 Jessie Mae Hemphill
As I stepped into Jessie Mae Hemphill’s trailer,
my eyes fell upon Sweet Pea (her dog) and a revolver.
By the end of that first meeting, I couldn’t help
thinking that this was the allure of Jessie Mae. She is
sweetness incarnate, but you really wouldn’t want
to mess with her either.
This same duality is present in her music. Listen to her
voice and you can hear a lilting quality, bringing to
mind a Billie Holiday. But listen to the lyrics, and you
sense a woman who’s seen a thing or two of the world.
As she pulled a hollow-tip bullet out of her blouse she
spoke loudly so the young “punks” hanging
out near her trailer could hear. “A bullet like
this one here will put a hole in you this big,”
she said, making a circle with her good arm.
As it turns out, the revolver plays a practical role.
Ever since a stroke left Jessie Mae partially paralyzed,
she knows a vulnerability that she had clearly never experienced.
This same stroke rendered her unable to play guitar, effectively
ending a successful career that was on the rise.
Jessie Mae Hemphill was surrounded by music from the moment
she was born near the Tate and Panola County lines in
northern Mississippi. Her great-grandfather was a renowned
fiddle player in Choctaw County, Mississippi and her grandfather,
Sid Hemphill, was a blind fiddle player and bandleader.
The Hemphill’s were multi-instrumentalists with
her grandfather also playing panpipes, drums, guitar,
piano, banjo, and fife. Her aunt Rosa Lee was also a well-known
performer who recorded several albums. Rosa Lee, like
her sisters Sidney Lee and Virgie Lee Hemphill (Jessie
Mae’s mother) played stringed instruments, as well
as drums. As a young girl in the early 40’s, Jessie
Mae was heavily influenced by the music at family and
community gatherings; both church music and the blues.
She began playing guitar at age seven or eight, and later
played bass drum and snare in her grandfather’s
fife and drum band.
Throughout the ‘50s, ‘60s, and early ’70s,
Jessie Mae Hemphill played with various bands, never straying
far from her roots. She lived in Memphis for 20 years,
playing on Beale Street when she wasn’t working
various odd jobs. By the time she decided to return home
to the country in the mid ‘70s, she had all but
left the drums behind and focused mainly on her guitar
playing.
Hemphill played an electric guitar in open D or open G,
preferring open D because of its versatility within the
blues structure. As Barbara Flaska writes in her article
“The High Water Mark Keeps Rising:”
Her playing ignores the standard 12-bar blues
progressions and relies instead on the open chord tunings
and repeated riffs typical of the folk blues of her
native Mississippi. Hemphill’s guitar style is
often described as idiosyncratic. Her open tunings are
rhythm-powered and enhanced by an occasionally hypnotic
drone. Her guitar style is overdriven, a little roughed-up
and coarsely textured, but very natural sounding. There’s
not too much in the way of turnarounds or doubling back.
Her songs are driven by a relentless rhythm, powered
by a fierce strum - with a slide up one string and down
the next for accent. Hemphill plays way up the neck,
with both barred and fingered chords, and bends a string
when the mood strikes her. The stomping guitar parts
act as a rhythmic echo to the words and percussion.
 Due to the remoteness
of her native North Mississippi region, much of this music
had yet to reach a mainstream audience. Although folklorist
Alan Lomax had recorded several of the Hemphill family
members in the ‘50s, in addition to “Mississippi”
Fred McDowell, most of the musicians of this region would
remain unnoticed for years to come.
Jessie Mae’s solo recording career began in the
early ‘80s with several 45s on the High Water label.
In 1981 she released her first album, She-Wolf, on
the French label Vogue. Unfortunately the album was only
released in Europe and the Vogue label did not have sufficient
resources for wide-scale promotion. As a result, the album
gained critical acclaim among blues enthusiasts, but failed
to reach a broader audience.
Nevertheless, Hemphill toured Europe on several occasions
playing at large halls and festivals. In 1986 she toured
France and recorded tracks for the Mississippi Blues
Festival 1986 album on the French Black and Blue label,
which achieved some recognition in the US. Hemphill won
the W.C. Handy Award for Best Traditional Female Blues
Artist in both 1987 and 1988, even though she had yet
to release a full-length album in the states.
In 1991 she released her second album, and the first in
the US, entitled Feelin’ Good on the High
Water label. The album won the Handy Award for Best Acoustic
Album that year. The title track is the signature piece
Hemphill used to open and close her sets. As Barbara Flaska
puts it;
Feelin’ Good provides a good
sense of what must have been the feel of Hemphill’s
entertaining at the rough and tumble gatherings, house
parties, or picnics of the region. Her songwriting often
wedded the stomp and march rhythms of the fife and drum
bands to her amplified guitar work. When she played
outdoors, people are reported to have climbed dancing
into trees while others still on the ground turned handstands
and danced on their hands. On the first six tracks,
Hemphill’s sparse accompaniment includes drummer
R. L. Boyce, who carried the tattoo snare rhythms he
learned from his work with the fife and drum bands of
the area straight into the studio, unchanged.
Coming off the success of Feelin’ Good, her
career looked bright for the ‘90s. She was well-known
in Europe and the US, was touring extensively, had gotten
good reviews, and her albums were selling rather well.
But in 1993 she suffered a stroke that paralyzed her left
side, leaving her unable to play guitar. Jessie Mae Hemphill
retired from touring and returned to Senatobia, Mississippi
where she lives with her dog Sweet Pea. She still sings
and plays the tambourine in church. "I am singing
for the Lord now," she says.
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