She-Wolf

Performer: Jessie Mae Hemphill
Engineer: David Evans; Bob Vinisky; Paul Compton; Danny Wildman; Jerry Thompson
Producer: David Evans
Distributor: City Hall

Notes: Personnel includes: Jessie Mae Hemphill (vocals); David Evans (guitar); Joe Hicks (drums). Personnel: Jessie Mae Hemphill (vocals, guitar, tambourine); Dr. David Evans (guitar); Calvin Jackson, Joe Hicks (drums). Audio Mixers: Ian Marks; Matthew Kosel. Liner Note Authors: Dr. David Evans ; Jessie Mae Hemphill. Recording information: Center For Southern Folklore, Memphis, TN (07/28/1979-12/05/1980); Como, MS (07/28/1979-12/05/1980); Senatobia, MS (07/28/1979-12/05/1980); Shoe Productions Studio, Memphis, TN (07/28/1979-12/05/1980). Photographer: Tom Wofford. This compact disc reissue gathers up all the original tracks from Jessie Mae's 1980 debut album for the French Vogue label along with four remixed bonus tracks, all seeing their first domestic release. Recorded by folklorist Dr. David Evans (who also contributes second guitar on 13 of the 15 tracks here) in various locales around Memphis and Mississippi, the music stays down-home and primal throughout. There's a strong sense of rhythm that permeates this record, whether it comes from the fife and drum-derived percussion work of Calvin Jackson and Joe Hicks or simply Jessie Mae's own foot-operated tambourine driving the beat home. Highlights include "Jessie's Boogie" and "Standing In My Doorway Crying" (both sides of her first 45 single, underwritten by the National Endowment for the Arts), "Honey Bee," "Boogie Side of the Road," "Crawdad Hole," "Lovin' In the Moonlight," "Married Man Blues" and the title track. The blues, real and raw. ~ Cub Koda

Musician (5/98, p.91) - "...this funky rave-up collects the first recordings of the Como, Mississippi native, who's a stirring singer and gracefully idiosyncratic guitarist. Muddy Waters, Memphis Minne, Howlin' Wolf...and other immortals haunt Hemphill's music....Listen and be transported..."

Boasting a musical family which included grandfather Sid Hemphill and aunt Rosa Lee Hill, the traditionalist Mississippi blueswoman Jesse Mae Hemphill specialized in a folk-derived, non-commercial blues indigenous to her region, including that of the fife-and-drum bands which actually predate the blues early in the 20th century. Hemphill's own music is characterized by the use of droning chords and self-accompanied rhythm provided by beating her foot on a tambourine. Her first solo album, 1981's SHE-WOLF, was actually first released in France but she eventually garnered several W.C. Handy awards for Best Traditional Artist all through the '80s. In 1993, a stroke necessitated her laying down her guitar but she continued to sing and beat on the tambourine till her death in 2006.

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