Throughout her illustrious career, now spanning five decades, Tracy Nelson has never been one to abide boundaries. Certainly, in terms of musical genres, she’s been able to meld and/or incorporate folk, blues, rock, country and whatever else you might throw at her into her own musical persona. Tracy has always been her own master, as strong of character as she is of voice. She’s a far cry from today’s Svengali-controlled pop princesses who are, essentially, puppets of packagers and marketers whose interest in real music is both limited and limiting.

One boundary Tracy has crossed is the very real one that keeps prisoners and performers apart. Late last year, she journeyed to Mason, Tennessee to entertain the inmates at West Tennessee Detention Center and gave those guests of the state in which she, herself, resides a performance that has been documented by Memphis International Records on Live From Cell Block D. Tracy’s "prison record," so to speak, is in the tradition established by Johnny Cash and B. B. King but she had her doubts going into the project when it was proposed to her by producer David Less. "Would we seem like dilettantes in the profound reality of a prison setting?" she wondered. The prison population, both male and female inmates at separate concerts, gave her a stirring reception that undercut her initial insecurity. The result in an album that is a singular statement of the humanizing power of music.

Tracy’s journey to Cell Block D began in the early 1960’s when, while growing up in Madison, Wisconsin, she immersed herself in the R&B she heard beamed into her bedroom from Nashville’s WLAC. "It was like hearing music from Mars," she recalls of the alien sounds that stirred her so. Later, she was bitten by the folk music bug, which she refers to as "the folk scare of the sixties." As an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin, she combined her musical passions singing folk and blues at coffeehouses and R&B at frat parties as one of three singers fronting a band called The Fabulous Imitations when she was all of 18. In 1964 she went to Chicago to record her first album, Deep Are The Roots, produced by Sam Charters, and released by Prestige Records. A young harmonica player from Memphis named Charlie Musselwhite played on the album and the two would explore the city’s famed south side where she met and was inspired by such legendary figures as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Otis Spann and others.

A short time later, Tracy moved to San Francisco and, in the midst of the era’s psychedelic explosion, formed Mother Earth, a group that was named after the fatalistic Memphis Slim song of that title. (The song is included in Live From Cell Block D.) Mother Earth, the group, true to its origin, was more grounded than freaky but, nonetheless, was a major attraction at The Fillmore where they encountered the likes of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Burdon who, as legend has it, was once bitten by Tracy’s dog. In 1968 Mother Earth recorded its first album, which included her own composition "Down So Low." It became her signature song and was later to be covered by Etta James, Linda Rondstadt and Maria Muldaur with Tracy’s own stirring latest version included on Live From Cell Block D.

The second Mother Earth album, Make A Joyful Noise was recorded in Nashville in 1969, leading Tracy to rent a house and later buy a small farm in the area where she still lives today. As a side project, she soon recorded Mother Earth Presents Tracy Nelson Country for which she coaxed Elvis Presley’s original Sun-era guitarist Scotty Moore out of retirement to produce (with Pete Drake) and play on her rendition of Arthur "Big Boy" Cruddup’s "That’s All Right Mama." In a way, the phenomenon that is Tracy Nelson is encapsulated in that circumstance: it’s a blues song, made famous by a rock ’n roller, recorded on a country album by a folkie turned Fillmore goddess, produced by a rockabilly cat and a pedal steel player. Eclecticism, thy name is Nelson.

After six Mother Earth albums for Mercury Records and Reprise Records, Nelson continued to record throughout the ’70s as a solo artist on various labels. In 1974, she garnered her first Grammy nomination for "After the Fire Is Gone," a track from her Atlantic Records album, a hit duet with Willie Nelson that Tracy reprises on Live From Cell Block D. Willie (who, despite the rumors, is not related to Tracy although he contends they just might be "the illegitimate children of Ozzie and Harriet") provided liner notes for the album CD, noting of Tracy’s remarkable instrument, "that tremendous voice has only gotten better over the years."

Though she’s done straight blues albums, Tracy prefers eclecticism and that’s what she served the prison population on Live From Cell Block D. Of course, there’s country, including "Walkin’ After Midnight" which made a memorable impression on Tracy. "I was stunned to see a young black woman in the second row singing along with the all the lyrics. It reinforced my belief that Pasty Cline is god." Blues are present with Big Bill Broonzy’s "Feel So Good" and, a truly brave choice for a prison performance, Bessie Smith’s "Send Me To The ’lectric Chair." Lyle Lovett’s contemplative and longing "God Will" is given a wonderfully strong reading by Tracy and the same is true of Bobby Charles’ "Tennessee Blues" that struck a special chord with the inmates. Tracy’s collaboration with buddy Marcia Ball, "Got A New Truck" is a lighthearted look at upward mobility shared with a population who has none.