SOUND PROJECTIONS

AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU

SPRING, 2018

VOLUME FIVE NUMBER THREE

BOBBY HUTCHERSON

Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:

DOROTHY ASHBY

(April 21-27)

MILFORD GRAVES

(April 28-May 4)

LOUIS JORDAN

(May 5-11)

JOSEPH JARMAN

(May 12-18)

OTIS BLACKWELL

{May 19-25)

MARION BROWN

(May 26-June 1)

THE ROOTS

(June 2-8)

BILLY BANG

(JUNE 9-15)

STEFON HARRIS
(JUNE 16-22)

MEMPHIS MINNIE

(June 23-29)

HAROLD LAND

(June 30-July 6)

WILLIE DIXON

(July 7--13)

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/memphis-minnie-mn0000352499/biography

Memphis Minnie
(1897-1973)

Artist Biography by Barry Lee Pearson

Tracking down the ultimate woman blues guitar hero is problematic because woman blues singers seldom recorded as guitar players and woman guitar players (such as Rosetta Tharpe and Sister O.M. Terrell) were seldom recorded playing blues. Excluding contemporary artists, the most notable exception to this pattern was Memphis Minnie. The most popular and prolific blueswoman outside the vaudeville tradition, she earned the respect of critics, the support of record-buying fans, and the unqualified praise of the blues artists she worked with throughout her long career. Despite her Southern roots and popularity, she was as much a Chicago blues artist as anyone in her day. Big Bill Broonzy recalls her beating both him and Tampa Red in a guitar contest and claims she was the best woman guitarist he had ever heard. Tough enough to endure in a hard business, she earned the respect of her peers with her solid musicianship and recorded good blues over four decades for Columbia, Vocalion, Bluebird, OKeh, Regal, Checker, and JOB. She also proved to have as good taste in musical husbands as music and sustained working marriages with guitarists Casey Bill Weldon, Joe McCoy, and Ernest Lawlars. Their guitar duets span the spectrum of African-American folk and popular music, including spirituals, comic dialogs, and old-time dance pieces, but Memphis Minnie's best work consisted of deep blues like "Moaning the Blues." More than a good woman blues guitarist and singer, Memphis Minnie holds her own against the best blues artists of her time, and her work has special resonance for today's aspiring guitarists.

http://www.knowlouisiana.org/entry/memphis-minnie

Memphis Minnie

Also known as: Lizzie Douglas

(1897–1973)

An early photograph of Lizzie Douglas, (also known as Memphis Minnie,) with music partner and husband, "Kansas" Joe McCoy. Learn more

New Orleans native Lizzie Douglas was a pioneering blues vocalist, guitarist, songwriter, and recording artist from the 1930s to the 1950s. She added a woman’s perspective to a music genre largely dominated by men and was also among the first blues musicians to experiment with the electrically amplified guitar. Known as “Kid” all her life to her family, she was given the moniker “Memphis Minnie” by the recording industry. Douglas honed her performing skills during the Jazz Age before coming into her own during the Great Depression. She continued to perform and record into the post-World War II era, but following her retirement in the mid-1950s, Douglas fell from widespread public notice, despite her more than 200 recordings. Her fall into obscurity ended when a roots music revival around the turn of the twenty-first century restored her as a much-admired icon of modern feminism and an inspiration to contemporary blues musicians.

Songs written by Douglas circulated widely in the mid-twentieth century, from “What’s the Matter with the Mill?”–an early hit for Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys–to “Bumble Bee,” which was remade as “I’m a King Bee” by Muddy Waters. Other songs surfaced in later decades, including Jefferson Airplane’s recording of “Me and My Chauffeur Blues” in the mid-1960s and Led Zeppelin’s revised version of “When the Levee Breaks,” recorded on the British rock band’s fourth album in 1971. With her late-century reinstatement in the pantheon of major blues figures, a new interest emerged in Douglas’s instrumental abilities, particularly the finesse and driving rhythms of her acoustic playing. These aspects of her artistry shine in a series of guitar duets with several male partners playing backup guitar. Douglas took an early interest in the electric guitar, which she adapted for popular Chicago blues ensembles. Arguably, she contributed to the developing sound of electric blues bands more than previously acknowledged and may have been the first blues musician to record with an electrically amplified guitar.

Early Life in New Orleans and Memphis

Lizzie Douglas was born on June 3, 1897, the eldest of thirteen children born to Abe and Gertrude Douglas, Baptist sharecroppers of African American heritage who had settled in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans. At the time Douglas was born, Algiers was a major industrial hub, with shipbuilding and repair yards, stockyards and slaughterhouses, and a sprawling rail yard that attracted hundreds of immigrant workers and their families, including those with German, Irish, Sicilian, and African American heritage.

To provide entertainment for these hard-working laborers and their families, Algiers boasted more than forty bars and dance halls. This vibrant environment produced a wealth of musical talent, including such well-known bandleaders and jazz musicians as Oscar “Papa” Celestine, “Kid” Thomas Valentine, and Henry “Red” Allen. Although the Douglas family relocated to Walls, Mississippi, roughly twenty miles southwest of Memphis, when Lizzie was seven, the musical ambience of her early childhood years made a strong impression on the headstrong, defiantly independent young girl. She asked for a guitar for her first Christmas away from New Orleans, and she often ran away from home, guitar in tow, to partake of the music scene around Beale Street in downtown Memphis. These frequent, short periods away took place even before Douglas reached adolescence. Before long, she left home for good, making a name for herself in the highly competitive music scene of Memphis while still a teenager.

Queen of Chicago Blues

Douglas began to travel with vaudeville and tent shows, including the Ringling Brothers Circus, where she learned showmanship. For several years, she partnered with the highly respected Delta-style guitarist Willie Brown, performing regularly for tourists on a scenic boat ride on a lake near Memphis. While Douglas worked on perfecting her own style, Brown complemented her by playing background rhythm and bass runs. Both experiences prepared Douglas for her life in music: although she collaborated with three different guitar-playing husbands, none outshone her own larger-than-life musical persona. By most accounts, Douglas’s stage presence stemmed from her admiration of vaudeville blues pioneer Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, particularly her self-confident spirit and stylishly exotic wardrobe.

After several years, Douglas moved back to the city to partner with Memphis Jug Band guitarist Casey Bill Weldon, who would become her first husband. She relentlessly promoted herself and her career, playing with jug bands, as a duo with her husband and others, and by herself in clubs and on street corners. She switched partners once again in 1929, marrying guitarist Joe McCoy, and soon after recorded for Columbia Records, which billed the duo as “Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe.” Their recordings sold well, which encouraged the couple to relocate to Chicago, then considered the blues capital. Her reputation preceded her, so that it was not long before the reigning “king” of Chicago blues, Lee Conley Bradley, better known as “Big Bill Broonzy,” challenged Douglas to a “cutting contest.” Legend tells that, while Douglas won the contest based on intensity of the audience applause, Broonzy nonetheless walked away with the bottle of whiskey, the contest’s formal award. More verifiable is the fact that Douglas established herself as the queen of Chicago blues, a status unchallenged through World War II, and that she and Broonzy remained close friends for the rest of their lives.

Memphis Minnie’s Legacy

Throughout the 1930s, Douglas recorded frequently and performed to great acclaim on both the Chicago blues scene and tours throughout the Midwest. By 1935, she parted ways with her second guitarist-husband. She signed on as a client of producer, music publisher, and entertainment promoter Lester Melrose, an association that provided a modicum of professional stability and placed her among his nationally known stars. On the other hand, Melrose focused on producing records geared toward commercial success, with sometimes formulaic results. His management contrasted with Douglas’s virtuosity and restless spirit, as demonstrated in her late 1920s experiments with the steel-bodied resonator guitars produced by the National Guitar Company. After leaving “Kansas Joe,” Douglas began performing with a full backup band that included piano, bass, and drums.

During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Douglas experimented with electrically amplified guitar. Unfortunately, her recordings during this time reflect a more conservative style, with restrained studio musicians, standard vocals by Douglas, and conventional solo guitar runs. These records do not bear witness to the true depth of her musicianship. As music journalist JoBeth Briton wrote in tribute, “Memphis Minnie was a phenomenal musician who [eventually] moved beyond intricate blues fingerpicking and phrasing to play ferocious stand-up electric guitar live on stage in Chicago at least one year before Muddy Waters. … Unfortunately, no vinyl exists to verify what she surely was: the foremother of electric, blues-based rock guitar.” Briton suggests that Melrose’s conservative approach left no room for her “hard-driving electric guitar.”

While the recorded output fails to give full testimony to Douglas’s musical prowess, written impressions offer a glimpse of Memphis Minnie in her prime. Harlem Renaissance writer and poet Langston Hughes published an account of her performance for a 1942 New Year’s Eve audience in The Chicago Defender newspaper:

The singing, the electric guitar, and the drums are so hard and so loud, amplified as they are by General Electric … that sometimes the voice, the words, and melody get lost under sheer noise, leaving only the rhythm to come through clear. … The rhythm is as old as Minnie’s most remote ancestor. … Then, through the smoke and racket of the noisy Chicago bar float Louisiana bayous, muddy old swamps, Mississippi dust and sun, cotton fields, lonesome roads, train whistles in the night, mosquitoes at dawn, and the Rural Free Delivery, that never brings the right letter. All these things cry through the strings on Memphis Minnie’s electric guitar, amplified to machine proportions—a musical version of electric welders plus a rolling mill.

Prior to the recording ban imposed from 1942 to 1944, when musicians’ unions struggled to gain royalties from record sales, Douglas established herself as a major figure, with 158 recorded releases between 1920 and 1942, almost as many as Bessie Smith’s 160. Douglas continued to record well into the mid-1950s, accompanied now by her third husband, guitarist Ernest “Little Son Joe” Lawlers, whom she married in 1939; the couple remained together for more than twenty years. By the late 1950s, Douglas’s health began to fail and, after playing with Little Son Joe in a 1958 tribute concert for Big Bill Broonzy, she headed back to her family in Memphis. There she assumed the role of a senior blues mentor, playing occasionally on the radio and encouraging young blues artists, just as she had done most of her life. Despite more than two hundred recorded tracks and the distinction of towering success for over two decades in the male-dominated, hardscrabble world of blues, Douglas lived the last years of her life in poverty and anonymity.

A Critical Reevaluation and Historical

Reassessment Begins

In 1960, at sixty-three years old, Douglas suffered a debilitating stroke that confined her to a wheelchair. Douglas was too poor to afford a nursing home and was cared for by a sister, and by the time she died on August 6, 1973, her family could not even afford a headstone for her grave. Nevertheless, Douglas had left a legacy in both her music and her independent spirit. Readers of the British publication Blues Unlimited voted Douglas “Best Female Vocalist,” just ahead of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, in 1973, perhaps in acknowledgment of her death. Douglas was among the Blues Foundation and Blues Hall of Fame’s first twenty inductees when it was established in Memphis in 1980. Douglas was the only woman in the group besides Bessie Smith.

In 1996 blues singer and songwriter Bonnie Raitt had a headstone installed at Douglas’s grave at the Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Walls, Mississippi. An inscription reads, “The hundreds of sides Minnie recorded are the perfect material to teach us about the blues. For the blues are at once general, and particular, speaking for millions, but in a highly singular, individual voice. Listening to Minnie’s songs we hear her fantasies, her dreams, her desires, but we will hear them as if they were our own.”

In 2012 folk, blues, and jazz vocalist and record producer Maria Muldaur put together First Came Memphis Minnie, a collection of Memphis Minnie’s best-known songs performed by female blues artists such as Raitt, Ruthie Foster, Rory Block, Phoebe Snow, and Koko Taylor.

Author: Roger Hahn

http://www.musicianguide.com/biographies/1608002338/Memphis-Minnie.html

Find Memphis Minnie on Amazon.com

Born Lizzie Douglas on June 3, 1897, in Algiers, LA ( died August 6, 1973); married: Will Weldon (a.k.a. Casey Bill), circa 1920s; Joe McCoy, 1929-1934; Earnest Lawlars (a.k.a. Little Son Joe), 1939.

For nearly three decades, Memphis Minnie was one of the most influential blues artists in the United States. From the early 1920s until she retired in the mid-1950s, she released more than 180 songs, in addition to those released after her death in 1973. Minnie's songwriting and performances thrived in a genre dominated by men. Unlike most female blues singers of the time, Minnie also wrote her own songs and played guitar. She cemented her place in blues history with such classics as "Bumble Bee," "Hoodoo Lady," and "I Want Something for You." Her repertoire included country blues, urban blues, the Melrose sound, Chicago blues, and postwar blues.

Born Lizzie Douglas in Algiers, Louisiana, Memphis Minnie was the eldest of Abe and Gertrude Wells Douglas' 13 children. Throughout her childhood, her family always called her "Kid." When she was seven years old, the Douglas family moved to Wall, Mississippi, just south of Memphis. The following year, she received her first guitar for Christmas. She learned to play both the guitar and banjo and performed under the name Kid Douglas.

In 1910, at the age of 13, she ran away from home to live on Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee. Throughout her teenage years, she would periodically return to her family's farm when she ran out of money. The majority of the time, she played and sang on street corners. Her sidewalk performances eventually led to a tour of the South with the Ringling Brothers Circus.

Still performing under the name Kid Douglas, she returned to Memphis and became embroiled in the Beale Street blues scene. At the time, women were highly valued-along with whiskey and cocaine-and Beale Street was one of the first places in the country where women could perform in public. In order to survive financially, most of the female performers on Beale Street were also prostitutes, and Minnie was no exception. She received $12 for her services-an outrageous fee for the time.

Beyond the buzz she created as a performer, she also developed a reputation as a woman who could take care of herself. "Any men fool with her, she'd go for them right away," blues guitarist/vocalist Johnny Shines told Paul and Beth Garon in Woman With Guitar. "She didn't take no foolishness off them. Guitar, pocket-knife, pistol, anything she got her hands on, she'd use it; y'know Memphis Minnie used to be a hell-cat."

During the 1920s, she reportedly married Will Weldon, also known as Casey Bill. However, some historians claim the two didn't meet until their first recording sessions together in 1935 and never married. If she did marry Weldon, she had left him within the decade, and married guitarist Kansas Joe McCoy in 1929. Minnie and McCoy often performed together and were discovered by a talent scout from Columbia Records that same year. They went to New York City for their first recording sessions, and it was then that she changed her name to Memphis Minnie.

McCoy and Minnie released the single "When the Levee Breaks" backed with "That Will Be Alright," but McCoy performed all the vocals. Two months later, they released "Frisco Town" and "Going Back to Texas." Minnie sang alone on "Frisco Town" and sang a duet with McCoy on "Going Back to Texas."

In 1930, Minnie released one of her favorite songs "Bumble Bee," which led to a recording contract with the Vocalion label. Later that year, she and McCoy released "I'm Talking About You" on Vocalion. The couple continued to produce records for Vocalion for two more years, then left the label and decided to move to Chicago. It didn't take long before Minnie and McCoy had become a part of the city's blues scene, and they had introduced country blues into an urban environment.

Divorce Expanded Musical Horizons

McCoy and Minnie recorded songs together and on their own for Decca Records until they divorced in 1934. According to several reports, McCoy's increasing jealousy of Minnie's fame and success caused the breakup. The two-part single "You Got To Move (You Ain't Got To Move)" was the last record issued by the couple.

Back on her own, Minnie began to experiment with different styles and sounds. She recorded four sides for the Bluebird label in 1935 under the name Texas Tessie. They included "Good Mornin'," "You Wrecked My Happy Home," "I'm Waiting on You," and "Keep on Goin'." In August of that year, she returned to the Vocalion label to record two songs in tribute to boxing champion Joe Louis: "He's in the Ring (Doing That Same Old Thing" and "Joe Louis Strut." Columbia later released "He's in the Ring" on the collection The Great Depression: American Music in the '30s in 1994.

In October of 1935, Minnie recorded with Casey Bill Weldon for the first time on "When the Sun Goes Down, Part 2" and Hustlin' Woman Blues." It was about this time that Minnie had teamed up with manager Lester Melrose, the single most powerful and influential executive in the blues industry during the 1930s and 1940s. By the end of the 1930s, Minnie had recorded nearly 20 sides for Decca Records and eight sides for the Bluebird label. In 1939, she returned to the Vocalion label. She had also met and married her new musical partner, guitarist Earnest Lawlars, also known as Little Son Joe.

Minnie and Little Son Joe also began to release material on Okeh Records in the 1940s. Their earliest recordings together included "Nothin' in Ramblin'" and "Me and My Chauffeur Blues." The couple continued to record together throughout the decade. In 1952, Minnie recorded a session for the legendary Chess label, when it was just two months old. Singles from the session included "Broken Heart" and a re-recording of "Me and My Chauffeur Blues." The following year, she released her last commercial recording after 24 years in blues music, "Kissing in the Dark" and "World of Trouble" on the JOB label.

Within the next few years, Minnie's health began to fail. She retired from her music career and returned to Memphis. She performed one last time at a memorial for her friend, blues artist Big Bill Broozny in 1958. Periodically, she would appear on Memphis radio stations to encourage younger blues musicians. As the Garons wrote in Woman with Guitar, "She never laid her guitar down, until she could literally no longer pick it up." In 1960, Minnie suffered from a stroke and was bound to a wheelchair. The following year, Little Son Joe passed away. The trauma provoked Minnie to have a second stroke.

Illness Forced Retirement

By the mid-1960s Minnie had entered the Jell Nursing Home and she could no longer survive on her social security income. The news of her plight began to spread, and magazines such as Living Bluesand Blues Unlimited appealed to their readers for assistance. Many fans quickly sent money for her care, and several musicians held benefits to help her. On August 6, 1973, Memphis Minnie died of a stroke in the nursing home. In true blues fashion, she was buried in an unmarked grave at the New Hope Cemetery in Memphis.

In 1980, Memphis Minnie was one of the first 20 artists inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. Her work was featured on several blues compilations throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Compilations of her own work also continued to surface, including I Ain't No Bad Girl in 1989 and Queen of the Blues in 1997.

by Sonya Shelton

Memphis Minnie's Career

Began performing on the streets of Memphis, Tennessee, 1910; signed recording contract with Columbia Records, 1929; released more than 180 songs on various labels until her retirement in 1953, including Columbia Records, Vocalion, Decca, Bluebird, Okeh, and Checker.

Famous Works

Selected discography
Singles
"When the Levee Breaks"/"That Will Be Alright," Columbia, 1929.
"Frisco Town"/"Going Back to Texas," Columbia, 1929.
"Bumble Bee," Columbia, 1930.
"Stinging Snake Blues," Vocalion, 1934.
"You Got to Move (You Ain't Got to Move)," Decca Records, 1934.
"He's in the Ring (Doing That Same Old Thing)," Vocalion, 1935.
"Joe Louis Strut," Vocalion, 1935.
"When the Sun Goes Down, Part 2," Bluebird, 1935.
"Hustlin' Woman Blues," Bluebird, 1935.
"Me and My Chauffeur Blues," Okeh Records, 1941; re-released, Chess Records, 1952.
"In My Girlish Days," Okeh Records, 1941.
"Looking the World Over," Okeh Records, 1941.
"Broken Heart," Chess Records, 1952.
"Kissing in the Dark"/"World of Trouble," JOB, 1953.
Albums
I Ain't No Bad Girl , Portrait/CBS Records, 1989.
Queen of the Blues , Sony Music, 1997.

Woman With Guitar – Memphis Minnie BluesWritten by Paul & Beth Garon
City Lights Books
www.citylights.com
407 pages

This biographical study was first published in 1992 by Da Capo Press. In the ensuing years, researchers like Jim O’Neal, Robert Pruter, and Bob Eagle have uncovered additional information and documents that, combined with the original work, give us more insight into the life and career of Memphis Minnie, one of the most prolific blues singers in history. The authors, Paul & Beth Garon, have collected all of the new findings and incorporated them into a study that explores Minnie’s music and how it reflected the world that she lived in.

Minnie Douglas was born on June 3, 1897 supposedly in Algiers, Louisiana. Research has cast some doubts about the location, which causes some speculation by the authors. Her father was a sharecropper but Minnie never fancied the hard life on a farm. She received a guitar for Christmas at age eight, setting in motion an interest in music that would provide an escape route from field work. Soon she was running off to hang out on Beale Street in Memphis, where she undoubtedly was schooled on singing and guitar techniques. Soon she hit the road as part of a touring Ringling Brothers show, rounding out her rough edges and teaching her the value of showmanship as well as the art of survival. The book adds this quote from bluesman Johnny Shines, “She didn’t take no foolishness off them (men). ..anything she get her hands on she’d use it; ..Memphis Minnie used to be a hellcat.”

She soon developed into a mesmerizing singer and a masterful guitarist considered to be as good as any man. When she paired up with Kansas Joe McCoy in Memphis, they shared the vocals over their dazzling National steel guitar interplay. Soon they cut their first records for Columbia in 1929 and the following year did multiple sessions for the Vocalion label. Columbia issued classic tracks “When the Levee Breaks, “Frisco Town”, and “Bumble Bee” while “Dirt Dauber Blues”, “What’s the Matter with the Mill”, and “Plymouth Rock Blues” were hits for Vocalion. Several years later they had releases on Decca and Bluebird. By 1934, the pair cut their last session. The authors discuss whether their parting was due to Joe being jealous of Minnie’s fame or because he had got religion.
Minnie continued on alone, cutting records on a regular basis under the guidance of Lester Melrose, who provided a steady stream of talent to the major labels. Minnie followed the great migration north and ended up in Chicago. There she found regular club work befitting an artist of her stature. She also incorporated the new sound of single string guitar picking that started with the legendary Lonnie Johnson. By the end of the decade, Minnie has another great partner, Earnest “Little Son Joe” Lawlars, a fine guitar man who became Minnie’s second husband and recording partner for the next twenty years.

The book is divided into three sections. The first part – The Life – recounts details of Minnie’s life and recording career. There isn’t much in the way of print articles on Minnie, although sources like The Chicago Defender newspaper files contain ads for Minnie’s appearances in Chicago clubs. Details come from remembrances from other blues artists like Jimmy Rogers, Champion Jack Dupree, Brewer Phillips, and Homesick James. No one disputes that Minnie was a rough woman as well as a top-notch blues musician. Several pages recount the success Minnie had at cutting contests, even when she was pitted against legends like Big Bill Broonzy.

The next section of the book – The Songs – breaks down her extensive recordings into fourteen general topical categories. This allows the authors to dig deep to reveal hidden or thinly veiled meanings in the lyrics – “Our aim is to reveal the unheard side of Minnie’s entire realm so that we might recover the power of her achievement in a way that addresses the urgent needs of humankind today”. They explore the influence of racism, women’s rights, sexual tension, and even voodoo on Minnie’s songwriting. “ The blues itself sabotages “bourgeois discourse” by its advocacy of non-repressive values….”. They also find similarities between Minnie’s lyrics and famous poets like Rimbaud – “Thus, there may be an analogy between how we listen to the blues and how surrealist poets listen to the unconscious”. At times their musings require your undivided attention in order to grasp the point under discussion.

The Appendices section includes a listing of her nightclub performances, a thirty-six page discography covering the 250 songs that she played and/or sang on, an additional forty pages of notes by chapter, and twenty-four pages of photos and documents that bring you closer to the beautiful woman who made beautiful music.

Minnie cut her last record in 1959. A short time later, she suffered a stroke that left her unable to play the guitar. Her sister, Daisy Douglas Johnson, cared for her in Memphis until she was unable to continue. Minnie was moved to a nursing home, where she lived until her death in 1973. Her grave remained unmarked until 1996, when Bonnie Raitt financed the purchase of a fitting headstone.

The idea behind any biography is to bring the subject into brighter light, illuminating their character, their strengths and faults as well as their impact on the world around them. The Garons and their contributors have certainly fulfilled that goal. This updated volume celebrates the legacy of the person many claim was the first lady of the blues. Blues fans should relish this opportunity to discover more about Memphis Minnie, a pivotal figure in blues history., 1997 (no longer in print). | Visit

Memphis Minnie Biography & Discography
From AllMusic.com | Visit

Memphis Minnie 1897–1973
From Encyclopedia.com | Visit

http://blurtonline.com/feature/flood-memphis-minnie/

DOWN IN THE FLOOD: Memphis Minnie

An updated and revised edition of the iconic blueswoman’s biography gets to the heart of the hoodoo, and then some.

by DENISE SULLIVAN

In what is perhaps the best-known story of a blues woman as legend, Big Bill Broonzy tells of the “cutting” contest he lost to Memphis Minnie following her 20-minute performance of “Me and My Chauffeur Blues.” So carried away was she with the jam, Minnie was carted offstage by the judges who were said to be bluesmen Tampa Red, Muddy Waters and most unlikely, Mississippi John Hurt. Meanwhile, as Minnie was catching her breath, Big Bill was making off with the two bottles of hooch earmarked to be taken home by the grand prize winner.

“…She can make a guitar speak words, she can make a guitar cry, moan, talk, and whistle the blues,” Broonzy wrote in his memoir. Man enough to admit he’d been whupped by a gal, the story behind their supposed tussle in 1930s Chicago has, over time, been revealed to be a conflation of repeated guitar stand-offs between Broonzy, other bluesmen, and Minnie who was known to routinely trounce all-comers throughout the South and Midwest with the antics on her ax. While Broonzy would go on to be remembered as the musician who brought the blues to England and influenced an entire generation of rock’n’roll guitarists, Minnie’s legacy is less tangible and entrenched. For reasons not entirely clear and despite repeat testimonials from Bonnie Raitt and Lucinda Williams, Minnie’s only had a few, cheapo boxed sets and a recent tribute compiled; there have been no lovely vinyl reissues, collector’s editions, or special treatments given to her recorded legacy.

As for what we know of her history, most all of it comes down to Paul and Beth Garon’s 1992 volume, Woman With Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues, available once again in an updated and revised edition with a forward by Jim O’Neal (City Lights, 2014). Twenty-two years after its initial publication, the most profound details of Minnie’s story still reveal a hard travelin’ blues woman—singing and performing her ribald, daring, and well-honed songs in the early part of the 20th Century—as a player who has yet to be honored and enshrined in equal measure to her accomplishments.

A certain amount of projection, imagination, and accounting for what the Garons call “the listener’s own obsessions” aid in an understanding of Minnie’s blues, alternately concerned with cooking, hoodoo, love, sex and the natural environment. A least that’s what I hear when she sings “I’m Gonna Bake My Biscuits,” “Black Cat Blues,” and “When the Levee Breaks.” When Minnie sings, most of her lines go at least two or three ways, which in itself is not the revolutionary part; that she was a woman, saying and doing the things that she was in her time, contributes to the possibility she was also the greatest songster of them all, and yet, she remains the proverbial secret hiding in plain sight. Broonzy said as much in his 1955 book, and since then, the songs have supported the fact she’s a giant—just ask the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Chuck Berry who used them as springboards for their own. Is it possible that Minnie was so good—the world’s deepest blues player, conjurer, show person and poet—her story is believable only if it’s portrayed as myth?

Minnie’s way with words is largely the focus of the Garons’ study, a combination of interpretation and inquiry into Minnie’s blues and the deep subconscious well from which she drew inspiration. Crafting lines with far more layers of meaning than the kind of poetry which generally receives laurels, the authors emphasize Minnie’s contributions to blues form have barely begun to be unpacked. The Garons’ surrealist portrait of Minnie is a unique work of scholarship and an essential text toward understanding not only Minnie’s world and work, but the blues itself. Quoting her lyrics and others in blues tradition, the authors consistently and convincingly deliver the idea that a blues narrative is often less critical to interpretation than its lines and metaphors. Pieces of the dream are absorbed in a flash, by design, assimilated “on the fly, while dancing and drinking. Thus, there may be an analogy of how we listen to the blues and how surrealist poets listen to the unconscious.”

A captivating performer—agile, fast, and showy—Minnie was not only an accomplished guitarist but a songwriting original with verses double and triple-loaded with richness. She covered it all, though an area that Minnie mined singularly and deeply was the kitchen: Like the bluesmen’s perpetual and enduring references to liquor as poison, potion and magic elixir, Minnie used food as a way to sing of longing, desire and consummation but also of autonomy, liberation and ultimately transformation. (In addition to her ability to wipe the floor with her guitar competitors, Minnie was also known for her home cooking, especially her biscuits).

Automobiles and trains, allusions to the great outdoors, and the open road also serve as symbols of freedom in her songs, an ideal that still largely lived in the abstract for a rural black woman—and most all women—of Minnie’s generation. And though she might have done sung on the drudgery of domestic work, more often she chose not to: All these sides of Minnie, and what may also be perceived as her contradictions are explored throughout Woman With Guitar.

And you can’t tell me nothing, baby, that I never seen (2x)
And if you don’t believe me, follow me back to New Orleans

Among the new discoveries in this fresh edition of Woman With Guitar: Minnie, born Lizzie Douglas, was not from Algiers, Louisiana as was previously believed; rather, she is a Mississippian, like so many other legends of the blues, likely born in Tunica County around 1897. The eldest of 13, Lizzie or “Kid” as she was known, began to play guitar and banjo from age 10 or 11. She ran away from home to begin her career as a teenaged guitarist on Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, and joined the Ringling Brothers Circus for a few years. Returning to Beale Street, she fell in with friends in the Memphis Jug Band and was eventually discovered and signed to a Columbia recording contract in 1929. Her first sides, cut with “Kansas” Joe McCoy, were released that year and in 1930: Among the early songs, which remain her best-known were “Bumble Bee” and “When the Levee Breaks,” concerning the great Mississippi flood of 1927 (famously covered by Led Zeppelin).

Wild associations, side roads, and back doors are the Garons’ stock-in-trade, infusing their studies with an edge that the work by other scholars of classic American music forms often lacks; and yet, Woman With Guitar is no easy ride for casual readers who may need to delve deeper into America’s blues past to perceive the big picture.

When LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) described the makers of indigenous African American music as Blues People, he explored the idea that as musical innovators jazz and blues players could look misery in the face while never allowing despair or suffering the last word; music was their soul expression, a place where joy, pain, and liberation occupied the same truly free space, no matter one’s circumstances. Scholar Cornel West has furthered this idea in his ongoing dialogues suggesting, “These people are neither sentimental [nor] cynical; they’re blues people.” Blues people are willing to fight for what’s right and to be of service, “even when it did not look as if it would produce major consequences and effects.”

It’s unlikely Memphis Minnie was conscious of what she had to give or the ground she was breaking or taking—she was merely trying to survive America, the South, and escape her oppressors. Using her poetic and musical gifts, her expressions were samples of the life sustaining properties of song and the unconscious messages emitted when a poet puts pen to paper and gives voice to her soul. Given her circumstances, it’s miraculous that Minnie could read and write at all (any number of her contemporaries could not).

Paul Garon’s City Lights title, Blues and the Poetic Spirit, further defends the blues as a complex form, piled with as much meaning as so-called standard poetry has, if not more. Making the case that the blues is a “sustained poetic attack on the superstructure of an exploitative society,” he asserts the blues has made its own “psychopoetic” contribution to American music and social history. The same must be said for Minnie. Whether or not she is acknowledged by the masses, or the blueskeepers and tastemakers who reissue records is irrelevant.

“We have everything to gain if we interrogate our own level of consciousness about what we hear and how we hear it, in an effort to plumb the depths of responsibility toward the determination of the nature of the revolutionary poetic voice,” write the Garons. An offering to anyone interested in better understanding the blues and aiding in its survival, the Garons’ work has certainly made a difference in my own explorations, listenings and writings on blues. While there are no pat stories or explanations and few solutions to age old dilemmas on offer, Minnie’s story as a consummate artist against the odds will resonate with anyone who finds him or herself up against it in the here and now. Let Minnie’s life and work be a reminder that it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it that’s important. May she continue to inspire and inform listeners for another 100 years or more.

Below: Memphis Minnie as lovingly rendered by artist R. Crumb, from his Heroes of the Blues trading cards.

http://memphismusichalloffame.com/inductee/memphisminnie/

It’s been said that Memphis Minnie played guitar “like a man.”

But there were plenty of men who wanted to play guitar like Memphis Minnie. She once even beat the great Big Bill Broonzy in a picking contest. Her title “Queen of the Country Blues” was no hype. Minnie did everything the boys could do, and she did it in a fancy gown with full hair and makeup. She had it all: stellar guitar chops, a powerful voice, a huge repertoire including many original, signature songs and a stage presence simultaneously glamorous, bawdy and tough.

She transcended both gender and genre. Her recording career reached from the 1920s heyday of country blues to cutting electric sides in 1950s Chicago studios for the Chess subsidiary Checker. Minnie helped form the roots of electric Chicago blues, as well as R&B and rock ‘n’ roll, long before she plugged in. Her unique storytelling style of songwriting drew such surprising fans as Country Music Hall of Famer Bob Wills, the King of Western Swing, who covered her song about a favorite horse, “Frankie Jean,” right down to copying Minnie’s whistling. Though she inspired as many men as women, her influence was particularly strong on female musicians, her disciples including her niece Lavern Baker, a rock and R&B pioneer in her own right, as well as Maria Muldaur (who released a 2012 tribute CD) Bonnie Raitt (who paid for her headstone), Rory Block, Tracy Nelson, Saffire and virtually every other guitar-slinging woman since.

A Tough Kid

She sang about being “born in Louisiana, raised in Algiers” (a town just across from New Orleans), but that was poetic license. She was actually born in Mississippi, raised in Walls, a small farming community in DeSoto County south of Memphis, according to US Census data uncovered by Dr. Bill Ellis. She learned music early on, getting a guitar for Christmas at the age of 8. She was a wild child, running away from home for the last time at 13, heading for the bright lights of Beale Street, where, as “Kid” Douglas, she quickly made a name for herself with the jug bands and string groups that played on the street and at Memphis’ Church Park. Life was hard for a homeless kid and she grew up fast, earning a reputation for toughness, both personally and musically.

Background: Barn wall by jeffeaton, Some rights reserved

Listen Now:

In the early 1920s, the most popular blues performers were Bessie Smith and the other classic blues singers - bejeweled women standing in front of jazz bands singing Tin Pan Alley blues. By contrast, Minnie’s style was far more raw and personal, and it endured long after that first blues craze.

She described her life in “In My Girlish Days” &
“Nothing in Rambling” sang about a favorite cafe in “North Memphis Blues” documented local events in “Garage Fire Blues” and paid tribute to the great African-American boxer Joe Louis in “The Joe Louis Strut.”

Bumble Bee Blues

She recorded her most popular song, “Bumble Bee Blues,” at her first session in 1929 and re-recorded the song repeatedly throughout her career, including a session with The Memphis Jug Band. That version, with its laid-back, behind-the-beat, jug-driven groove, points the way to the Memphis Beat later perfected at Stax Records.

Soo Cow Soo

Her guitar playing was just as visionary; her up-the-neck solo on 1931’s “Soo Cow Soo” foreshadowing the rockabilly revolution to come. On record, her second guitarist was usually one of her guitar-playing husbands, first “Kansas Joe” McCoy, and then Ernest “Little Son Joe” Lawlers.

In 1930, she and McCoy, who’d married the year before, joined the thousands of other African-Americans leaving the Delta for Chicago.

It was there in 1933 that she bested Broonzy in the guitar contest immortalized in his autobiography Big Bill’s Blues.” And it was there that she recorded many of her best-known songs. She and McCoy broke up in 1935 and within a few years she was married to Lawlers, with whom she made some of her best, most enduring records in the early 1940s - "including “Me and My Chauffeur Blues” and her autobiographical “In My Girlish Days” and “Nothing in Rambling.”

She adapted to the big city, performing in clubs, organizing “Blue Monday” shows and forming a vaudeville troupe to tour theaters. She formally studied music and added some of the jazz and pop standards of the day to her repertoire. Minnie joined the musicians union and bought a National electric archtop guitar, becoming part of that transitional generation between acoustic Delta blues and the electrified Chicago sound. But she was at heart a country blues singer/guitarist, and even though she was one of the greatest of all time, the changing tastes of the African-American audience found little room for what they considered a reminder of the grim life left behind in Mississippi.

Background: Chicago by Dave Sizer, Some rights reserved

By the late 1950s, a new audience for that acoustic blues sound was growing, as some of her contemporaries were rediscovered by urban collegiate folk music fans. Broonzy, Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Rev. Gary Davis and many others all enjoyed renewed popularity, national and international tours and steady incomes.

Minnie, in failing health, was unable to take part. She moved home to Memphis in the 1960s and lived quietly, even as small, independent labels were reissuing her classic 78s on LPs aimed at her new audience. In 1970, folk-blues revivalist Maria Muldaur, a few years away from her “Midnight at the Oasis” success, recorded Minnie’s “Me and My Chauffeur Blues.” In 1971, Led Zeppelin released the Kansas Joe McCoy/Memphis Minnie composition “When the Levee Breaks” on its fourth album, crediting it to the band and Minnie.

Background: DSC03454 by jeremy1choo, Some rights reserved

But there would be no triumphant comeback. Memphis Minnie died of complications from a stroke in Memphis in 1973 and buried in Walls, Miss. Today, 40 years later, her songs continue to be recorded by contemporary artists. Her image of the powerful, take no-crap guitar hero was perfectly suited to the modern women’s movement and she continues inspiring new generations. With such ongoing tributes as a new album of her songs by Muldaur, there seems little chance she’ll ever go out of style.

Unlike her stilted vaudeville blues counterparts, Memphis Minnie’s music sounds as fresh today as when it was first set in shellac. In 2012, every single record Memphis Minnie ever released is still available. And most importantly, they all still rock.

“I got me a bumble bee, don’t sting nobody but me.”

Memphis Minnie
Hooks Bros, Memphis, 1950s
© 1993 Delta Haze Corporation
All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission

About the Author

Larry Nager

For over 18 years, Nager has written about music for the Cincinnati Enquirer and other national, regional and local productions. As a filmmaker, he wrote and co-produced the 1993 musical documentary Bill Monroe: Father of Bluegrass Music. He also wrote Memphis Beat: The Lives and Times of America’s Musical Crossroads.

http://memphisminnie.com/

Memphis Minnie: Her Story

Audio Player:

Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.

Memphis Minnie by Del Rey

Guitar Queen. Hoodoo Lady. Master finger-style guitar player. Elizabeth “Kid” Douglas, known as Memphis Minnie was an intricate guitarist, an astute songwriter and a stylistic innovator. Her work (over 200 recordings) leads the way through the development of blues guitar playing, starting with her first recordings in 1929. There have been a number of re-releases of her work, and her songs, especially Chauffeur Blues, When The Levee Breaks, Black Rat Swing and What’s The Matter With The Mill? are repertoire perennials. A full-length biography, “Woman With Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues” by Paul and Beth Garon was published by DaCapo press in 1998 with a 2nd edition in 2014. Yet she remains comparatively unknown and under-studied in relation to her influence and importance to the development of blues music and guitar playing. Why has this musician , with her enormous body of recordings, who was well-loved by the Black blues audiences of the ’30s and ’40s been comparatively ignored by later, whiter audiences?

Perhaps it’s because Memphis Minnie doesn’t fit the myth of the young, tragic, haunted blues man and she is too complex of a character to be easily marketed. She shaped a life very different from the limited possibilities offered to the women of her time. She lived a long life, was at her best in middle age, and would spit tobacco wearing a chiffon ball gown. Memphis Minnie’s music remained popular over two decades because it was lyrically and instrumentally in tune with the lives of Black Americans. It remains vital and influential today because of her inventive, rhythmic guitar playing and her songs, which capture people and events and bring them to life across the years.

Starting in 1929, her records lead us through twenty years of recorded blues and illustrate her life, as she moved from the rural South to urban Chicago. Musically there were three basic phases to her style: the duet years with Kansas Joe, the “Melrose” band sound of the late thirties and early forties, and her later electric playing. She was always a finger picker, and played in Spanish (DGDGBD) and standard tunings, often using a capo. For guitar players, the first part of her career is definitely the most inspiring, as her inventive variations make masterpieces of tunes like “When The Levee Breaks”(1930) or “Let’s Go To Town”(1931). In terms of her influence on the development of blues, she was an important player in the Chicago clubs during the ’40s when musicians like Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rodgers and Johnny Shines, were coming up.

African, European and Indigenous traditions had begun to coalesce into the blues in the South much earlier than the ’20s, but our perception of history is usually based on recorded history: what gets recorded, written about and incorporated into our accepted common memory. In our society, what is deemed important is often what has commercial value, and that is precisely what pushes blues off the front porch and onto 78s. in the ’20s when record companies first perceived a market for the style. The commercial success of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” in 1920, alerted record companies to the existence of black record buyers. The companies began to seek out and record other singers in the same vaudevillian genre. Theatrical, glamorous blues queens dominated the first decade of recorded blues. Primarily an urban, piano based music, it was perfect for the speciously prosperous “Jazz Age” atmosphere of the twenties, during which the music of Black Americans became increasingly influential to the mainstream.

As the realities of boom and bust economics became universal after the stock market crash of 1929, record companies began to seek out rural, guitar based music. Perhaps it was cheaper to record a country boy’s guitar than an established vaudeville professional. Perhaps the glamour of beaded and tiaraed blues royalty seemed wrong for a time of soup kitchens and extensive poverty, although blues listeners surely always lived in poverty. It is difficult to tell whether audiences demanded different music, or if they bought what was promoted and available. In any case, in 1929 Elizabeth Douglas, professionally known as Memphis Minnie, made her debut on record.

Memphis Minnie (known to her family as “Kid”) was born June 3, 1897, in Algiers Louisiana, the oldest of 13 brothers and sisters. She grew up in Walls Mississippi, about 20 miles from Memphis on Route 61, in a time before rural electrification and national media created a mass culture. Music (like most things) was still homemade: for entertainment, people threw parties–suppers where roast shoat, custard pies and candy sticks dipped in corn whiskey got worked off dancing the “shoofly”, the “scratch” and the “shimmy-she-wobble.” Minnie started playing banjo when she was seven years old, and was influenced by the string bands which played for dancers who partied all night and hit the fields at dawn. She got her first guitar at age ten or 11. The wretchedness of hitting the fields at dawn led some to try life with “the starvation box”, as Roosevelt Sykes called the guitar. A musicians’ life was an escape from endless labor, looked on with both admiration and resentment by the field hands and workers in the audience. The official job prospects for black women were limited to domestic service and farm work both of which demanded grueling labor and subservience for low pay. Memphis Minnie was never interested in physical labor and she began to play on the streets of Memphis and the towns surrounding Walls soon after getting her first guitar.

In 1907 a blues musician played in all kinds of places: house parties, barrel houses, work camps, traveling shows. It’s hard to imagine how prevalent live music was before the advent of consumer electronics. Anywhere you hear canned music now would probably have had a live musician–well, maybe not elevators. Sometimes a blues musician got paid with an apple or a can of sardines, sometimes she made as much as a hundred dollars. The traveling musician was often a lonely stranger, an outsider who might not know the local situation, and musicians often teamed up. One of Memphis Minnie’s first musical partnerships was with Willie Brown, who is is better known for his association with Charlie Patton. Brown provided the solid rhythm and bass lines she seemed to require from all her men. She and Brown began playing together around 1915 in the resort town of Bedford Mississippi, where tourists could take a ferryboat trip around nearby Lake Cormorant. Minnie and Brown would get aboard and entertain the primarily white pleasure seekers, once debarking at Biggs Arkansas with $119 in tips. They mixed blues with pop tunes, her favorite cover being “What Makes You Do Me Like You Do Do Do”. She also played for dances and store promotions. In guitarist Willie Moore’s recollection, (reported in Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow’s King of the Delta Blues; The Life and Music of Charlie Patton, 1988 Rock Chapel Press) Minnie was the better guitarist, —“She was a guitar king”—-he said—- although Brown was better known.

Minnie is rumored to have joined a Ringling Bros. circus in Clarksdale around 1917. There were traveling shows of all kinds, from lowdown to grand, but they all included comedy, dancers and musicians of every type from jug bands to elegant pianists. Associating with circus and vaudeville performers must have been a step up for a street musician, and probably helped Minnie make her music more of an act.

Minnie settled Memphis in the early ’20s. Beale Street was at this time an important bit of pavement, a place where segregation forced dentists and church ladies to mix with gamblers and whores, creating quite a lively atmosphere.

Minnie worked the streets and parks with Jed Davenport’s Beale Street Jug Band, and her guitar playing was influenced by the popular jug band musician Frank Stokes, who’s guitar duets with Dan Sane are very similar to Minnie’s early style.

By 1929, Douglas had married another guitar-player, Joe McCoy, who was a good singer and guitarist, but reputedly a jealous fellow. One photo of the two has Minnie in an florid, drop-waisted day dress, with straightened flapper hair, looking distinctly unsteady on her feet as she grabs hold of a grim-faced Joe’s padded shoulder. They were playing together in a Beale street barbershop when a scout from Columbia offered to record them in New York. Their first session was on June 18, 1929, two weeks after Minnie’s 32nd birthday. The silly yet haunting “Bumble Bee Blues” became the popular song from that session– so popular that Minnie recorded several different versions of it for different labels. Columbia was responsible for bestowing their geographical monikers: Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe. Minnie used the name both publicly and privately, although her family still called her Kid.

Minnie and Joe began a steady series of recording dates in New York, and Memphis, first for Columbia, later for Vocalion, Decca, Okeh and Bluebird. Kansas Joe,and Minnie were guitarists of equal ability, and the interplay of their instruments is like a great conversation: with both of them switching between treble and bass. The back-up parts are as interesting as the melody parts, especially on tunes like “When the Levee Breaks”, recorded in 1929, in Spanish tuning capoed to Bb (the third fret) or “Crazy Crying Blues” from 1931, also in Spanish, capoed to C# (the sixth fret). It’s rural party music, with doubling of parts helping punch the sound through in a loud environment in the pre-electric age.

Minnie was quick to embrace the latest technologies in order to be heard above the crowds She was one of the first blues players to use a National in 1929, and to play an electric wood body National and various electric guitars in the ’40s and ’50s.

Minnie’s fame began to spread northward by word of mouth and records. Apparently people in Chicago, who had never actually seen her play, were skeptical–so far no women instrumentalists had become prominent on the tough country blues circuit, although some (like guitarist Mattie Delaney), made a brief, tantalizing appearance, then disappeared. Minnie’s arrival in Chicago precipitated a showdown with the reigning King, Big Bill Broonzy.1. In 1933, when Big Bill Broonzy was very popular in Chicago, a blues contest between him and Memphis Minnie took place in a night club. As Broonzy tells the story, in his autobiography Big Bill Blues, (Cassell and Co.London 1956) a jury of fellow musicians awarded Minnie the prize of a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of gin for her performance of “Chauffeur Blues” and “Looking the World Over”. Bill grabbed half the prize (the bottle of whiskey) and took it off to drink under a table. Two of the judges, John Estes and Richard Jones hoisted the victorious Minnie on their shoulders while Kansas Joe remarked sourly “Put her down. She can walk”. Broonzy and Minnie became good friends, and played together locally and on the road.

Joe and Minnie based themselves in Chicago throughout the early ’30s, playing clubs like the DeLisa and the Music Box, recording both together and separately. Their marriage and musical partnership fell apart in the mid-thirties, around the same time Minnie became increasingly featured as a guitarist, vocalist and songwriter.

Minnie toured a great deal in the ’30s, mostly in the south. It was during this period that Bob Wills and some of his Texas Playboys saw her playing in Texas; they would later make her “What’s The Matter With The Mill?” a part of their repetoire.

Some of her mid-thirties recordings incorporate piano, drums and a few horn players and after 1935, she joined the group of musicians who worked regularly for Lester Melrose, a producer and talent scout who supplied blues artists for a number of labels. He standardized the sound of his blues offerings, using musicians like Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy and Thomas Dorsey to back up different artists. In the studio Minnie worked with pianist Black Bob, drummer Fred Williams and other instrumentalists, from the occasional trumpeter to lap-steel and mandolin. During this period Minnie began playing much less; the guitar no longer combines bass, treble and rhythm parts, leaving that to the other instruments, and instead starts to sound more like what we think of as blues today, with soulful bends and well-placed twangs on songs like the swing influenced “Good Morning”(1936) and “Hot Stuff”(1937), both of which she played in standard tuning.

In 1939 she married Ernest “Little Son Joe” Lawlars, a Memphis based guitarist who was her partner for the next 23 years. Her recordings with Son Joe are in duet style, with piano, bass or drums added on some sessions. Although Son’s playing has an impelling pulse and solidness their instrumental interplay is less intricate than what Minnie and Kansas Joe recorded. Some of Minnie’s best lyrics come from this period, like those in the autobiographical “In My Girlish Days”, (1941)which she played in G in standard tuning. In the same session Son Joe sang “Black Rat Swing”, and sounded so much like Minnie he must have borrowed her chewing tobacco. Minnie’s fantastically vituperative vocal delivery on some songs may be due in part to having a cheek full of Copenhagen. She was known to spit mid-song without losing a beat.

Their sessions in May and December of 1941 fused her more urban sound, (for example her vocal delivery on “Nothin’ In Ramblin”), with Son Joe’s back-up style, which combined big chords with an insistent beat to create a chunky swing feel. He seems to play with a flatpick, mostly in standard tuning. The forties treated Minnie and Son Joe well and they performed both together and separately depending on finances, (they could make more money playing separate gigs). Minnie, presided over Blue Monday parties at Ruby Lee Gatewood’s Tavern playing an electrified National arch top in front of a band that included bass and drums. The poet Langston Hughes saw her perform New Year’s Eve 1942, at the 230 Club, and was thoroughly overwhelmed by her “scientific” (i.e. loud) sound. He described the sound of her electric guitar as ” a musical version of electric welders plus a rolling mill”. Clearly she had by that time embraced the next phase of the blues.

The poet Langston Hughes was overwhelmed by Minnie’s “rolling mill” sounds. Courtesy Vintage Books USA.

As a working musician, Minnie’s guitar style evolved partly in response to the kind of places she played and the people for whom she played. Her recorded output is not necessarily the same as her live set. Record companies are remarkably mono-thematic about marketing, and Minnie, like many other blues musicians, played jazz and swing tunes as well, although there are only hints of this in her 200 recorded sides. Paul and Beth Garon include a fascinating photo of Minnie’s set list in “Woman with Guitar”, that includes songs like “Marie”, “Woody Woodpecker”, Lady Be Good”, “I Love You For Sentimental Reasons” and “How High The Moon.” Son Joe and Minnie played until their health broke down. Even though sales of their recordings slowed down by the end of the forties, their audience remained available to them in the clubs. Styles were shifting toward jump blues bands and by the mid ’50s the record industry had changed irrevocably with the fabrication of rock and roll. The major labels pulled out of the blues market, and Minnie’s last recordings were for Regal in 1949. The best tune of that session, in which Minnie generally sounded tired and overwrought, is “Downhome Girl” which is sung with great feeling but too many notes on the wrong frets. These sides were never issued by Regal but can now be heard on the Biograph CD Memphis Minnie: Early Rhythm and Blues 1949.

In 1957 Minnie had an incapacitating heart attack, and Son Joe became too ill to perform. They returned to Memphis where Minnie’s sister Daisy took care of them. After Son Joe’s death in 1962 Minnie lived in a nursing home until she died on August 6,1973, at the age of 76.

Although Memphis Minnie is gone, her music is still full of life, and her influence can be heard in the music of the many Chicago blues players who came up during her reign in the thirties and forties. Her guitar playing embodies the best of blues: it takes a simple form and makes each iteration fresh and inventive. Many of her hits are still standards in more than one genre, like “What’s The Matter With The Mill?”, “Chauffeur Blues” or “When The Levee Breaks”. Her recordings were reissued by Chris Strachwitz on Blues Classics in the late sixties, and had a profound influence on several young musicians, particularly the late guitarist JoAnn Kelly, and Maria Muldaur who still sings Minnie’s songs today. Suzy Thompson, who plays blues fiddle and guitar is another current interpreter of Minnie’s songs.

Minnie’s voice is rarely heard, even today: it is the voice of an independent, childless woman, an artist who never puts up with abuse, and who managed to find pleasure while living through tough times.

(a version of this article was originally published in Acoustic Guitar Magazine 1997)

Sources not cited in the text are from record labels and personal conversations with musicians. Photo courtesy the Frank Driggs collection. Langston Hughes quote courtesy Vintage Books USA.

Visit
Del Rey and Suzy Thompson for modern interpretations.

To buy Minnie’s original recordings check Arhoolie, and Document .

Many of Minnie’s lyrics gathered here.

If you are interested in Minnie’s guitar style, I’ve made a Homespun video on how to figure her guitar parts in the various keys she plays in. There are also additional hints as to positions, and links to sound recordings on the Playing Memphis Minnie page. Have fun!

http://sheshredsmag.com/legends-memphis-minnie/

The Legends: Memphis Minnie

While pioneering vocalist Ma Rainey was dubbed the “Mother of the Blues,” and helped spark the genre’s commercial spread in the 1920s, it was guitarist/bassist/vocalist Memphis Minnie (June 3, 1897- Aug. 6, 1973) who picked up the torch to keep African American popular music raw and relevant through the mid-20th century. In the process, she shaped the sound of modern pop music.

Born Lizzie Douglas, the New Orleans native was playing on Beale Street sidewalks in Memphis by age 13. After learning her craft down South, Douglas joined the historic migration of African American musicians to the North, eventually establishing herself in Chicago. It was there that her musical partnership with singer and guitarist Joe McCoy caught the attention of Columbia Records, who rechristened the pair Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe.

Among the duo’s signature songs are 1929’s “When the Levee Breaks,” a song famously reshaped by Led Zeppelin as the final song on Led Zeppelin IV, and 1930s “Bumble Bee,” the impetus for Muddy Waters’ “Honey Bee.” The pair influenced contemporary “hillbilly” music as well as blues, with country music pioneers Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys adding their own twist to their 1930 single, “What’s the Matter with the Mill?”

In a field dominated by men, Memphis Minnie thrived and played a major role in shaping the sound of Chicago blues. One legendary story from the 1930s finds Minnie publicly defeating renowned guitarist (and her future tourmate) Big Bill Broonzy in a battle of the blues performers, with a bottle of gin and a bottle of whiskey on the line.

As the blues changed, so did Minnie’s penchant for duets. Her rhythmic guitar playing as heard on earlier recordings gave way to a more modern-sounding, standard tuned style that better suits the drum, trumpet, and piano accompaniment on such recordings as her 1939 release, “Hot Stuff.”

Memphis Minnie had a respect for the women that paved the way for her success, recording “Ma Rainey” in tribute to the singer just six months after her 1939 passing. With her own natural talent and embrace of musical and technological innovations, she became a groundbreaker in her own right soon after, playing electric guitar publicly several years before Big Mama Thornton and others laid the groundwork for rhythm and blues.

As one of the greatest and most visible guitarists of her time, and a songwriter and performer who still influences popular music today, Memphis Minnie is simultaneously one of the seminal and unsung blues pickers and singers of the early 20th century.

THE MUSIC OF MEMPHIS MINNIE: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MEMPHIS MINNIE:

Memphis Minnie - Hoodoo Lady Blues

Memphis Minnie - Me And My Chauffeur Blues

Memphis Minnie - Kissing In The Dark

I'm A Bad Luck Woman - MEMPHIS MINNIE

BD Music Presents Memphis Minnie

The life and music of Memphis Minnie

Pickin' The Blues MEMPHIS MINNIE (1929)

Memphis Minnie-Frisco Town-1929

Memphis Minnie What A Night (1953)

Memphis Minnie - Bumble Bee

Memphis Minnie Hot Stuff (1937)

Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie When the Levee

Memphis Minnie - Down In The Alley - Blues

Caught Me Wrong Again - Memphis Minnie

Memphis Minnie " Looking The World Over " (1941)

Memphis Minnie True Love

Memphis Minnie - Moaning the Blues

Memphis Minnie-Can I Do It For You

Memphis Minnie-Pickin´ The Blues

MY BABY DON'T WANT ME NO MORE by Memphis Minnie

Memphis Minnie - Sylvester And His Mule Blues

Memphis Minnie-Memphis Minnie-Jitis Blues

Memphis Minnie - Hoodoo Lady

Broken Heart : Memphis Minnie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Minnie

Memphis Minnie

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lizzie Douglas (June 3, 1897 – August 6, 1973), known as Memphis Minnie, was a blues guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter whose recording career lasted from the 1920s to the 1950s. She recorded around 200 songs, some of the best known being "Bumble Bee", "Nothing in Rambling", and "Me and My Chauffeur Blues".

Early life

Douglas was born on June 3, 1897, in Algiers, Louisiana.^[1] She was the eldest of 13 siblings. Her parents, Abe and Gertrude Douglas, nicknamed her Kid when she was young, and her family called her that throughout her childhood. It is reported that she disliked the name Lizzie.^[2] When she first began performing, she played under the name Kid Douglas.
When she was 7, she and her family moved to Walls, Mississippi, south of Memphis. The following year she received her first guitar, as a Christmas present. She learned to play the banjo by the age of 10 and the guitar by the age of 11, when she started playing at parties.^[1] The family later moved to Brunswick, Tennessee. After Minnie's mother died, in 1922, Abe Douglas moved back to Walls, where he died in 1935.^[3]

Career

In 1910, at the age of 13, she ran away from home to live on Beale Street, in Memphis. She played on street corners for most of her teenage years, occasionally returning to her family's farm when she ran out of money.^[4] Her sidewalk performances led to a tour of the South with the Ringling Brothers Circus from 1916 to 1920.^[5] She then went back to Beale Street, with its thriving blues scene, and made her living by playing guitar and singing, supplementing her income by prostitution (at that time, it was not uncommon for female performers to work as prostitutes out of financial need).^[6]
She began performing with Joe McCoy, her second husband, in 1929. They were discovered by a talent scout for Columbia Records, in front of a barber shop, where they were playing for dimes.^[7] She and McCoy went to record in New York City and were given the names Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie by a Columbia A&R man.^[8] Over the next few years she and McCoy released a series of records, performing as a duet. In February 1930 they recorded the song "Bumble Bee" for the Vocalion label, which they had already recorded for Columbia but which had not yet been released.^[9] It became one of Minnie's most popular songs; she eventually recorded five versions of it.^[10] Minnie and McCoy continued to record for Vocalion until August 1934, when they recorded a few sessions for Decca Records. Their last session together was for Decca, in September.^[11] They divorced in 1935.^[1]
An anecdote from Big Bill Broonzy's autobiography, Big Bill Blues, recounts a cutting contest between Minnie and Broonzy in a Chicago nightclub on June 26, 1933, for the prize of a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of gin. Each singer was to sing two songs; after Broonzy sang "Just a Dream" and "Make My Getaway," Minnie won the prize with "Me and My Chauffeur Blues" and "Looking the World Over".^[12] Paul and Beth Garon, in their biography Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie's Blues, suggested that Broonzy's account may have combined various contests at different dates, as these songs of Minnie's date from the 1940s rather than the 1930s.^[13]
By 1935 Minnie was established in Chicago and had become one of a group of musicians who worked regularly for the record producer and talent scout Lester Melrose.^[14] Back on her own after her divorce from McCoy, Minnie began to experiment with different styles and sounds. She recorded four sides for Bluebird Records in July 1935, returned to the Vocalion label in August, and then recorded another session for Bluebird in October, this time accompanied by Casey Bill Weldon. By the end of the 1930s, in addition to her output for Vocalion, she had recorded nearly 20 sides for Decca and eight sides for Bluebird.^[11] She also toured extensively in the 1930s, mainly in the South.^[14]
In 1938 Minnie returned to recording for the Vocalion label, this time accompanied by Charlie McCoy, Kansas Joe's brother, on mandolin.^[11] Around this time she married the guitarist and singer Ernest Lawlars, known as Little Son Joe. They began recording together in 1939, with Son adding a more rhythmic backing to Minnie's guitar.^[14] They recorded for Okeh Records in the 1940s and continued to record together through the decade. By 1941 Minnie had started playing electric guitar,^[15] and in May of that year she recorded her biggest hit, "Me and My Chauffeur Blues". A follow-up date produced two more blues standards, "Looking the World Over" and Lawlars's "Black Rat Swing" (issued under the name "Mr. Memphis Minnie"). In the 1940s Minnie and Lawlars continued to work at their "home club," Chicago's popular 708 Club, where they were often joined by Broonzy, Sunnyland Slim, or Snooky Pryor, and also played at many of the other better-known Chicago nightclubs. During the 1940s Minnie and Lawlars performed together and separately in the Chicago and Indiana areas.^[16] Minnie often played at "Blue Monday" parties at Ruby Lee Gatewood's, on Lake Street.^[17] The poet Langston Hughes, who saw her perform at the 230 Club on New Year's Eve, 1942, wrote of her "hard and strong voice" being made harder and stronger by amplification and described the sound of her electric guitar as "a musical version of electric welders plus a rolling mill."^[18]
Later in the 1940s Minnie lived in Indianapolis and Detroit. She returned to Chicago in the early 1950s.^[19] By the late 1940s, clubs had begun hiring younger and cheaper artists, and Columbia had begun dropping blues artists, including Memphis Minnie. Unable to adapt to changing tastes, she moved to smaller labels, such as Regal, Checker, and J.O.B.^[20]

Later life and death

Memphis Minnie's grave (2008)

Minnie continued to record into the 1950s, but her health began to decline. With public interest in her music waning, she retired from her musical career, and in 1957 she and Lawlars returned to Memphis.^[21] Periodically, she appeared on Memphis radio stations to encourage young blues musicians. In 1958 she played at a memorial concert for Big Bill Broonzy.^[22] As the Garons wrote in Woman with Guitar, "She never laid her guitar down, until she could literally no longer pick it up." She suffered a stroke in 1960, which left her confined to a wheelchair. Lawlars died the following year, and Minnie had another stroke a short while after. She could no longer survive on her Social Security income. Magazines wrote about her plight, and readers sent her money for assistance.^{[citation needed]} She spent her last years in the Jell Nursing Home, in Memphis, where she died of a stroke in 1973.^[23] She is buried at the New Hope Baptist Church Cemetery, in Walls, DeSoto County, Mississippi.^[1] A headstone paid for by Bonnie Raitt was erected by the Mount Zion Memorial Fund on October 13, 1996, with 34 family members in attendance, including her sister Daisy. The ceremony was taped for broadcast by the BBC.^[24] Her headstone is inscribed:

Lizzie "Kid" Douglas Lawlers
aka Memphis Minnie

The inscription on the back of her gravestone reads:

The hundreds of sides Minnie recorded are the perfect material to teach us about the blues. For the blues are at once general, and particular, speaking for millions, but in a highly singular, individual voice. Listening to Minnie's songs we hear her fantasies, her dreams, her desires, but we will hear them as if they were our own.^[25]

Character and personal life

Minnie was known as a polished professional and an independent woman who knew how to take care of herself.^[4] She presented herself to the public as being feminine and ladylike, wearing expensive dresses and jewelry, but she was aggressive when she needed to be and was not shy when it came to fighting.^[26] According to the blues musician Johnny Shines, "Any men fool with her she'd go for them right away. She didn't take no foolishness off them. Guitar, pocket knife, pistol, anything she get her hand on she'd use it".^[4] According to Homesick James, she chewed tobacco all the time, even while singing or playing the guitar, and always had a cup at hand in case she wanted to spit.^[27] Most of the music she made was autobiographical; Minnie expressed a lot of her personal life in music.^{[citation needed]}
Minnie was married three times,^[1] although no marriage certificates have been found.^[28] It is believed that her first husband was Casey Bill Weldon, whom she married in the early 1920s. Her second husband was the guitarist and mandolin player Kansas Joe McCoy, whom she married in 1929.^[1] They filed for divorce in 1934. McCoy's jealousy of Minnie's professional success has been given as one reason for the breakup of their marriage.^[29] Around 1938 she met the guitarist Ernest Lawlars (Little Son Joe), who became her new musical partner, and they married shortly thereafter;^[30] Minnie's union records, covering 1939 onwards, give her name as Minnie Lawlars.^[31] He dedicated songs to her, including "Key to the World", in which he addresses her as "the woman I got now" and calls her "the key to the world." Minnie was also reported to have lived with a man known as "Squirrel" in the mid- to late 1930s.^[32]
Minnie was not religious and rarely went to church; the only time she was reported to have gone to church was to see a gospel group perform.^[29] She was baptised shortly before she died, probably to please her sister Daisy Johnson.^[33] A house in Memphis where she once lived, at 1355 Adelaide Street, still exists.^[34]

Legacy

Memphis Minnie has been described as "the most popular female country blues singer of all time".^[35] Big Bill Broonzy said that she could "pick a guitar and sing as good as any man I've ever heard."^[12] Minnie lived to see a renewed appreciation of her recorded work during the revival of interest in blues music in the 1960s. She was an influence on later singers, such as Big Mama Thornton, Jo Ann Kelly^[1] and Erin Harpe.^[36] She was inducted into the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame in 1980.^[37]
"Me and My Chauffeur Blues" was recorded by Jefferson Airplane on their debut album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, with Signe Anderson as lead vocalist. "Can I Do It for You" was recorded by Donovan in 1965, under the title "Hey Gyp (Dig the Slowness)". A 1929 Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy song, "When the Levee Breaks",^[38] was adapted (with altered lyrics and a different melody) by Led Zeppelin and released in 1971 on their fourth album. "I'm Sailin'" was covered by Mazzy Star on their 1990 debut album, She Hangs Brightly.

Songs

References

Harris, Sheldon (1989). Blues Who's Who: A Biographical Dictionary of Blues SIngers. pp. 161–162.
Garon, Paul; Garon, Beth (1992). Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie's Blues. Da Capo Press. p. 14.
Garon and Garon (1992), p. 28.
Garon and Garon (1992), p. 15.
Oliver, Paul. "Memphis Minnie". Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press. Retrieved 2012-12-07.
"Memphis Minnie". Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 2014-06-14.
Garon and Garon (1992), p. 24.
Garon and Garon (1992), p. 25.
Russell, Tony (1997). The Blues: From Robert Johnson to Robert Cray. Dubai: Carlton Books. p. 12. ISBN 1-85868-255-X.
Garon and Garon (1992), p. 103.
Dixon, Robert M. W.; Godrich, John; and Rye, Howard W. (1997). Blues and Gospel Records 1890–1943. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 615–622.
Farley, Christopher John. "Memphis Minnie and the Cutting Contest." In Guralnik, P., Santelli, R., George-Warren, H., Farley, C.J., eds. (2003). Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues, New York: Armistad. p. 198.
Garon and Garon (1992), p. 58.
Ray, Del (1995). "Guitar Queen". Acoustic Guitar, no. 33, September 1995.
Spottswood, Richard K. (1993). "Country Girls, Classic Blues, and Vaudeville Voices". In: Cohn, L. Nothing but the Blues. New York: Abbeville Press. p. 101.
Smith, Jessie Carney, ed. (1996). Notable Black American Women. Book 2. Detroit: Gale Research. pp. 185–188.
Garon and Garon (1992), p. 55.
Hughes, L. (1943). Music at Year's End. Chicago Defender, January 9, 1943.
Russell, Tony (1997). The Blues: From Robert Johnson to Robert Cray. Dubai: Carlton Books. pp. 103–104. ISBN 1-85868-255-X.
Pearson, Barry (1993). "Jump Steady: The Roots of R & B". In: Cohn, L. Nothing but the Blues. New York: Abbeville Press. pp. 325–326.
"Memphis Minnie". Cr.nps.gov. Archived from the original on 2006-10-31. Retrieved 2006-10-23.
Humphrey, Mark A. (1993). "Bright Lights, Big City: Urban Blues". In: Cohn, L. Nothing But the Blues. New York: Abbeville Press, p. 169.
Santelli, Robert. (2001) The Big Book of Blues. Penguin Books. page 335. ISBN 0-14-100145-3.
"Memphis Minnie". Mount Zion Memorial Fund. Retrieved 2014-07-01.
"Memphis Minnie McCoy (1897–1973)". Findagrave.com. Retrieved 2014-06-14.
Pearson, Barry Lee (1973-08-06). "Memphis Minnie: Biography". AllMusic.com. Retrieved 2014-06-14.
Garon and Garon (1992), p. 38.
Garon and Garon (1992), p. 5.
Garon and Garon (1992), p. 36.
Garon and Garon (1992), p. 45.
Garon and Garon (1992), p. 48.
Garon and Garon (1992), pp. 21, 38.
Garon and Garon (1992), p. 85.
Sauer, Steve (2010). "Former Home of Led Zeppelin Inspiration Memphis Minnie Wastes Away." Goldmine, p. 55.
LaVere, Steve, and Garon, Paul (1973). "Memphis Minnie". Living Blues, Autumn 1973, p. 5.
"Erin Harpe". The Noise, May 29, 2014.
"1980 Hall of Fame Inductees". The Blues Foundation. Archived from the original on 2007-03-05. Retrieved 2006-10-23.

Fast, Susan (2001). In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music. p. 165. ISBN 0-19-511756-5.

Sources

Garon, Paul, and Garon, Beth (1992). Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie's Blues. New York: Da Capo Press.
Harris, S, (1989). Blues Who's Who. 5th paperback ed. New York: Da Capo Press.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Memphis Minnie.

	Night Time Blues, Ma Rainey and Memphis Minnie	blues	History

Welcome to Sound Projections

Saturday, June 23, 2018

Memphis Minnie (1897-1973): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, singer, songwriter, arranger, ensemble leader, producer, and teacher

AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU

SPRING, 2018

VOLUME FIVE NUMBER THREE

Artist Biography by Barry Lee Pearson

Memphis Minnie

Also known as: Lizzie Douglas

(1897–1973)

Memphis Minnie Biography

Memphis Minnie's Career

Famous Works

Further Reading

Suggested Reading

External Links

It’s been said that Memphis Minnie played guitar “like a man.”

A Tough Kid

Listen Now:

Bumble Bee Blues

Soo Cow Soo

In 1930, she and McCoy, who’d married the year before, joined the thousands of other African-Americans leaving the Delta for Chicago.

“I got me a bumble bee, don’t sting nobody but me.”

About the Author

Larry Nager

The Legends: Memphis Minnie

Memphis Minnie

Early life

Career

Later life and death

Character and personal life

Legacy

Songs

References

Sources

External links

Editor's Bio

Blog Archive

Labels