No love. No money. No solid plan. She’s L.A.’s preeminent blues deejay and, man, does she know the territory. by andy meisler

Our story in a Blues Nouveau nutshell:

Three years ago, an African American woman named Margaret Ann Long-Dolan, aka longtime local radio deejay Ann the Raven, was handling the announcing chores at a Los Angeles-area blues festival. Ann the Raven, who is in her late 40s (“Late, late, late 40s,” she says) had the honor of introducing the festival’s headliner, mid-60ish blues legend Etta James, who at the time, unfortunately, was overweight and needed an electric scooter chair to make it onto the stage.

Unfortunately, Ann--most of her many friends call her that--tripped over the ramp installed for Ms. James, fell heavily on her right knee and badly tore the cartilage. She had--still has--no health insurance, and after one Medi-Cal-funded operation, her leg has not totally healed. She’s also gained about 40 pounds from enforced immobility.

Since she lost her last regular paying job as a driver for a limousine company that went bankrupt, Ann the Raven has had no reliable income. She scrapes together whatever money she can by baby-sitting and doing other off-the-books chores, living with her 11-year-old terrier mix, Miss Thang. Until recently she shared the rent for her third of an Echo Park triplex with a roommate, a gay Belgian construction worker/video editor whose limited English she could barely understand. One day he decamped for Florida, leaving her in the lurch. She drives a 1984 Mustang convertible with a duct tape-patched top, three bald tires and one undersized spare. She sometimes has to borrow gas money to get to her radio station.

Ann the Raven tells her own story best, and she does it hypnotically well. If you’re able to tune in to her low-to-medium power (on a good day) signal on public radio station KCSN (88.5 FM, from 8 p.m. to midnight on Sundays and 9 to midnight on Mondays), you’re likely to hear some splendid blues recordings by artists such as James, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Stevie Ray Vaughan and, perhaps, Janis Joplin or Billie Holiday. And probably her signature song, “Blues in the City,” by Larry McCray. All speak to the exquisitely bittersweet nature of the human condition.

Then Ann the Raven, who works at KCSN without pay, will cut in:

“This is Ann the Raven, in case you just tuned in, darlin’, and I’m dishing out the blues for you this Sunday night. This is a holiday weekend, yeah! And for you people who work--hey! A long weekend. You should be out there playing, having fun. I’m thinking about the things I used to do all those Sunday nights--before I got fat, you know. I used to be one wild chick! And I was thinking: I want that back! I gotta get rid of this fat! [Choked sound from deep in her throat that might be laughing, might be crying.]

“Life in the big city hasn’t been pretty for the Raven, but she’s hangin’ in there. She’s doin’ the best she can. She’s gonna make you happy tonight, though. I know I will. Because I’m gonna try. Earlier, of course, you heard Larry McCray with ‘Blues in the City,’--and honey, let me tell you that the Raven’s got blues in the city. L.A.’s a city to have blues in. Let me tell you: I’ve no money, fat, black, hey--what can I say? Broke, no career, no life, love--oh, I need love so bad! Hey, my city is not pretty, I can tell you that. But I’m gonna hang in there ‘til it gets better.”

Or maybe more to the point, on a special “love-themed” Valentine’s Day show:

“I don’t know, guys, about playing all this ‘love’ music tonight. It’s just not doing it for me. It’s just not doing it. I want to feel the blues. I guess I’m not happy unless I’m unhappy. [Approximately same choked sound as before.] I just can’t figure it out. I need to hear something tough. But I gotta remind myself that it is other people out there who’re in love and I gotta play it for the lovers. So darlin’, I’m going to stick with it for a while. I myself, I admit that I--I keep hoping that one day I’ll have someone who I’ll feel strong about. Feel good about. I don’t know. I can’t give up. I ain’t gonna give up. I can’t give up on love.”

So, arguably, Ann the Raven is Southern California’s Queen of the Blues--local sovereign, that is, of an art form that’s purely American and absolutely seminal to such varied offspring as jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, soul, R&B; and even rap. Unfortunately, the show that made her reputation--a sweet, four-hour Saturday-night slot on powerful KPCC in Pasadena--ended abruptly in 2000 after 15 years. Unfortunately too, at this point in history, the music of her life is so intensely out of fashion that the few touring blues performers who make money are elderly legends such as King or Hooker. A devotion to the art form--just like always, one might argue--is more than ever before an act of extreme faith and eloquently self-expressed suffering.

No thanks,” says Ann the Raven. “I feel cool enough to limp tonight.”

She smiles and declines an outstretched male arm. A fairly new listener has offered to drive her to her “job” one recent Monday evening; she slowly and carefully lowers herself onto his fairly new car’s passenger seat and places her carrying case of blues CDs on the back seat. After rush hour, the campus of Cal State Northridge, home of the radio station where she “works,” is about a gallon and a half to the northwest.

To longtime listeners of Southern California public radio--particularly relative powerhouses such as KCRW, KUSC and KKJZ--KCSN is practically a living museum. Located in a ground-floor corner of a hard-to-find dorm building, it runs an “Arts and Roots” format: in other words, no noncommercial staples such as “Morning Edition” or “All Things Considered”; no Garrison Keillor, Terry Gross, Ira Glass, Larry Mantle or Nic Harcourt. Just classical music during the daytime and practically everything that isn’t--from bluegrass to hip-hop to Broadway to All Beatles to All Grateful Dead to Hawaiian--in the evenings and on weekends.

Most of the on-air staff is unpaid; only a handful of full-timers, veteran radio survivors all, are salaried. Everybody engineers his or her own show, most in soundproof isolation.

On her way into the studio Ann greets the host of “The Dylan Hour,” a divorced mom named Kiki Whitman (on-air name “Kiki Wow”) who works in labor relations at Warner Bros., as Kiki is on her way out. Ann dims the lights for proper atmospherics, squints suspiciously at a balky CD drive that’s given her trouble in the past, and begins fading in and out of three- and four-song sets.

She rolls promos for other KCSN shows and recites the station’s hourly thank-you to underwriter Sempra Energy--not without some irony, she mentions off the air, because her own gas bill is close to terminally past due. She takes phone calls while the music plays, many from old KPCC fans rediscovering her unmistakable voice, and some from lovelorn or down-and-out listeners who need a particular blues lament to help them get through their crisis. As much as time and her CD case allow, Ann commiserates with their troubles and strives to play their requests. She sends them best wishes, too, in her own between-set disquisitions on poverty, loneliness, lovelessness and persistence.

By 10 p.m., the blues have begun to work their magic. Ann’s mood noticeably lightens and her laments grow more optimistic. By midnight, after packing up her CDs and hooking up the station’s unmanned overnight BBC News feed, she heads out to the deserted campus parking lot.

“My fantasy,” she says, looking up at the starless sky, her limp a tad lessened, “is for once in my life to actually get paid for doing this.”

That’s Ann the Raven’s ultimate goal. Her alternate aim is to make a decent living, somehow, in some other area of music, radio or entertainment. These ambitions are shared--some might even say enabled--by a loyal corps of friends and fans.

“What’s different about her show than any other blues show is that she’s not just an academic who’s studied the music and sits there telling you when it was recorded and who was in the studio session,” says Pam Mosher, a commercial and documentary filmmaker based in Arcadia who has known Ann for more than a decade. “She’s got the blues, and you’re experiencing it with her.”

For the last few years Mosher has been assembling footage of Ann, taken at her studio and at blues festivals, and is hoping to assemble it into a definitive documentary. So far, however, its definitive form has not quite gelled.

Another staunch supporter is Carlo Weber, a retired psychologist and mental health administrator. “She’s a great entertainer. Very flamboyant,” he says.

Weber met Ann in 2000 when she came to him for therapy. “We’re way beyond that now,” he says. After his retirement, the doctor-patient relationship morphed into true friendship. Weber sometimes spends long hours on the phone with Ann, and journeys from his home in Camarillo to Los Angeles to treat her to lunch or dinner.

Says Fred Johnson, general manager of KCSN: “It’s part of my job to thank the ground she walks on when she comes in here. I don’t know long she can go on doing it, but I hope it’s forever.”

The trouble with that fond wish is yet another twist of Ann’s blues-tinged tale: As blues mistress of KCSN, she hosts one of only three blues-centric radio shows in Southern California. Left-wing KPFK has a 90-minute show on Thursday evenings. The primo slot is at KKJZ, a much more solvent and powerful jazz-oriented station that pays most of its on-air personalities and airs blues for five hours each Saturday and Sunday afternoon. The genial weekend host of “Nothin’ but the Blues” is Sean Heitkemper, a 34-year-old Cal State Long Beach graduate who started as an intern and is the acting general manager of KKJZ. Heitkemper says he is a longtime admirer of Ann the Raven, although the two have never met.

Heitkemper is white--as are, in fact, the great majority of today’s young or even youngish blues performers; backup musicians; aficionados (including most of Ann’s fan base and friends); independent record producers and festival organizers. So are most of the people who might have the chance to give Ann the Raven a paying job. She doesn’t hesitate to blame her lack of gainful employment on racism.

“You don’t get the benefit of the doubt,” she says. “You go to a job interview and you get bad vibes--even from the receptionist, and she has nothing to do with the interview--from the get-go. It’s got to put you in the wrong state of mind. People can’t help themselves. It comes naturally. Sometimes they don’t even know they’re doing it.”

It’s rumored that the revered Delta bluesman Robert Johnson (1911-1938) once sold his soul to the devil in order to write and play songs such as “Cross Road Blues,” “Hellhound on My Trail” and “Sweet Home Chicago.” Sometimes it seems like the devil had one last prank to play--on Margaret Ann Long of Jones, Okla., a suburb of Oklahoma City.

Unlike Johnson, a sharecropper’s stepson, Long grew up in a middle-class neighborhood and attended integrated schools. She didn’t even like the blues, which her mother, Iva, played incessantly on the phonograph. “She loved Jimmy Reed,” Ann says, naming a famous blues singer of the ‘50s and early ‘60s. “That’s all I heard all day long. Jimmy Reed, Jimmy Reed, Jimmy Reed!”

After a couple of years attending a local college that offered a heavily agricultural curriculum, the 20-year-old Long grew bored with Oklahoma, moved to Houston, enrolled in court reporting school, got high marks, and was about to graduate and start her career when the school went bankrupt--leaving her without credentials. It also was in Houston that she met an illegal Irish immigrant named Dolan. “I knew it was love. It had to be love,” says Ann. “Well, it was and it wasn’t.”

After Long married him, the newly legalized Dolan, a chef, decided to relocate to San Francisco for the same reason as a lot of other men. One day several years later Ann walked in on him in same-sex delicto. After the 1982 divorce she moved in with a female cousin living in Duarte, got a job as an administrative assistant at nearby Pasadena City College, and signed up for its two-year program in radio and television with hopes of transferring to the film school at USC. Some of her new friends began calling her Ann the Raven after a highly personal misadventure she underwent that she insists is far too embarrassing to disclose.

As Ann the Raven, though, she talked her way onto KPCC-FM, which at the time was running a traditional jazz format.

Her first assignment was a Big Bands program, called “Afternoon Delight,” which she gamely endured while planning her escape. “I started listening to the blues while I was playing all that old jazz, and I decided I liked it more and more all the time,” Ann says. She wrangled a two-hour blues show from midnight to 2 a.m. on Saturdays, and it was such a success that she got a weekly Saturday night blues show from midnight to 4 a.m. No pay, of course.

Her show was a hit--at least in terms of local visibility and pledge-drive proceeds. Then-KPCC music director Johnson remembers a lot of pledges coming in from the blues-stricken inmates of several Southern California prisons. Record companies and blues festival organizers showered Ann with CDs and freebie tickets, and she amassed a priceless collection of taped interviews with notable blues musicians--most of which were lost in a burglary of her apartment several years ago.

Ann the Raven’s birthday, July 14, became the approximate date of a can’t-miss annual party, usually held in a blues bar in Old Town Pasadena, featuring most of the bands and fans of the L.A.-area blues scene. She amassed a package of scholarships and loans, successfully transferred to Southern Cal--and lived happily ever after?

Not even close.

USC was a fiasco. Her application to film school was turned down--racism again, says Ann--and she says she graduated with a pile of unpaid student loans. During the 1990s she worked as an artist’s assistant while holding down her air shift at KPCC. She also began a long, doomed relationship with a local police officer whose wife, from whom he was separated, opposed divorce on religious grounds. Then, on Jan. 1, 2000, KPCC was taken over by public radio powerhouse Minnesota Public Radio. In March the station format was changed to news and talk--most of the staff news people and talkers being salaried, by the way--and Ann and the rest of her musical colleagues were out.

In 2003, Johnson called from his new job at KCSN, and Ann was on the air again. She has slowly been building up her audience and, more slowly, her contacts with “the industry.” She’s also sending out her resume. No meaningful replies so far, but who knows?

In the meantime, there’s the little matter of survival. But Ann the Raven has a plan. Even during the wilderness years, her birthday was still celebrated with a blues party to end all others. So this summer, says Ann, she plans to turn the celebration into her own, hopefully profitable, blues extravaganza. She’s named it the “1st Annual Pasadena Blues Festival,” and already has put down a deposit on the Farnsworth Park Amphitheater for tonight. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do if this thing doesn’t work,” she says.

She pauses a few moments, the saddest imaginable “Who am I kidding?” expression on her face.

“I guess,” she says, finally, “I’ll just have to think of something else.”