Jessie Mae Hemphill

 

Jessie Mae Hemphill is a legend of Mississippi hill country blues guitar.  Born in 1923, she grew up in a lineage of traditional fife-and-drums bands from northern Mississippi.  She rose to popularity in the mid 1980s and had a fruitful career during which she performed around the globe, traveling mostly on her own.  Jesse Mae was a five-time W.C. Handy award-winner.

Jessie Mae died on July 22, 2006, at the Regional Medical Center in Memphis, after complications from an ulcer.

Fun Fact: On November 18, 1982, Jessie Mae performed with fife-and-drum band veteran Othar Turner for the TV show, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.

Live Jessie Mae played an open-tuned National or Gibson electric guitar with a spangly gold Christmas wreath wrapped around it.  Sometimes, she used Choctaw Indian bells tied to her leg and played a tambourine with her foot.  She also usually had a cocked Colt Cobra .38 Special Snub-Nosed Revolver, on her lap, just behind her guitar.  Jessie Mae was not a woman to be trifled with...

Her style is beautifully hypnotic, with blues-drenched soundscapes, she vamps more than she volleys between strictly defined verses and choruses, blurring the lines of conventional Blues forms.

Here are three of Jessie Mae's studio recordings

From 1981, 'She Wolf'

From 1990, 'Feelin' Good'

From 2003, 'Get Right Blues'

For the freeload, what was your favorite children's TV show, when you were a little kid?