:: CLUB HISTORY ::

THREE DECADES OF THE BLUES
For performers and listeners alike, Laura’s new club quickly became a welcoming home for pure unadulterated live blues. B.B. King, Bobby Bland, T-Bone Walker, Lowell Fulson, Little Milton, Albert King and other noted blues musicians would drop by to play, as well as hundreds of marvelous sidemen, comedians, and dancers. And Laura made sure the club was one where anybody could come in out of the weather, forget about the world outside and the day-to-day problems of life, and enjoy great live music.
By the time the nineties rolled around, Laura was well-known and beloved by the jazz community, as much for her tenacity to survive as for her unerring ability to recognize and cultivate rising blues talent. Without the benefit of press agents, managers, or promoters, the word about Babe’s & Ricky’s Inn spread throughout the blues community to such an extent that within the past ten years, Laura has appeared in almost every major news publication and television channels in Los Angeles. In 1987, then Mayor Tom Bradley signed a certificate of commendation from the City of Los Angeles honoring Laura’s “achievements in helping to keep Central Avenue alive.” In 1994 she was covered on the ABC Evening News with Peter Jennings, and people all over America got to hear the blues from Central Avenue.
Over the years her club has been visited by thousands of blues fans from all over the southern California, as well as the rest of the country and even from overseas. The stage had been graced by legends like Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Big Mama Thornton, Little Esther Phillips, Count Basie, Albert Collins, Ike Turner, Eric Clapton, Bobby “Blue” Bland, John Lee Hooker, Deacon Jones, Keb’ Mo, Jimmy Rip, Evans Neckbone” Walker, Mickey Champion, Ray Bailey, J.J. “Bad Boy” Jones, and Lowell Fulsom, just to name a few.
Besides its entertainment value, Babe's & Ricky's Inn has had great historic and cultural value as a training ground for blues performers. Over the years the club was a venue where new musicians could hone their skills and learn from older musicians. Laura (or “Mama” as her “boys” affectionately call her) allowed the aspiring and very often unskilled blues pretenders to get up on the stage during the club’s legendary Monday night jam sessions. If you showed talent, you might get a gig on Thursday night, and, with practice and patience, the performer could eventually work Friday and Saturday nights with the regular band. This way new performers would have the opportunity to play the blues with and learn from local legends from the years past. After thirty years of cultivating new performers, one can hardly look at the roster of any legitimate Los Angeles blues band or blues recording without seeing the name of one or more of “Mama’s boys.”