WALLACE, BEULAH THOMAS [SIPPIE] (1898–1986). Sippie Wallace, blues singer, also known as the Texas Nightingale, one of thirteen children of Fanny and George W. Thomas, Sr., was born Beulah Thomas Wallace in Houston on November 1, 1898. Her father was a deacon at Shiloh Baptist Church. Beulah was nicknamed Sippie in grammar school because, she once said, "My teeth were so far apart I had to sip everything." As a child she began singing and playing the organ at her father's church. But on summer nights she would steal away from her home, follow the ragtime sounds of the traveling tent-show bands, and listen to the blues singers through a flap in the canvas tent. On one of her many visits, some of the performers asked her to fill an opening in the chorus line, and her career began.
As the tent shows expanded and grew more elaborate, Beulah found more opportunities to perform. When one of the shows moved from Houston to Dallas, she traveled with it. By 1916 she was acting in plays, dancing in the chorus line, doing comedy routines, serving as a snake charmer's assistant, and singing solo ballads. Later that year she moved to New Orleans to work with her older brother, George W. Thomasqv, who was a pianist, songwriter, and publisher. Jazz and ragtime were flourishing, and Sippie found herself surrounded by young musicians, many of whom later became legends. Rehearsals in the Thomas house included King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Clarence Williams, and Johnny Dodds.
In 1923 she moved to Chicago and, with the help of her brother George, met Ralph Peer, then general manager of Okeh Records. Three months after her first record was pressed with Okeh, she was on top of the black record industry, a star with a national reputation. Her songs, such as the classics "Mighty Tight Woman" and "Woman Be Wise," spoke with earthy directness about love and relationships. The sudden severing of two of her own relationships prompted her to settle in Detroit and return to singing gospel music. Her brother, noted pianist Hersal Thomas, and her second husband, Matt Wallace, both passed away in 1936.
Victoria Spivey, another Texas artist, persuaded Wallace to return to performing in the 1960s. The "tough-minded" lyrics of some of Wallace's songs transcended the blues era in which they were written and appealed to feminists of the 1970s, when a young singer named Bonnie Raitt initiated renewed interest in Wallace. Raitt's debut album in 1971 included two Wallace songs, and during the 1970s and 1980s the two women recorded and toured together. Wallace subsequently made an album, Sippie, in 1982 (Atlantic Records). She wrote seven of the ten songs on the release, which was nominated for a Grammy. In 1985 the eighty-six-year-old Wallace appeared at the annual Austin Music Festival in Manor, her first Texas performance since her departure sixty-three years before.
Sippie Wallace is said to have possessed "qualities of shading and inflection in her singing that marked the classic blues artist." She was known as the last of the blues shouters and ranked among such blues greats as Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Ida Cox and Alberta Hunter. She died in Detroit on November 1, 1986, and was buried there in Trinity Cemetery. She was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 1993. In 2003 she was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame. Wallace is also a member of the Houston Institute for Culture's Texas Music Hall of Fame.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: John Chilton, Who's Who of Jazz: Storyville to Swing Street (London: Bloomsbury Book Shop, 1970; American ed., New York and Philadelphia: Chilton, 1972; 4th ed., New York: Da Capo Press, 1985). Sheldon Harris, Blues Who's Who: A Biographical Dictionary of Blues Singers (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1979). Houston Post, November 3, 1986. Jazz on Record: A Critical Guide (London: Hutchinson, 1960; rev. ed., London: Hanover, 1968). Newsweek, November 17, 1987. New York Times, November 4, 1986.
