681 Ella Mae Morse (1924-1999) “Get On Board, Little Chillun” 1942

“When Ella Mae Morse was nine and living in Paris, Texas, she went to the grocery store with her mother and heard someone playing guitar out back. She’d grown up with music—her mother was a singer and her father, who was British, had been a dance-band drummer—but this music was different. Uncle Joe, the blues guitarist she met that day, encouraged her natural talent for blues, as did her mother. Her father had left when she was younger. Soon, she was singing on Paris’s radio station, and in 1936, she and her mother moved to Dallas, where she got another regular radio slot after winning a talent contest” (Fresh Air, 2/21/2011). 

Ella Mae Morse “Get On Board, Little Chillun”