When the smoke cleared from the retro swing boom of the '90s, only a few bands remained. Lavay Smith and her Red Hot Skillet Lickers was one of them. The swing bands resurrected an entire corpus of old-style dancing, slick dressing, and lyrics not heard in public for a half-century. While the posers could handle the hip side, only a few bands could really play the music.
Lavay belts out blues, jazz, jump, jive and swing with the old-style grace and suggestive innuendo of the original hard-swinging bands of the '30s and '40s. More than engaging in musical archaeology, though, Lavay and the Lickers genuinely re-create the excitement of those classic jazz bands that played to fast-stepping dancers in clubs across prewar America.
Her singing style has little of modern jazz in it, drawing inspiration instead from singers such as Dinah Washington, Helen Humes, Jimmy Rushing and Joe Williams. Those singers delivered soul-satisfying blues phrasing set to danceable rhythms. Lavay (her first name fits the sexy intimacy of her stage persona show better than "Smith") works that same good-time style with a booming voice and coy charisma. She squeezes irony out of every line, and ensures the female point-of-view is distinctly heard. On "Big Fine Daddy" she sings, "I love men, I swear it's true, all shapes, all sizes, all kinds/But baby when I'm blue, a big man's good to find/I need a big, fine daddy, a big, fine daddy in every way/They say it's what's inside that counts, and daddy, I think that's cool/Love's not measured by the ounce, baby, as a rule."