Jessie Mae Hemphill.

Wearing her 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 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 international only in later life, achieving cult fame in Europe -- and finally the US -- during the 1980s.
Jessie Mae was born into a Mississippi musical dynasty and thus immersed in blues and church music from birth. Both her parents were accomplished multi-instrumentalists, who played at local picnics and dances, 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, (who also made several recordings) Jessie Mae took up the guitar at around eight, developing a unique rhythmic style that reflected her early experience as a percussionist.
From the 1940s onwards, she played in a fife-and-drum group with Napoleon Strickland, which rivalled that of Othar Turner for many years. She took her first steps as a professional musician in bands at local dances in the Mississippi delta, Arkansas and Memphis, which she moved to 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 song writing. Once, during a break at a venue where King was playing, Jessie Mae and two other women took over the stage to play, and got such an enthusiastic response that King's band were momentarily convinced the proprietors had hired another band in their place for taking too long off.
Jessie Mae returned to Como in the mid 1970s. She had already made her first (unreleased) recordings for blues researcher George Mitchell in 1967 and ethnomusicologist Dr. David Evans in 1973, when she still had the surname Brooks from a marriage in 1941. 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 debut album She-Wolf was licensed to the French label Vogue. It was only distributed in Western Europe but allowed Jessie Mae to launch an international career. During the next decade, she toured in Europe, Canada and across the United States. After touring France in 1986, some of her songs appeared on the album Mississippi Blues Festival 1986 (Black and Blue), 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 effectively 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), having begun to move away from blues even before her illness.
Olga Wilhelmine Mathus, co-founder of the Jessie Mae Hemphill Foundation, set up in 2003 to help her and other struggling local artists, recalls Jessie Mae 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. She was very, very brave."

Jessie Mae Hemphill, musician; born near Como, Mississippi, 18 October, 1923. Died Memphis, 22 July, 2006.

Jon Lusk.