.
“My mom was not a mean person,” Ricks says. “Her condition made for mean circumstances. She was an emotionally stunted person. She loved, but she didn’t express love.”
Instead, her perfectionist tendencies shattered Ricks’ confidence. There’s a vulnerable anger in Ricks’ voice when she recalls the time her mom compared her singing to a dead cat’s.
“You don’t say that to a kid. It stigmatized me for the rest of my life, but it did it in a way that ended up building my self-esteem,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh, I sound like a dead cat?’ I’m going to sing more. I’m getting my voice stronger, and then one day you won’t say I sound like a dead cat.’”
She attributes that attitude to the “fighting spirit in me.” She would need it at age seven, when she was sent to live at Villa Maria, a Maryland group home for girls.
“They had 15 beds in this big, giant room, and they had a clock radio that they would play at night,” Ricks remembers. “They would put the radio on, and this one song that would come on had this ethereal kind of music in the beginning. This guy would be singing, but it would be haunting.”
“Ooh, dream weaver / I believe you can get me through the night / Ooh, dream weaver / I believe we can reach the morning light,” she sings to me at her home one recent afternoon, realizing that the song has haunted her.
“That song followed me around all my life, and I don’t know why.”
It followed her, a few years later, through the foster care system to Mineral Wells, Texas, where she moved around the age of 10. There, she met a couple, Van and Susan, who were hippies and taught young Ricks some Kentucky Bluegrass basics that would stick with her.
As she entered her teens, “I played a little guitar, wrote a few songs, and thought, ‘Maybe I should sing,’ because people always said I had a lovely voice. I was never shocked, but I was shocked that they would like it after hearing somebody say I sounded like a dead cat.”
Ricks was 18 when her mother praised her singing for the first time, but by then, it didn’t matter. Her voice, which has been described as smoky and androgynous, had found her, and locals would go on to crown her “The Queen of Baltimore Soul” and compare her to Mahalia Jackson.
“Big Mama Thornton comes to mind,” Hebron says. “Koko Taylor comes to mind. Sister Rosetta Tharpe. I mean, she can blow, and her facial expressions — when she closes her eyes and clenches her fist and sings from the gut — it’s very moving to see that. You can almost hear the years of pain and suffering come out of her. But there was also unrelenting joy within her. It wasn’t all just pain. She could bring joy to the room too, and make people happy.”
Ricks’ close friend Alex Rankin, a Baltimore County guitarist and a member of The Ursula Ricks Project, met her in the early aughts and mostly played with her around Fells Point.
“She’s undeniable,” says Rankin, who was taken by her singing from the first note.
“She’s incredible. It was really fun watching the tourists and people that were seeing her for the first time — just like all of us when we would see her for the first time — just be thoroughly moved and have a spiritual experience. She has an amazing command of the audience. She can have them right in the palm of her hand.”
It blows Rankin’s mind that Ricks isn’t a household name.
“I mean, she should be, you know, as big a name as there is out there right now, doing what, what she does,” he says.
“In a lot of ways, that’s great for us, that she didn’t blow up and leave, because we got to play with her and stuff and be around her. But I mean, she might as well be Tina Turner or Mavis Staples. She’s got all of that. It never made sense that it wouldn’t have come to pass. Ursula is the bomb.”
As respected as she is within the city’s tight-knit music scene, Ricks doesn’t let her undisputed gift affect her ego.
“Wherever you go in the United States, you will find people with monster talent, and Baltimore is no exception,” she says.
“Rick Chapman is probably one of the best guitar players I’ve ever played with in my entire life, and that’s including listening to people like [Joe] Bonamassa, B.B. King, and Eric Clapton.‘White Lightnin’ Hopkins showed me what it is to be a show person, to be a front person. Those are the great musicians, the musicians that pass it on to a musician that is open to any suggestion that they give. Those are the ones with the talent. Those are the ones that can see talent.”
As a musical talent detector herself, Ricks is famously hard to win over.
“She’s got a lot of intuition,” Rankin says.
“It doesn’t matter what your accolades are, like, that’s almost a deterrent for her. She wants the underdog, and in a lot of ways, she’ll help you find your own voice. She’s not going to give you any direction. She’ll just give you a pass or a fail. She won’t tell you what to play or what she’s looking for. She’ll just let you go, and then she’s like, ‘No, that’s not it,’ [and you’d say] ‘Okay. I’ll keep working on it.’”
Although Ricks has sung and played music all over the East Coast, at her core, she’s “just a woman from Baltimore, born in Baltimore, who decided to start singing the blues.” It was here that Ricks formed her band, The Ursula Ricks Project, and released her debut album, “My Street,” an ode to her Baltimore heritage, in 2013.
“I don’t walk around thinking that I’m the best singer in the world,” Ricks says. “I do walk around thinking that I’m the best singer that sings like me. I cannot compare myself to Aretha Franklin. I cannot compare myself to Nina Simone or Tracy Chapman. I sound like Ursula Ricks, and I know I sound like Ursula Ricks because I’m singing for my soul, from who I am.”
Singing has given Ricks the stage presence she lacked when she was younger, and a grasp on entertaining that is transformative.
“I’ve gotten to that frequency that stops whatever is going on in your mind as the listener and makes you pause long enough to realize that you can have joy, that you could just enjoy this moment. You’re going to have a wonderful time, not because I’m Ursula Ricks, but because I’ve achieved the goal that Spirit has given me.”
“She’s not just up there singing the blues,” Hebron says.
“When she opens her heart to the blues, that’s when she’s really able to express herself and all that hurt and pain comes up through her voice.”
George Hebron
“She lived the blues, and I’ve never really known her to pursue anything but the blues. She may be interested in other styles of music, but when she opens her heart to the blues, that’s when she’s really able to express herself and all that hurt and pain comes up through her voice. She personifies it, man. Her voice, her appearance, it’s all the blues.”
Talking to Ricks, now in the last stretches of COPD and increasingly aware of her mortality, the blues is there. I hear it in her robust, Maya Angelou-like speaking voice, which warms the room but cracks every so often.
At end-stage, the majority of COPD patients, Ricks included, experience breathlessness at rest, and struggle with daily activities like cooking and dressing. Most receive a prognosis of anywhere from months to five years. It was a harrowing diagnosis for Ricks, who says she hasn’t left her living room in two years, save for visits to the hospital. Without a lifesaving lung transplant, doctors predicted last year that Ricks might not live to this February.
“I got really angry when the doctor said it was end-stage,” Ricks says. Realizing she may never sing professionally again, and that she may not live to see her teenage grandchildren grow up, felt unacceptable.
“Initially, it’s like, ‘If I don’t feel [sick], I won’t die, so why are they telling me this?’ And then, of course, it kicks in. ‘They’re telling me I’m dying. Oh my god, I’m dying. I’m going to die. I’m going to die in January. How inconvenient.’ And then it’s like, ‘You know what, you’re going to die. So is everybody else. Okay, what do we have to deal with right now?’”
There’s the blues again. It seeps out in the molten form of agony. I listen as it threatens her unwillingness to fall apart, mortality be damned.
For Ricks, there’s way too much at stake right now to let the blues call all the shots. She currently has custody of three of her nine grandchildren, all of whom, she says, have changed her for the better. The teens under her care are her world, and she worries about making sure they are adequately fed and get to school each day on time.
“I can’t go to the grocery store, I can’t work, I can’t sing,” Ricks says. “I’m dealing with constantly needing to make sure that I can have food for these kids. When you do the pantry stuff, they just keep sending you canned goods. There’s no protein in that; no fresh vegetables.”
She’s also making plans to enter hospice care, and coordinating her funeral arrangements. Even in the depths of illness, which, at times, has made Ricks fear falling asleep at night, afraid that she’ll stop breathing before morning, she’s a fierce protector as a single grandparent, and credits her grandchildren with expanding her capacity to love. Caring for her grandchildren has helped Ricks come to terms with the post-partum depression she faced as a young mother and musician. That, in turn, at the end of her life, has helped her understand her own mother, a complicated woman who said hurtful things while Ricks was still developing a sense of worth. She works hard to make sure her still-young grandchildren don’t ever have to question theirs.
“It wasn’t singing that I was born to do. It was loving them, because that’s the love I didn’t get,” Ricks says.
She isn’t going down without a fight, but when Ricks has to go, she hopes Baltimore will remember the sound of her voice, which she refers to as her superpower.
“Remember me when I was singing to you,” Ricks says.
“[When I think about] the epitaph of my life, I don’t want it to be that she died penniless. I am going to die penniless, but I don’t want that to be the legacy of Ursula Ricks. So remember me as you saw me.”