(9CD)
BIOGRAPHY
Hemphill was born near Como and Senatobia, Mississippi, in the northern
Mississippi hill country, just east of the Mississippi Delta. She began
playing the guitar at the age of seven. She also played drums in local
fife-and-drum bands, beginning with the band led by her paternal
grandfather, Sid Hemphill, in which she played snare drum and bass drum.
Aside from sitting in at Memphis bars a few times in the 1950s, most of
her playing was done in family and informal settings, such as picnics
with fife-and-drum music, until she was recorded in 1979.
Her first recordings were field recordings made by the blues researcher
George Mitchell in 1967 and the ethnomusicologist David Evans in 1973,
but they were not released. She was then known as Jessie Mae Brooks,
using the surname from a brief early marriage. In 1978, Evans came to
Memphis, Tennessee, to teach at Memphis State University (now the
University of Memphis). The school founded the High Water Recording
Company in 1979 to promote interest in the regional music of the South.
Evans made the first high-quality field recordings of Hemphill in that
year and soon after produced her first sessions for High Water.
Hemphill launched a recording career in the early 1980s. In 1981 her
first full-length album, She-Wolf, was licensed from High Water and
released by the French label Disques Vogue. In the early 1980s, she
performed in a Mississippi drum corps assembled by Evans; it included
Hemphill, Abe Young, and Jim Harper (who also played on Tav Falco's
Panther Burns's album Behind the Magnolia Curtain). Hemphill performed
in another drum group with Young and fife-and-drum band veteran Othar
Turner for the television program Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.
The French label Black & Blue Records released other recordings by
her. Hemphill played concerts across the United States and in other
countries, including France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the
Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and Canada. In 1987 and 1988 she
received the W. C. Handy Award for best traditional female blues artist.
In 1987 she made her New York debut, accompanied by Evans and Walter
Perkins. Her first American full-length album, Feelin' Good, released in
1990, won a Handy Award for best acoustic album.
In 1993 Hemphill had a stroke, which paralyzed her left side,
preventing her from playing guitar; she retired from her blues career.
She continued to play by accompanying her band on the tambourine.....
(Wikpedia)