Jesse White, a gifted bluesman, was born in Terry, Mississippi.  Much of his early life in that Delta community was spent picking cotton with his sharecropper father but also soaking up the musical traditions of his family and community. His grandmother played the organ, his mother played piano and sang in church, as did his sisters, and his father played the harmonica and taught Jessie some tunes.  Jesse also recalls listening to records of such blues greats as Blind Lemon Jefferson at his grandmother's house and then later hearing firsthand numerous blues artists in the juke joints that dotted the Mississippi rural landscape.

Jesse recalls as a teenager he made $5.00 a week working in the fields and $5.00 a week playing music so it was no wonder that he began regularly performing in the juke joints on weekends.  At first he played guitar and harmonica and then switched over to harmonica and boogie piano.  From 1943 to 1965 he quit playing altogether while he was supporting his own family of nine children.  To find regular employment, he moved to Detroit in 1950 after his parents passed away and has lived there ever since.

In the mid-1960s Jesse picked up music playing again and his house on Detroit's 29th Street became home to jam sessions from Friday evening after work, until Monday morning --stopping for the week so the musicians could go back to their jobs on the line in Detroit's auto factories. These jam sessions helped to create some of Detroit's local favorite blues artists: Johnny Bassett, Butler Twins, Jeff Grand, Johnnie Yard Dog Jones, Eddie Burns, and many others.  In 1984, the Attic Bar opened in Hamtramck, offering blues musicians a place to play other than White's house and a handful of local nightclubs and Jesse White and his 29th Street Blues Bands were regulars.

Jesse is considered by many to be the patriarch of blues in Detroit. Stored in his head are more than 300 songs--some he wrote himself, some are tunes his father taught him, others he has learned from his many, many years of listening to and playing with other blues artists. 
At the 2003 Great Lakes Folk Festival, Uncle Jesse White is backed by veteran musicians RJ Spangler (drums), Paul Carey (guitar), Ben Luttermoser (bass), Keith Kaminski (saxophone), and Martin Simmons (piano).