St. Louis native Joyce "Lady J" Huston was raised in a musical family; her mother, the late Loyce P. Huston, was a noted entertainer and recording artist in the St. Louis area. Before she was in her teens, young Joyce was appearing as a dancer on her mother's shows. No doubt influenced by her mother's ethic of professionalism and excellence, she also majored in music, eventually studying music theory and composition at Howard University. Her biography credits her with facility in at least 15 instruments, most notably the trumpet—she played lead trumpet in Albert King's band for a while, eventually becoming King's musical director. Now on her own as a blues singer, she has released what appears to be her first-ever solo album, featuring a set that includes eight original compositions (three co-written by Zelma Lipsky), two songs originally recorded by her mother, and the standard Born under a Bad Sign, obviously a tribute to her old boss Albert King, on which guitarist Jason Cooper weighs in with an admirable approximation of King's string-bending style.

From the first notes of the opening number, Your Call, it's clear that Lady J, who spent several years performing on the Las Vegas circuit, is a show woman of the old school— the sound is deep and wide, burnished by a brawny horn section that includes Huston herself on several tracks, and charged with the kind of house-wrecking ebullience that's impossible to fake (aside from her duties as songwriter and lead singer, Huston also did the arrangements for this session). Her vocals likewise sound pitched to fill a room, if not an auditorium: they're flamboyant and theatrical, almost as if she's acting out her storylines as she sings them. A lesser artist could easily have crossed the line into bathos, especially on a heart-rent ballad like Tearing Me Apart, but Huston has the knack of embellishing her lines with a chiaroscuro-like melisma that accentuates, rather than obscures or parodies, the intensity of the emotions she's conveying.