From:   "Dik de Heer" 
Date:  Fri Nov 1, 2002  6:11 am
Subject:  Born To Be With You : Sippie Wallace
 
SIPPIE WALLACE

Born Beulah Thomas, 1 November 1898, Houston, Texas
Died 1 November 1986, Detroit, Michigan

Blues singer Sippie Wallace was a sister to Hersal and George Thomas
(both piano players of some renown), and an aunt of George's blues-singing
daughter Hociel Thomas. Wallace left Houston to join George in Chicago in
1923 and recorded her first single, "Up The Country Blues", in October of that
year. It was a hit and led to a career that, intermittently, spanned four
decades.
A leading blues star in the twenties, Wallace enjoyed a string of bawdy hits
that included "I'm A Mighty Tight Woman" and "Bedroom Blues". But following
the death of her husband and a brother, Wallace abandoned blues music in the
thirties and returned to gospel. Only occasionally performing the blues in the
next three decades, she was lured back to the stage by Victoria Spivey during
the blues boom of the sixties and toured Europe in 1966. After recording the
album "Sippie Wallace and Victoria Spivey", Wallace suffered a debilitating
stroke in 1970.
She entered another phase in her career in 1982 when she was befriended
by singer Bonnie Raitt, with whom she recorded the duet "Women Be Wise".
Wallace's 1983 album, the Raitt-produced "Sippie", was nominated for a
Grammy award. Then she got together with German boogie woogie pianist
Axel Zwingenberger, with whom she recorded a studio album in 1983 and a
live album in 1984. In 1986, during a tour in Germany with Axel, she suffered
a heart attack, was hospitalized, returned to the US and died on her 88th
birthday in a Detroit hospital.

Her 1923-29 recordings are available on "Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 1
and 2" (Document), "Women Be Wise" is on a Storyville CD, "Sippie" on an
Atlantic CD and the two CD's with Zwingenberger are on Vagabond.