19 Facts About Sippie Wallace

Sippie Wallace's accompanists included Louis Armstrong, Johnny Dodds, Sidney Bechet, King Oliver, and Clarence Williams.

Sippie Wallace was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1982 and was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 1993.

Sippie Wallace was born in the Delta lowlands of Jefferson County, Arkansas, one of 13 children in her family.

Sippie Wallace came from a musical family: her brother George Washington Thomas became a notable pianist, bandleader, composer, and music publisher; a brother Hersal Thomas, was a pianist and composer; her niece Hociel Thomas was a pianist and composer.

In 1915, Sippie Wallace moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, with Hersal.

Two years later she married Matt Sippie Wallace and took his surname.

Sippie Wallace followed her brothers to Chicago in 1923 and worked her way into the city's bustling jazz scene.

Sippie Wallace's reputation led to a recording contract with Okeh Records in 1923.

Sippie Wallace's first recorded songs, "Shorty George" and "Up the Country Blues", the former written with her brother George, sold well enough to make her a blues star in the early 1920s.

Matt Sippie Wallace died in 1936 and George Thomas Washington died on March 6,1937.

For some 40 years, Sippie Wallace was a singer and organist at the Leland Baptist Church in Detroit.

Sippie Wallace recorded an album, Women Be Wise, on October 31,1966, in Copenhagen, Denmark, with Roosevelt Sykes and Little Brother Montgomery playing the piano.

Sippie Wallace recorded another album in 1966, Sings the Blues, on which she accompanied herself on piano on the title song, with Sykes or Montgomery playing piano on other tracks.

Sippie Wallace toured and recorded with Raitt in the 1970s and 1980s and continued to perform on her own.

Sippie Wallace appeared at the Newport Folk Festival in 1966 and 1967, toured Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival in 1966, performed at the Chicago Blues Festival in 1967 and the Ann Arbor Blues Festival in 1972, and appeared at Lincoln Center in New York in 1977.

Sippie Wallace appeared in the 1982 documentary Jammin' with the Blues Greats.

In March 1986, following a concert at the Burghausen Jazz Festival in Germany, Sippie Wallace suffered a severe stroke and was hospitalized.

Sippie Wallace returned to the United States and died on her 88th birthday, at Sinai Hospital in Detroit.

Sippie Wallace is buried at Trinity Cemetery, in Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan.