Laura Smith (blues singer) Laura Smith (blues singer) Laura Smith (March 1882 – February 1932) was an American classic female blues and country blues singer. Songs she recorded include "Gonna Put You Right in Jail" and her version of "Don't You Leave Me Here". She led Laura Smith and her Wild Cats and also worked with Clarence Williams and Perry Bradford. Details of her life outside the music industry are scanty. The researchers Bob Eagle and Eric LeBlanc state that she was born Loretta Bryant in Illinois in 1882. Other sources suggest that she was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, at an unknown date. In
Where I Was From [...] misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely." "Where I Was From" is also in parts a retrospective on Didion's work, examining how these "confusions" affected books such as "Run, River". Diane Johnson summarizes the apparent hypocrisies of California culture that Didion discusses in the book: "Like all California children, Didion had been fed the old stories of California history, but when she eventually came to think about them, she could see they didn’t 'add up.' The disjunction between myth and reality was too large,