‘My Mother Told Me . . .’

Last week, I wrote about Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas and the six tracks they recorded for the Paramount label in Grafton, Wisconsin, in the spring of 1930. As I noted in that piece, Wiley’s given name was Lillie Mae and Thomas was actually called L.V., her initials. Since then, thoughts of the two and the piece I wrote have been tumbling around in my head, reminding me of things I maybe should have included and of things I may have left unclear. 

I failed to mention that although little is known about Wiley, more is known about Thomas. Research by blues historian Robert “Mack” McCormick presented – perhaps not all that ethically, but that’s another story – by Jeremiah John Sullivan in the New York Times tells us that Thomas was born in Houston, died there and is buried there and much more as well. Thomas, in Sullivan’s “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie,” come more fully to life, with tales of being a young musician, of the recording sessions in Grafton, and of her long life in Houston. 

There’s even a picture of an aging Thomas in her wheelchair and a photo of her grave marker. She was born in 1891 and died in 1979. 

Wiley remains mostly a phantom. As Sullivan wrote, one census record says she was born in Louisiana in 1908, which would make her birth surname Boone. That Lillie Mae might have been the one who married a man named Scott who was later murdered by a Lille Mae Wiley in Texas, as Sullivan reports. Those could be different Lillie Maes, though. Further research by Sullivan found a record of a Lillie Mae Boone who died of head trauma in 1950 in Texas and was buried in a cemetery in Burleson County, Texas. Researcher Caitlin Rose tried to get to the cemetery in 2014, when Sullivan’s piece was published, but was unable to do so. 

As Sullivan wrote in 2014: 

There are graves of Lillie Mae Scotts in Texas and Oklahoma, and Lily May Scotts, and Lilly M. Scotts, and maybe one of them is hers, and maybe none of them are. Maybe she changed her name completely, or maybe she kept the name Wiley. She could be alive. She’d be about 106; it happens. Maybe you are reading this and you have a great-grandmother named Lillie Mae who told you once that she used to sing and make records. Or maybe nothing. That might be best. That she stay Geeshie, but more so. Lillie Mae of Louisiana was better than myth; she was a mystery. She was the one who had ghosts. 

We’ll let the ghosts rest there this week and turn back to L.V. Thomas and her “Motherless Child Blues,” a tune on which Wiley played second guitar when they recorded it in Grafton in the spring of 1930. It’s been covered – according to Second Hand Songs – a very few times since it came to light during the early 1960s. Rory Block recorded it in 2020, and Tracy Nelson has taken on the song three times, in 1965 and 1993 on her own albums as well as on the star-studded 1972 album by Earl Scruggs, I Saw The Light With Some Help From My Friends. There may be more covers out there, but a look through YouTube found none. 

We’ll close this with Tracy Nelson’s version from the Earl Scruggs album and then go to Thomas’ performance on the hiss-laden 1930 Paramount recording:

– whiteray