Diamond Teeth Mary

"Diamond Teeth" Mary McClain (born Mary Smith, August 27, 1902 – April 4, 2000) was an American blues and gospel singer and vaudeville entertainer, whose career as a performer extended from the 1910s to the 1990s.

Biography Smith was born in Huntington, West Virginia. She was a half-sister of the blues singer Bessie Smith (Bessie's mother, Laura, née Owens, married Mary's father). She left home at the age of 13, to avoid beatings, and joined a circus. She performed as a chorus girl in Memphis, Tennessee, and in various minstrel shows during the 1920s and 1930s, including Irvin C. Miller's Brown Skin Models, the Davis S. Bell Medicine Show, and F. S. Wolcott's Rabbit Foot Minstrels. She was known as "Walking Mary" until the 1940s. She continued to play with touring shows, and in 1954 was reported as being the lead blues singer with the Rabbit's Foot Minstrels.

Among the stories she told about her long career were that she had lived for a time with the baseball star Satchel Paige and that the young Elvis Presley "would bring Howlin' Wolf and me liquor from the liquor cabinet." John Lee Hooker and Big Mama Thornton also credited her with giving them their start in the music business. She recorded her first album, If I Can't Sell It, I'm Gonna Sit on It, released by Big Boss Records in 1993. She toured Europe again in the 1990s,

Discography 1993 - If I Can't Sell It, I'm Gonna Sit on It 1993 - Walking Mary’s Blues