Last Kind Words - Recorded circa March 1930 in Grafton, Wisconsin.
Although Geeshie Wiley may well have been the rural South's greatest female blues singer and musician, almost nothing is known of her. She was from Natchez, Mississippi and may have come to town with a medicine show, with which she played during her sojourn.
Wiley's masterpiece, Last Kind Words, played in the key of E, is one of the most imaginatively constructed guitar arrangments of its era and possible one of the most archaic. Although the lyrics date it to the late World War I era, its verse structure appears to be older. (Don Kent's liner notes
to "Mississippi Masters: Early American Blues Classics 1927-35)
