geeshie wiley (1908-1950)

A Phantom Voice of the Blues

I was once asked if I could go back in time to meet any historical figure, who would I choose and what would I ask them. My answer? I would choose Geeshie Wiley, and I would ask her the question that is on the minds of pretty much every blues enthusiast: “Who are you?”

In the liner notes of the compilation album Mississippi Masters, Don Kent wrote, “If Geeshie Wiley did not exist, she could not be invented.” Geeshie Wiley did exist and she is widely regarded as one of the greatest blues artists in history, and also one of its most elusive figures. Wiley’s six recorded tracks, made for Paramount Records in 1930 and 1931 with her music partner L.V. Thomas, are celebrated as masterpieces of the blues. Despite her profound impact on the genre, details of her life and career remain largely a mystery, leaving scholars and enthusiasts to piece together fragments of her life and artistry.

Marcus Greil (1999) aptly dubbed Geeshie Wiley “the ghost of the blues” while John Jeremiah Sullivan (2014) described her and L.V. Thomas as “phantom geniuses.” In “Unknown Bards,” Sullivan (2011) lamented, “All we know about Wiley is what we don’t know about her” (p. 255). This would eventually change to some degree with the publication of Sullivan’s 2014 New York Times Magazine article, “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie,” but not without its controversy (see Kassel, 2014a, 2014b; Nolan, 2014).

Who Was Lillie Mae Wiley?

Little is definitively known about Wiley’s life, but we learn through L.V. Thomas’s 1961 interview with musicologist and folklorist Robert “Mack” McCormick that L.V. gave her the nickname “Geetchie” – “I just picked that for her name,” she said – and that is the name Arthur Laibly, recording director of Paramount Records, “decided to put on the records,” she continued (Sullivan, 2014). Scholars have also noted that “Geechee” (or “Geeshie”) suggests connections to the Gullah culture (Sullivan, 2014), but it might also be “a generic name for any black (or sometimes nonblack) person from the coastal area of Georgia or North Carolina” (Greil, 1999, p. 83).

L.V. Thomas also shared in her interview with McCormick that Geeshie Wiley’s real name was Lillie Mae Wiley. We learn from additional research that her married name was Lillie Mae Scott (Sullivan, 2014) and her maiden name was most likely Lillie Mae Boone (Love, 2014). We also now know that L.V. Thomas’s name is not “Elvie.” When McCormick asked about the spelling of her name, she explained, “It’s just the letters L.V. [. . .] that’s all of the name I got but he [Arthur Laibly?] made it out ‘Elvie’ someway” (Sullivan, 2014).

Delta blues musician Ishmon Bracey famously claimed that Geeshie Wiley was born in Natchez, Mississippi (Gioia, 2008, p. 125; Kent, 1994), but also we learned from L.V. Thomas that Wiley was “from some country place” that census documents suggest may have been Louisiana and that she was likely born around 1908 (Sullivan, 2014).

“Last Kind Words Blues”

Wiley’s brief but impactful recording career began in the early 1930s when H.C. Speir, a talent scout who combed the South looking for new voices, introduced Wiley to one of the leading producers at Paramount Records (Turner, 2021, p. 33). She and L.V. Thomas recorded six known tracks, all between 1930 and 1931 in Grafton, Wisconsin. Among these were hauntingly beautiful tracks like Wiley’s “Last Kind Words Blues” and L.V. Thomas’s “Motherless Child Blues.” Paramount’s rudimentary recording technology inadvertently contributed to the haunting sound of the records. It’s hard to separate the work from the crackling static you hear in the limited recordings that exist.

One of my favorite tracks is Wiley and Thomas's duet, “Pick Poor Robin Clean”:

Disappearance & Rediscovery

After her Paramount sessions, Wiley vanished into obscurity. The details of her life after her recording sessions remain almost entirely unknown. Some reports suggest that she may have lived quietly in the South, possibly working as a domestic laborer or performing music locally. There is no documented evidence of additional recordings or significant public performances after 1931 (at least not that I've found). Scholars and researchers have speculated that Wiley may have died of a head trauma in 1950 and is likely buried in Texas (Love, 2014), but even this remains unverified.

Geeshie Wiley’s recordings, particularly "Last Kind Words Blues," once marginalized by the unholy trinity of poor production quality, Paramount’s fleeting market strategy, and the tendency to privilege male blues artists (Brooks, 2017), have since gained acclaim. John Jeremiah Sullivan rightly argues that Wiley and Thomas’s six songs “are among the greatest country-blues performances ever etched into shellac” and Wiley’s masterpiece, “Last Kind Words,” is “an essential work of American art” (Sullivan, 2014).

These songs, which “are representative of an era in which contemporary African American music was evolving into what we now call blues” (Turner, 2021, p. 33), have been included in numerous anthologies of early blues, appeared in the soundtrack for Terry Zwigoff’s (2010) film Crumb (about the artists Robert Crumb), and inspired countless music artists, including Rhiannon Giddens whose beautiful rendition of “Last Kind Words Blues” helps to highlight and preserve Geeshie Wiley’s place in blues history.

Lady Plays the Blues Project © 2024 by Yoli Bergstrom-Lynch is licensed under CC BY 4.0  

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