The late Jessie Mae Hemphill is a legend of hill country blues. Born in 1923, she grew up in a lineage of familial fife-and-drums bands from northern Mississippi. She rose to popularity in the mid 1980s and had a fruitful career during which she performed around the globe, traveling mostly on her own. Hemphill played in open tunings and, having started as a drummer, had a percussive guitar style that included slapping and banging the instrument. She would also tie a tambourine around her calf, which, together with her strumming-and-drumming guitar work, gave her performance the sound of a one-woman-band. In 1993, a stroke left Hemphill unable to play with both hands, but as this 2005 interview reveals, her independence and faith allowed her to persevere and accept her circumstances with grace. Hemphill died in 2006.
Did your mother play guitar?
Yeah, all of ’em played guitar in my family. My daddy’s side played piano and organ and such, but my mama and them played piano and organ, guitar and any kind of string music. It came from my mama’s side. All of them was musicians. I had a great childhood. I used to go from one house to the other and take the guitar and beat on the drums, and I wasn’t but two or three years old.
So you played drums first and then guitar?
I played all of it. I played guitar and drums. My aunty, she was a school teacher and she played piano, and I’d go stay with her and she’d get me to school. After high school, I went to Memphis and stayed with my daddy, and I got a job up there. I stayed in Memphis 30 years. Those were my first concerts. I played guitar all the time in Memphis. I played