Sippie Wallace wrote, sang and played the Blues over two careers that spanned the 20th Century, beginning before 1920 and ending only in the 1980s. During that time she delighted, inspired and left a wonderful body of work.
Born Beulah Thomas in 1898 in Plum Bayou, Arkansas, in the Delta Lowlands of the Mississippi, she was one of 13 children. When her family moved to Houston, Texas while she was still a child, she already played piano and sang in church; however she snuck out with her brothers to see tent shows. At an early age she became a tent show singer known as the Texas Nightingale. Beulah Thomas moved to New Orleans in 1915 and it was a marriage there that gave her the surname Wallace.
Her live singing success brought her a recording contract with Okeh Records (a so called “Race” label) and she did 40 sides between 1923 and 1927. Many of which she wrote. Her record collaborators included Louis Armstrong, Johnny Dodds, Sidney Bechet, King Oliver, and Clarence Williams.
Sippie Wallace was on top in 1930 when she left the Blues World to be a church organist and choir director in Detroit. She seldom did any Blues for about 40 years until good friend and Blues legend Victoria Spivey convinced her to come out on tour in 1966 doing Folk and Blues festivals. The first new album of her renewed career was the iconic Women Be Wise, done in 1966 in Copenhagen with Roosevelt Sykes and Little Brother Montgomery on piano. That album inspired a young Bonnie Raitt to take up the Blues.
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Wallace recorded another album that same year again with Sykes, Montgomery and herself variously on piano. She went on to record and play with greats like Louis Armstrong and Victoria Spivey and became a major draw at festivals around the World. In 1986, just after a concert in Germany, she had a stroke and passed away on her 88th birthday, leaving a legacy to be admired and for us to happily appreciate.