The Mississippi Sheiks were a popular and influential guitar and fiddle group of the 1930s. They were notable mostly for playing country blues but were adept at many styles of United States popular music of the time, and their records were bought by both black and white audiences. Country blues is often seen as being the domain of individual musicians, a stereotype propagated by the way such delta blues performers as Robert Johnson and Charley Patton have entered the popular consciousness. Of the smaller number of groups playing at the time, the Mississippi Sheiks are among the better known and most influential among their peers.
In 2004, they were inducted in the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame. Their 1930 blues single "Sitting on Top of the World" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008.
The Mississippi Sheiks consisted mainly of the Chatmon family, who came from Bolton, Mississippi and were well known throughout the Mississippi Delta; the father of the family had been a "musicianer" during times of black slavery, and his children carried on the musical spirit. Their most famous (although by no means permanent) member was Armenter Chatmon - better known as Bo Carter - who managed a successful solo career as well as playing with the Sheiks, which may have contributed to their success. The band named themselves after Rudolph Valentino's film The Sheik (1921).
When the band first recorded in 1930, the line-up consisted of Carter with Lonnie and Sam Chatmon, and Walter Vinson. Charlie McCoy (not to be confused with Charlie McCoy, a later American musician) played later, when Bo Carter and Sam Chatmon ceased playing full time. It was Lonnie Chatmon and Vinson who formed the real centre of the group.
Bo Carter's solo work is notable for being sexually suggestive in songs such as "My Pencil Won't Write No More" and this is carried on to an extent with the group; however, like Carter himself the Mississippi Sheiks rarely used double entendres. They primarily earned their income like Robert Johnson and Skip James. They toured throughout the South of the U.S., but also reached as far north as Chicago and New York.
Their first and biggest success was "Sitting On Top Of The World" (1930), later to be recorded by Howlin' Wolf, Nat King Cole, Bill Monroe, Bob Wills (numerous times), Harry Belafonte, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead and Jack White, and re-done by Robert Johnson, and called Come On in My Kitchen. Throughout their five active years, the Mississippi Sheiks recorded over seventy songs for the Okeh, Paramount and Bluebird labels.
When the band dissolved in 1935 the Chatmon brothers gave up music and returned to being farmers, the most common occupation of black people in rural Mississippi.
The Sheiks and related groups under other names, such as Mississippi Mud Steppers and Blacksnakes, recorded about a hundred sides in the first half of the 1930s, among them original compositions (probably by Vinson) like "The World is Going Wrong" and "I've Got Blood in My Eyes For You" (1931) - both recorded by Bob Dylan - or the topical "Sales Tax" (1934)
