photo courtesy Texas Music Museum and the Blues Archive, University of Mississippi (1898-1986) Birthplace: Houston, Texas Genre: Blues Influenced: many later female blues singers, including Bonnie Raitt and Marcia Ball Other Sites: Sippie Wallace Page

The great Blues singer Sippie Wallace was at the top of the black record industry and a star with a national reputation soon after recording her first songs in 1923. Earthy and sensual, she spoke honestly about love, sex, and its sorrows in such classics as "Woman Be Wise" and "Mighty Tight Woman." But the death of a brother and her husband led her to fall back on gospel music as a solace. After decades of obscurity, Sippie Wallace came to the public's attention again in the seventies through the appreciation and help of Bonnie Raitt.

Born Beulah Thomas in 1898 to a deacon of Houston's Shiloh Baptist Church and his wife, Sippie began her musical career singing gospel and improvising on the church organ. But Sippie also loved the tent shows that came through town, and soon was asked to join in a chorus line. By 1916 she had traveled from Houston to Dallas, was a seasoned performer, and had graduated to singing solo ballads, fronting a band in Deep Ellum.

An older brother, George W. Thomas, was a successful pianist, songwriter, and publisher of new music in New Orleans, so later that year Sippie joined him there. It was the height of ragtime and the beginning of the jazz era, and Sippie perfected her craft performing alongside the future legends--Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, and King Oliver. With the help and encouragement of her brother George, she moved to Chicago in 1923 and got an audition with Okeh Records. Her first effort, "Up the Country Blues," was an instant success, followed by a string of others. In Chicago Sippie was joined by another musical brother, the jazz piano prodigy Hersal Thomas, who accompanied her on recordings before he was 15. Soon he was cutting his own solo recordings, including the well-known "Suitcase Blues." His death at 16 from food poisoning was the first of a series of personal tragedies which led to Sippie returning for a time to the gospel music of her childhood.

Although Sippie Wallace recorded as a blues singer again in the late forties and went on tour to Europe in the sixties entertaining American servicemen, she rode back to the heights of her earlier acclaim on the crest of Bonnie Raitt's popularity in the 1970s and 1980s; Raitt had recorded two Sippie Wallace songs on her first album, befriended her, then took the septagenarian on tour. In 1983 Wallace's last album, entitled Sippie, was nominated for a Grammy. She died on her eighty-seventh birthday in Detroit, Michigan, November 1, 1986.