Biography
Born on September 9, 1907, in Columbia, Tennessee, Lillie Mae Glover departed her household at thirteen by running away in 1920 to join the Tom Simpson Traveling Medicine Show. Her preacher father’s household could not contain her determination to perform the blues. Multiple road shows occupied her time until she reached Memphis, Tennessee, in the closing years of the 1920s. On that city’s celebrated Beale Street she became a fixture, earning the designation “the Mother of Beale Street.” Over the years she appeared and recorded under the alternate names Lillian Mae Glover, Mae Glover, and Big Memphis Ma Rainey, the last of these used when she cut several sides for Sun Records in 1953. She died in 1985 at age 77 in Tishomingo County Hospital in Iuka, Mississippi.
Albums
