Rosalie (or Rosa Lee) Hill, guitar and vocal. Recorded by Alan Lomax in Como, Mississippi, September 25, 1959. From "Worried Now, Won't Be Worried Long," one of five albums commemorating the 50th anniversary of Lomax's "Southern Journey" field recording trip. Released in 2010 digitally by Global Jukebox (GJ 1002) and on LP by Mississippi Records (MR 058).
Rosalie Hill was a daughter of the Mississippi Hill Country's composer, multi-instrumentalist, band leader, and musical patriarch Sid Hemphill. Sid taught Rosalie to play the guitar when she was six; by the time she was ten she was playing dances with him. The only two songs she recorded for Alan were marked by a desolate, keening intensity, although by all accounts she was a jolly woman. Her father died in 1961, after which, as blues researcher George Mitchell noted, most of the very musical Hemphills "just didn't feel like playing no more." Rosie hung up her guitar for a time, but by the time Mitchell visited in 1967 she was playing again, and recorded for him a barely less spry version of "Rolled and Tumbled." She died a year later. (Hill's first name often appears "Rosa Lee," but she signed her contract with Lomax "Rosalie.")
