Yank Rachell

Yank Rachell (b. March 16, 1910, Brownsville, Tennessee - d. Indianapolis, April 9, 1997) – Mandolin player, guitarist, and singer. While growing up about fifty miles from Memphis, Rachell acquired his first mandolin around age eight. He acquired his first instrument by trading a pig that his mother had given him to raise and butcher. Mama was not impressed! Although he couldn’t eat the mandolin the following fall, he learned to play it well enough to eventually become one of the only respectable bluesmen of that instrument. Always holding down a day job to support his family, Rachell sang and played the blues (mandolin and guitar) as a hobby and recorded prolifically in the 1930s and early 1940s. His extensive discography includes many sides on Victor and Bluebird with guitarists Sleepy John Estes and harpist Sonny Boy (John Lee) Williamson. Around 1956, Rachell left the South and settled in Indianapolis, where his wife’s sister lived. Discovered during the folk revival, he returned to the studios in 1963 and continued to write songs, perform and record until his death in 1997 at age eighty-seven. Several of his Delmark recordings are available on CD, and, in 2001, the University Press of Mississippi released Richard Congress’s Blues Mandolin Man, a book that chronicles his life as a blues man through interviews and commentary.