Jessie Mae Hemphill

Feisty Mississippi blues musician

Jessie Mae Hemphill, guitarist, percussionist and singer: born Como, Mississippi 18 October 1923; married 1941 L.D. Brooks (deceased); died Memphis, Tennessee 22 July 2006.

Wearing a trademark Stetson, with a tambourine strapped to her leg and a no messin' attitude, Jessie Mae Hemphill was an innovative performer of the driving, hypnotic North Mississippi hill country blues.

She was one of the few women making this raw and highly influential roots music, quite distinct from the popular but often clichéd "12-bar blues" format and the "delta blues". A respected colleague of luminaries such as R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, and Mississippi Fred McDowell, she was recognised internationally only in later life, achieving cult fame in Europe - and finally the United States - during the 1980s.

Jessie Mae Hemphill was born near Como into a Mississippi musical dynasty. Both her parents were accomplished multi-instrumentalists, and her grandfather Sid Hemphill was a blind fiddle player and string band leader, recorded by the musicologist and folklorist Alan Lomax in the 1940s.

From an early age, Jessie Mae become adept at playing the bass and snare drum in the rustic fife-and-drum bands then typical of the region. Encouraged to sing and play by her aunt Rosa Lee Hill, Jessie Mae Hemphill took up the guitar at around eight, developing a unique rhythmic style that reflected her early experience as a percussionist.

From the 1940s, she played in a fife-and-drum group with Napoleon Strickland, which for many years rivalled that of Othar Turner. She took her first steps as a professional musician at local dances in the Mississippi delta, Arkansas and Memphis. She moved to Memphis in the mid-1950s; there she played in blues bands and busked on Beale Street to supplement a meagre income from odd jobs, and also got to know the likes of B.B. King, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, the latter a key influence on her songwriting. Once, during a break at a venue where King was playing, Hemphill and two other women took over the stage to play, and got such an enthusiastic response that King's band were momentarily convinced that the proprietors had hired another band in their place for taking too long off.

Hemphill returned to Mississippi in the mid-1970s. She had already made her first (unreleased) recordings for the blues researcher George Mitchell in 1967 and the ethnomusicologist Dr David Evans in 1973, under the surname Brooks, from her marriage in 1941 to L.D. Brooks. When Evans founded the High Water label at what was then Memphis State University, he again recorded her, and released her first single, "Jessie's Boogie", in 1980.

The following year, her début album She-Wolf was licensed to the French label Vogue. It was only distributed in Western Europe but allowed Hemphill to launch an international career. During the next decade, she toured in Europe, Canada and across the US. Some of her songs appeared on the album Mississippi Blues Festival 1986, and she won the W.C. Handy Award for Best Traditional Female Blues Artist in 1987 and 1988, despite the fact that her first full-length US album Feelin' Good (High Water) did not appear until 1990 - this time winning the Handy Award for Best Acoustic Album in 1991.

She appeared in Robert Mugge's 1991 documentary film Deep Blues, but in 1993 a severe stroke ended her touring career, and thereafter she lived a quiet and impoverished life in Como and then Senatobia, still singing and playing tambourine in church. Although paralysed down her left-hand side, she made a final recording of gospel standards, Dare You To Do It Again (2004).

Olga Wilhelmine Mathus, co-founder of the Jessie Mae Hemphill Foundation, set up to help her and other struggling local artists, recalls Hemphill in her prime:

She was feisty and very much like a showman. She really was a pioneer for women, not just in blues, but in music, because she did it by herself. She was independent, she travelled all these places, she played all these clubs and juke joints and she really just paved the way, and there's a lot to be said for that.

Jon Lusk