Esther Mae Scott

Esther Mae Prentiss Scott (March 25, 1893 – October 16, 1979) was a Mississippi blues singer, also known as Mother Scott. After touring during the heyday of the blues, she stopped performing for about four decades before reviving her musical career in the Washington, D.C., area and releasing her only album, Mama Ain't Nobody's Fool.

The photo above has her death on October 8: that is incorrect. She died on October 16, 1979.

Early life and career Scott was born on March 25, 1893, on Polk Plantation in Bovina, Mississippi. She was the seventh of fourteen children of poor black sharecroppers Henry S. Erves, her step father and Mary Eliza Prentiss Erves her mother. Their family worked on the plantation where their ancestors Monroe Prentiss and Agnes Jane Garrett Prentiss, Mary Eliza's parents, had been enslaved. Scott's biological father was Sam Brown, from a prominent Jewish family in Vicksburg. She began farm work at age five, and food and clothing were so scarce she often suffered frostbite. Schooling at the Clover Valley Baptist School, a Rosenwald School, was limited to a few winter weeks where farm work could not be done.

Music, however, was an abundant part of life there, and she quickly learned to play guitar, mandolin, banjo, and piano, though never learned to read music. She said in 1979: The average Negro from Mississippi and other slave counties knew how to sing because singing is something to raise your ego up enough to help you solve the task you got to do. And singing looked like it'd make the day shorter for you.

For 27 years, she worked for the Klaus family, a family of German-Jewish caterers in Vicksburg, Mississippi, as a housekeeper and nanny. The family was related to her father Sam Brown. Her father acknowledged her, and her sister Clara and brother William. Sam Brown maintained two families, one white and one black; though it was illegal to associate and intermingle between races, it was very common. Scott was put to work as a domestic into her paternal extended family.

The family allowed her occasional time off to travel to see or perform with Lead Belly, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and other musicians. In 1938, the family downsized due to the Great Depression and unceremoniously fired Scott without severance, offering her nothing but a ticket back to her former childhood home in Mississippi on the Walter Langston Polk plantation, which was eventually purchased by her grandfather Monroe Prentiss and his son Jeff Prentiss.

For her 80th birthday, Scott wrote the song "Keep-A' Goin'", a musical setting of the poem by Frank Lebby Stanton.

Scott performed at a number of large events, including several bicentennial celebrations, the 1976 and 1978 Smithsonian Folklife Festivals, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, and at Washington National Cathedral.

She was also invited to the White House to play for President Jimmy Carter's mother's birthday party.

Death Scott suffered a stroke and died at Washington Hospital Center on October 8, 1979.