The London Independent, August 2006

OBITUARIES: JESSIE MAE HEMPHILL

By Jon Lusk

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 clichd "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.