Ginni Clemmens

Born in Chicago’s Evergreen Park neighborhood and raised in the south suburbs, folk and blues singer Ginni Clemmens grew up as the daughter of a big band musician. She performed in her school choir and picked up guitar, yet initially chose nursing over music, spending five years at a California facility for mentally handicapped children. She later retrieved her guitar to play for those young patients and eventually moved back to Chicago to pursue music professionally, holding a daytime post at a nursing home while appearing nightly at venues such as Mother Blues, the Earl of Old Town, Poor Richard’s, and the Gate of Horn. In the late 1950s Clemmens took up the banjo and began teaching guitar and banjo at the Old Town School of Folk Music, where she shared bills with emerging performers John Prine and Steve Goodman and once opened for Bob Dylan at Mother Blues. An early and outspoken advocate for feminism, she became a steady presence on the emerging women’s music festival circuit; one of her signature pieces was Ida Cox’s “Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues,” which she taught to Mama Cass Elliot, who later recorded her own version. Clemmens released the albums Sing a Rainbow and Other Children’s Songs, I’m Lookin’ for Some Longtime Friends, and Lopin’ Along Thru the Cosmos. After relocating to Hawaii in 1988, she drew on island life for her final, self-released recording, Underneath Hawaiian Skies. In 2000 she received the Jeannine Ray Award in recognition of her contributions to women’s music. Clemmens died on February 15, 2003, at age 66, from injuries sustained in a car crash in Maui.