Sippie Wallace

Like contemporaries Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Victoria Spivey, Sippie Wallace sang gutbucket blues in a jazz-band setting. Enormously influential on subsequent generations of female blues singers, Wallace served as a musical mentor to Bonnie Raitt, who has recorded a number of the blues pioneer's songs. She scored her first hit single in 1923, reemerged in the 1960s blues scene, and won a Grammy in 1982 for her final album SIPPIE. She died in 1986.