A musical pioneer who was among Americaโs first wave of jazz and blues recording artists in the 1920s, Lucille Hegamin was born Lucille Nelson in Macon, Georgia, on November 29, 1894. She grew up singing in church and, at the age of fifteen, joined a tent-show touring company performing standards of the day. She traveled around the country until 1914, when she settled in Chicago, Illinois. She made a living in nightclubs as a pop, blues, and jazz singer, working with a number of popular musicians of the period, including pianists Tony Jackson and Jelly Roll Morton. She occasionally used the alias Fanny Baker and was known to many on the club circuit as โThe Georgia Peach.โ While in Chicago, she met and married pianist Bill Hegamin. The couple eventually settled in New York City, New York in 1919.
In New York, Hegamin continued her career as a club performer with her husband leading her backup band, the Blue Flame Syncopators. The group toured from time to time throughout New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, with Hegamin sometimes billed as โThe Chicago Cyclone.โ Hegamin caught the attention of Arto Records, a small, independent record label with a studio in Manhattan. In November of 1920, she became one of the first significant African American female artists to make a blues record. Backed by the Blue Flame Syncopators, she recorded โThe Jazz Me Bluesโ and โEverybodyโs Bluesโ for Arto, both of which sold well. She then recorded โArkansas Blues,โ a bona fide hit that made her reputation as one of the leading female jazz and blues performers of the era. She eventually left Arto and moved to the Cameo Record Company, another independent, Manhattan-based label that specialized in jazz and blues dance music. Billed as the โCameo Girl,โ Hegamin recorded dozens of sides for the label during the 1920s, including โHe May Be Your Man (But He Comes to See Me Sometimes),โ her signature song and one of the most popular blues numbers of the period. In 1922, she joined the touring cast of โShuffle Along,โ the successful African American musical review written by Noble Sissle and Hubie Blake.
After Hegaminโs marriage ended in 1923, she worked with a number of other prominent artists, arrangers, and bandleaders, appearing on radio and touring with several musical theater troupes through the end of the decade. As the blues craze of the 1920s faded and the Great Depression set in, Hegaminโs career declined. In 1932, she made two recordings for Okeh Records and, the next year, began appearing regularly at the Paradise Cafรฉ in Atlantic City, New Jersey. In 1934, she retired from performing and became a nurse. During the early 1960s, she made a brief return to the music industry. Her final public performance was in 1964 at the Celebrity Club in New York. She died in New York on March 1, 1970.
