Jessie Mae Hemphill - Get Right Blues (2003)

 > The album

The lady of the hills 

Hypnotically fascinating ! This woman was something else ! She had a unique vocal imprint and a very personal way of uttering her lyrics as if she had missing teeth (which didn't show on her pictures, but I suspect she was wearing dentures, even decorated with fancy inlays !) and/or was affected by some kind of speech impediment. Her guitar boogies down all the way reminding of course John Lee Hooker in his early recordings. Her plain guitar style in reality hides a solid picking technique. Her songs are filled with sorrow and despair, reflecting the hard Mississippi country life inherited from the "forty acres and a mule" times of slavery liberation (which as everybody knows lasted a good century). This dark side of History can be felt in her poignant singing.

Born in 1923, Jessie Mae Hemphill had indeed known, through her family descent or by herself, the hard path from Lincoln to the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King. When this one was assassinated in 1968, she was already around 45. Ten years later, university ethno-musicologist and blues researcher Dr. David Evans started to record samples of her mix of folk-blues and spirituals.

She was from a small village between Como and Senatobia in the northern Mississippi hills country, east of the Delta. Her blind grandfather Sid Hemphill, the son of a slave fiddle player, was an extraordinary musician. He could craft instruments and play fiddle, banjo, guitar, jaw harp, quills (a kind of local panpipes), cane fife, piano, organ…, He also played what was called "fife and drums" music. Famous musicologist Alan Lomax did some field recordings of him in the 1940s and 1950s (*). With such a family, it's not surprising that Jessie Mae started very young to play in her grandad's band. This explains the great technicality hidden behind her apparent crude simplicity. In 1993 a stroke paralyzed her left side putting an end to her playing guitar.

Fortunately the songs gathered on this album were recorded in 1979, 1984 and 1985 by David Evans. They transport you to the rough Mississippi hills where she used to play in local or family gatherings with only her guitar and a drum gear or tambourine tied to her stomping feet. It is precisely this instrumental simplicity that emphasizes the fascinating mystery of her singular voice. Her other singularity is that she adopted electric guitar early. On this album only two tracks, recorded at the Memphis University Recording Studio in January 1984, feature a bass and drum rhythm section : "Shake Your Booty (Shake It, Baby)" and "Jessie's Love Song (Tell Me You Love Me)". All the others are performed using old traditional instruments : diddley bow (**), hand or foot tambourine, ankle bells, hat box, bass or snare drum. "Lord, Help The Poor And Needy" is even performed with just a simple tambourine.

Her repertoire is primarily made of self-written love songs about loss and rejection, or sometimes of spirituals. Four tracks only are covers ("Baby, Please Don't Go", Memphis Minnie's "Honey Bee") or traditionals ("He's A Mighty Good Leader", "Get Right, Church"). And once again her singular voice give them an extra tragic color.

David Evans, who did the recordings and sometimes took part on guitar himself ("Streamline Train", "Baby, Please Don't Go"), took detailed notes of each take. That's how we know today what instruments Jessie Mae played on which track.

On "Go Back To Your Used To Be" JMH is on guitar and foot tambourine. On "Take Me Home With You, Baby" she uses only a diddley bow, and a hand tambourine on "Lord, Help The Poor And Needy" as already said, while on "Cowgirl Blues" she's on guitar, foot tambourine and bass drum. On "All Night Boogie (Jessie's Boogie)", she uses guitar, foot tambourine, bass drum and snare, and on "Loving In The Moonlight", guitar and foot tambourine. On "Jesus Will Fix It For You", she plays guitar without any side instrument.

This unusual instrumental combinations creates a unique sound. If it wouldn't be for the electric guitar, we could well be somewhere indeterminate between the Civil war and the first decades of the twentieth century, at the birth age of blues.

It's down-home raw, it's authentic vintage roots, it's ageless, it's deeply moving, it's beautiful.

(*) Famous ethno-musicologist Alan Lomax's 1942 historical recordings of Sid Hemphill and his band playing at a picnic outside of Sledge, Mississippi. Some songs are close to country-folk, some others to blues :  https://youtu.be/cTjA1a1CjQs

(**) The diddley bow is a single-stringed instrument which influenced the development of the blues sound. It consists of a single wire string stretched between two nails on a board over a glass bottle, which is used both as a bridge and as an amplifier. Its origins go back to Africa.

Infos & Videos
> Some rare and raw documentary videos of Jessie Mae :
- J. M. Hemphill and her guitar, 1999 : https://youtu.be/OaevRGENk3g?list=PLacBKicScak93SikgmsCH8xtVJ5V6Sv8m
- J. M. Hemphill & Friends, 2004 : https://youtu.be/dD2PNxcvlhg
- Live in 1984 : https://youtu.be/rHtVqq09Ysk
- Of peanut butter and food : J. M. Hemphill telling stories on the road : https://youtu.be/xa280JfVvro?list=PL1i5WR0OdmQGZVs6WAgprcHEb8YToIKkw
- With unidentified blind guitar partner : https://youtu.be/bSO0k32JR5Q  & https://youtu.be/joAjpNCoW2A

> Sid Hemphill's friend and band mate Lucius Smith and J. M. Hemphill discuss drums and drumming at Smith's home in Sardis, Mississippi, in 1978 (Alan Lomax Archive ) : https://youtu.be/ThO8cIvGr4o
> Big Lucky Carter & J. M. Hemphill, Holly Springs, Mississippi, 1999 : https://youtu.be/u4LvkN03ePo
> R. L. Boyce visits J. M. Hemphill : https://youtu.be/DxyTE55CNmg
> Hill country fife & drum with Othar Turner, Ed Young and J. M. Hemphill, 1982 : https://youtu.be/gVzzTYzj2AQ
> With folklorist Dr. David Evans on guitar and A. J. Myers on drums at the Memphis Amphitheater in the late 1980s : https://youtu.be/Y-UIyjPoM8A

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