About Me
Memphis Minnie ranks with Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Big Mama Thornton as one of the blues' most influential and historically significant female artists. While Rainey and Smith came out of the 1920s classic blues period, and Thornton out of the post-World War II urban blues era, Minnie's roots were in country blues, an idiom dominated by men.An able guitarist and an authoritative singer who packed her notes with punch and rough-edged passion, Minnie was also an excellent composer. Songs of hers such as "Bumble Bee," "Hoodoo Lady," and "I Want Something for You" are genuine blues classics.Minnie's command of the blues was such that her recording career spanned three decades and survived the numerous stylistic shifts that occurred within the blues. Along the way she influenced a number of prominent blues figures, from Muddy Waters on down, and almost single-handedly kept a female presence in what became an increasingly male form.Broonzy spoke for the rest of her peers when he declared that Memphis Minnie could "pick a guitar and sing as good as any man I've ever heard." But just like the phrase that almost every girl who's ever thrown a sandlot football in a picture-perfect arc has heard -- "She throws pretty good for a girl" -- the language obscured the truth.The truth is that Memphis Minnie was a phenomenal pioneering musician who moved beyond intricate blues fingerpicking and phrasing to playing ferocious stand-up electric guitar live on stage in Chicago at least one year before Muddy Waters is reported to have begun playing electric. And that was five years before Muddy's first big electric blues single, "I Can't Be Satisfied"/"I Feel like Going Home," was released on Chess Records (in 1948), a watershed moment in the history of American music. The truth is that Memphis was never recorded playing guitar that way.Not only did Memphis write most of the more than 200 sides she recorded during her career, she also wrote songs for other outstanding blues musicians, including Robert Nighthawk. Her virtuosity as an instrumentalist was matched by her brilliance and subtlety as a lyricist; with the keen mind of a poet, she transmuted the facts of life in the Delta and beyond into contemplations of identity, desire, and power.By the late '20s, when Memphis left the Bedford Plantation, she knew where she needed to go: Chicago. Among her peers in the all-male bastion of great Chicago blues musicians -- Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy, Sunnyland Slim, Jimmy Rogers, Muddy Waters, and others -- she was both admired and resented. "She was a great girl, but she was a woman," Muddy Waters once said of Memphis. "You know, in this business, I don't know how you is in your business, you can be a little evil when . . . [he laughs]. Yeah, you know, when a woman's out there doing the job, you're doing the job she's doing, it could get a little evil sometimes." (This after Muddy and other bluesmen had repeatedly lost to Memphis in music duels fought out in Chicago clubs where crowd applause decided the winner.)When most blues guitarists were still performing from a chair, Memphis began standing up, with her guitar slung down over her hips. She paid a lot of attention to new styles, and new instruments, too. So it should come as no surprise that she was one of the first to play electric guitar. What has remained obscure in the annals of music history is her pioneering command of the instrument.Early in 1943, when poet/writer Langston Hughes saw Memphis play at the 230 Club, he was so overwhelmed by her literally electrifying show that he devoted his entire column in the January 9 Chicago Defender to her: " . . . Memphis Minnie . . . beats out blues on an electric guitar. . . . She grabs the microphone and yells, `Hey now!' Then she hits a few deep chords at random, leans forward ever so slightly on her guitar, bows her head and begins to beat out . . . a rhythm so contagious that often it makes the crowd holler out loud. . . . 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."This account shows that Memphis was playing electric guitar with a ferocious power that was virtually unparalleled at the time. The work of other early electric-guitar players -- such as T-Bone Walker and Eddie Durham of Texas, who had been playing electric since the '30s -- appears to have been far more restrained and jazzlike than the Memphis Minnie whom Langston Hughes saw. Unfortunately, no vinyl exists to verify what she surely was: the foremother of electric blues-based rock guitar.Why Memphis Minnie has never acclaimed as such is open to speculation, but it surely has something to do with a man named Lester Melrose. Melrose, the impresario who oversaw everything (from talent scouting to producing to contracts) at many of the major "race records" labels (with the exception of Decca) in the '30s and '40s, had Memphis virtually under his thumb for most of her recording career. Although Memphis and her first husband/music partner recorded some sides for Decca in 1934 and '35, most of her work was done in association with Melrose -- he of the "Melrose Sound," also known as "the Bluebird Beat," "the Melrose Mess," and "the Melrose Machine." Just as he did with everyone else in his "stable" of artists, Melrose recorded Memphis with a formulaic house band. In addition to his leanings toward "sophisticated" -- i.e., assembly line -- blues recordings, Melrose had no vision with regard to Memphis Minnie's potential. Neither he nor anyone else ever recorded her when she was playing hard-driving electric guitar. Worse, her last recording dates in the '50s, as the vinyl results attest, were failed efforts to stay commercially viable within parameters that contravened her natural instincts and gifts. (Big mistake, Lester. You fumbled the ball, man.) "She always would tell me that she'd been messed around in the music," Brewer Phillips, her late-career protégé, once related. "So I'd say, `How can they mess you around? She'd say, `They'll take your money.' And she'd always say, `You can learn to play, but don't let them take your money.' "Memphis was as self-possessed a woman as has ever breathed; the stories about her legendary Blue Monday "cocktail parties," her drinking and gambling, her ability to defend herself with any weapon at hand, as well as the nurture and guidance that she gave to many young, aspiring musicians are too numerous to repeat here........................................................ ........................................................... LIZZIE DOUGLAS. ( Memphis Minnie ) 1897 - 1973.Lizzie is born in Algiers, Louisiana, on 3 June 1897, the Douglas family move to Wallis, Mississippi in 1904 and the following year Lizzie receives her first guitar as a Christmas present.As a child she was called 'Kid Douglas' and learned how to play the guitar and banjo. Sometime during her early teens she began playing and singing on Memphis street corners and eventually joined Ringling Brothers Circus and toured the South.By 1917 she is a well known figure in Memphis, through playing her music in its streets and at house parties.During the 1920s she settled into Memphis's Beale Street blues scene, where in 1929 she was discovered by a talent scout for Columbia Records. Accompanied by guitarist Kansas Joe McCoy, her second husband (her first was the bluesman Casey Bill Weldon), she recorded later that year under the name Memphis Minnie. Her first song, "Bumble Bee," was one of the most successful of the more than one hundred sides she recorded before retiring in the mid-1950s.Minnie and Kansas Joe migrated to Chicago in 1930, where they quickly became part of the city's growing blues scene. Along with Big Bill Broonzy, whom she reputedly beat in a "blues contest," and Tampa Red, Minnie helped the country blues style ease into an urban setting. During the quarter century or so that she lived in Chicago, Minnie recorded for a number of labels, including Vocalion, Decca, and Bluebird, and with a number of bluesmen, most notably Sunnyland Slim and Little Walter. For some of her sessions, Minnie employed a small combo; for others, she was accompanied by a second guitarist.Over the next few years, the duo, who are romantically as well as musically linked, will make a host of records, mostly for the Vocalion record label. 'Bumble Bee' / 'I'm Talking About You', by Kansas Joe & Memphis Minnie is a good seller for Vocalion but the connection with Vocalion ends in 1932, the following year they move to Chicago.They cut some sides for Decca both as a duo and on their own. But their relationship is soon to end and this is to be the year in which they will record together.In 1939 having resumed her recording career with Vocalion, and while constantly on the move between Chicago and the South, Minnie finds a new lover and musical partner, Little Son Joe. During the next couple of years, Minnie and Little Son Joe record some of their most enduring work, including 'Nothing in Rambling' and 'Me and My Chauffeur Blues'.Three years on, Minnie remains a highly popular performer in the clubs of Chicago. 'Kidman Blues' is released in 1949 as Minnie's first recording for the Regal label but it is an unsuccessful blend of old and new musical styles.'Kissing in the Dark' / 'World of Trouble', release in 1953 on the JOB label, is a triumph. But it is to be Minnie's final commercial release after 24 years in the recording business.She plays at a concert in 1958. Minnie and Little Son Joe quit Chicago for Memphis where Minnie encourages younger blues musicians and broadcasts on local radio stations. Having been wheelchair-bound since suffering a stroke in 1960, Memphis Minnie dies in Memphis on 6 August 1973.Memphis Minnie was inducted into the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame in 1980.
