J. J. Phillips

Phillips was interviewed by Alan Govenar for his 2010 book Lightnin' Hopkins: His Life and Blues, in which he discusses the fallacy that Mojo Hand is "thinly disguised autobiography" based on her affair with Lightnin' Hopkins. In speaking about the origins of Mojo Hand, and setting out to tell "a story of one person's journey from a non-racialized state to the racialized real world", as was happening to her, Phillips said:

That debut novel, published in 1966, and reprinted 20 years later as Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale (with restored Orphic references that were cut by the original publisher), has been characterised as a "blues lament in literary form". The Los Angeles Times reviewer wrote in 1986: "Mojo Hand anticipates the lessons of much recent black women's fiction--here, the women hold things together, often literally tying random moments of humor and beauty into an at least tolerable daily tapestry. Phillips' novel is true to its African and Greek antecedents, showing the uncanny links between musical, mystical and sexual intoxication. The moral ambiguities of these ties have rarely been so economically, knowingly, or eloquently portrayed as here." An extract from Mojo Hand was included in Margaret Busby's anthology Daughters of Africa, published in the 1990s. In 2015 the novel was described by Nat Hentoff as the "most neglected book I know of".

Phillips studied at Immaculate Heart College, where as a freshman in 1962 she became interested in black roots music and travelled to Raleigh, North Carolina, to join the civil rights movement. She worked on a National Student Association voter-registration campaign and later joined a Congress of Racial Equality-sit-in at a Howard Johnson's restaurant, where she was arrested, spending 30 days in the county jail before returning to California. After reading The Country Blues by Samuel Charters, she listened to the music of Lightnin' Hopkins and determined to meet him, going with a roommate to Houston, Texas, to hear him play. She was expelled from Immaculate Heart College in January 1963, and has recalled: "I was extremely distraught. I wanted to be in school, but clearly the nuns didn't want me there. And soon after that I cam up with the idea to write a book that combined my fascination with Lightnin' with my abiding interest in herpetology, especially the blacksnake, which became the first name of the blues singer in Mojo Hand."

Jane J. Phillips (born April 2, 1944), known as J. J. Phillips, is an African-American poet, novelist and civil rights activist. Her best known work is the novel Mojo Hand, first published in 1966, the story of a light-skinned upper-class young woman from San Francisco, California, who after hearing a record by bluesman Blacksnake Brown seeks him out and becomes embroiled in an ultimately tragic relationship with him.