Jessie Mae Hemphill born 18 October 1923

Jessie Mae Hemphill (October 18, 1923 – July 22, 2006) was an American electric guitarist, songwriter, and vocalist specializing in the North Mississippi hill country blues traditions of her family and regional heritage.

Hemphill was born near Como and Senatobia, Mississippi, in the northern Mississippi hill country, just east of the Mississippi Delta. She began playing the guitar at the age of seven. She also played drums in local fife-and-drum bands, beginning with the band led by her paternal grandfather, Sid Hemphill, in which she played snare drum and bass drum. 

During most of the 1950s, the 1960s and the early 1970s, Hemphill's career was limited to the local and regional levels. She worked in several small places in the Delta as well as in Memphis where she lived for about twenty years. In Memphis, she played with a blues band in the 1950s and, when she was not playing, she worked for cleaners, cafeterias, or grocery stores; most of the time she worked at the cash registers. During these years she performed in bars and clubs in and around Memphis. At times, she performed in her own cafes or clubs in Memphis. 

Her first recordings were field recordings made by the blues researcher George Mitchell in 1967 and the ethnomusicologist David Evans in 1973, but they were not released. She was then known as Jessie Mae Brooks, using the surname from a brief early marriage. In the mid-1970s, she decided to return to the Delta. She left Memphis because of the increase in urban violence. She readily admitted that living in the countryside was better because of the lesser amount of violence. She also made it very clear that her life in her new rural environment was not her preferred lifestyle because of the absence of sociability on the part of many people, including some of her neighbours. 

In 1978, Evans went back to Memphis, Tennessee, to teach at Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis). The school founded the High Water Recording Company in 1979 to promote interest in the regional music of the South. Evans made the first high-quality field recordings of Hemphill in that year and soon after produced her first sessions for High Water. 

                       

Hemphill launched a recording career in the early 1980s. In 1981 her first full-length album, She-Wolf, was licensed from High Water and released by the French label Disques Vogue. In the early 1980s, she performed in a Mississippi drum corps assembled by Evans; it included Hemphill, Abe Young, and Jim Harper (who also played on Tav Falco's Panther Burns's album Behind the Magnolia Curtain). Hemphill performed in another drum group with Young and fife-and-drum band veteran Othar Turner for the television program Mr. Rogers' Neighbourhood. 

The French label Black & Blue Records released other recordings by her. Hemphill played concerts across the United States and in other countries, including France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and Canada. In 1987 and 1988 she received the W. C. Handy Award for best traditional female blues artist. In 1987 she made her New York debut, accompanied by Evans and Walter Perkins. Her first American full-length album, Feelin' Good, released in 1990, won a Handy Award for best acoustic album.

Her instrument of choice on stage was the electric guitar that she played in what could be seen as a traditional adaptation of a modern instrument. She did not play extended solos or fast musical phrases. Instead, she used the guitar as a rhythm instrument by strumming or elaborating patterns to accompany her singing. She has also recorded tunes where she uses a tambourine attached to her foot or bells attached to her leg. In 1993 Hemphill had a stroke, which paralyzed her left side, preventing her from playing guitar; she retired from her blues career but continued to play by accompanying her band on the tambourine. 

In 2004, the Jessie Mae Hemphill Foundation released Dare You to Do It Again, a double album and DVD of gospel standards, newly recorded by the ailing vocalist, singing and playing tambourine with accompaniment from Steve Gardner, DJ Logic, and descendants of the late musicians Junior Kimbrough, R. L. Burnside, and Otha Turner. They were her first recordings since her stroke in 1993. Also in 2004, Inside Sounds released Get Right Blues, containing material recorded from 1979 through the early 1980s, and Black & Blue released Mississippi Blues Festival, which includes seven live tracks by her from a Paris concert in 1986. 

Hemphill died on July 22, 2006, at the Regional Medical Center in Memphis, after complications from a perforated ulcer. 

(Edited from Wikipedia & Delta Boogie)