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If women remain passive, I think there is little hope for survival of life on this earth.

—Leonora Carrington

Who was Memphis Minnie? She may be relatively unknown to the general public, but among blues fans, her feats are legendary: “Memphis Minnie was one of the greatest blues singers of all time,” said Living Blues magazine.¹

In a 1973 obituary, one critic called her “the most popular female country blues singer,”² while Blues Who’s Who quotes another commentator who stated, “Memphis Minnie was without doubt the greatest of all female singers to record.”³

Many blues artists date an entire era in their lives by referring to her. As Koko Taylor said, “the first blues record I ever heard was Me and My Chauffeur Blues, by Memphis Minnie.”⁴ Hound Dog Taylor, speaking of his early days in Chicago in 1943–1944, noted that “47^th Street was jumping on the South Side. When I first come up Memphis Minnie was playing at the old 708 Club with her first husband.”⁵ When Baby Boy Warren looked back on the singers who influenced him the most and for whom he had the most respect, he commented, “The other musician I admired [besides Little Buddy Doyle] was a woman—Memphis Minnie.”⁶ And Bukka White reminisced, “Memphis Minnie, Washboard Sam, Tampa Red, Big Bill, they were my favorite ‘cause they really would knock the cover off a house. They play in the nightclubs, would play house parties through the day. Otherwise they were rehearsing; people would be there, as many as they would be at the nightclub sometimes.”⁷

She was among the first twenty performers elected to the Hall of Fame in the inaugural W. C. Handy Awards in 1980,⁸ and she won the top female vocalist award in the first Blues Unlimited Readers’ Poll in 1973, finishing ahead of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey.⁹ And this wouldn’t be the only time Minnie was compared to such greats. Helen Oakley Dance ranked T-Bone Walker “at the top … with ladies like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Memphis Minnie.”¹⁰

Many people who have heard of Big Bill Broonzy or Tampa Red still don’t know much about Minnie. But her songs have been recorded by performers as diverse as Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Mance Lipscomb, Muddy Waters, Clifton Chenier, and dozens of others, both obscure and well known. It would be no exaggeration to say that Memphis Minnie was one of the most influential blues singers ever to record.¹¹ Few today realize how extremely popular she was, with a string of hits and nearly 100 records to her credit.¹²

Countless performers were influenced by her. Johnny Shines, Eddie Boyd, Calvin Frazier, J. B. Hutto, Lowell Fulson and J. B. Lenoir all testified that they derived some aspects of their style from Memphis Minnie.¹³ Of course, a list of blues artists who played with Minnie in Chicago, not to mention those who frequently heard her and were influenced by her, would read like a Chicago Blues Who’s Who, with Big Bill, St. Louis Jimmy, Washboard Sam, Memphis Slim, Tampa Red, Black Bob, Jimmie Gordon, Blind John Davis, Charlie McCoy and Sunnyland Slim near the top of the list and dozens more below.

The breadth of Minnie’s influence is striking. When Chuck Berry arrived in Chicago, Minnie was recording for Leonard Chess’s Checker label. Berry would soon become a Chess star, and Minnie was an important influence on his musical development. There are even rumors of a mysterious tape of an extended jam session involving Chuck Berry and Memphis Minnie, but Berry has kept silent about its details, refusing even to reveal when it was made or what songs it contains.¹⁴

Because Minnie began her recording career in 1929 and kept going for three decades, her presence was written large across the whole history of the recorded blues. Year after year, her style evolved, and by the time illness forced her to retire, she had recorded the country blues, the urban blues, the Melrose sound, the Chicago blues and the postwar blues. Nonetheless, surprisingly little documentation exists for so extensive a career. Fortunately we have the testimony of Minnie’s youngest sister, Daisy Douglas Johnson. Mrs. Johnson has remarked, however, that while her information has come directly from Minnie herself, most of it was transmitted after Minnie had her first stroke.¹⁵

Many of the details of Minnie’s life story that came from early reports by pioneer blues researchers Georges Adins and Mike Leadbitter remain unsubstantiated, but we do not reject them out of hand.¹⁶ Indeed, in the absence of standard printed sources that usually provide the foundation of historical and biographical studies—in the absence, for example, of birth certificates for Minnie, Joe McCoy and Ernest Lawlars (Son Joe)—and in the presence of four different dates of birth established for Minnie in various works of blues criticism,¹⁷ and even by various official documents, our tale will be, by necessity, unorthodox and anecdotal. Nonetheless, we do provide documents rarely seen in blues biographies, e.g., union records and recording contracts.

We hope the organization of this book will present Minnie and her work in an enjoyable and readable form. Chapter 2 contains a historical overview of the development of blues during Minnie’s lifetime, and how Minnie seemed to stretch the boundaries of its forms. Such a perspective is of crucial importance in understanding the unique aspects of Minnie’s role and function. Chapters 3 through 7 provide a chronology of Memphis Minnie, from her birth to her death, in the words of her friends and relatives. Wherever possible, this information is supplemented by material from printed sources. Chapters 8 through 20 attempt to view Minnie’s songs as specific products of a specific cultural moment, acted upon by conflicting forces of gender, race and class. In twelve sections, each devoted to a group of songs that bear upon a specific idea or theme, we analyze the cultural forces through which the blues, and Minnie’s blues, in particular, come into being. These twelve chapters are introduced by a brief discussion of the principles of interpretation that we use throughout the analysis. Finally, we provide a thorough discography of Memphis Minnie’s work, complete with Library of Congress copyright information and, where possible, composer credits taken from the labels of the records themselves.

While our main purpose is to celebrate and delineate Memphis Minnie’s life and songs, we will also examine Minnie’s songs as exceptional examples of the blues genre, stunning pieces that reveal not only Minnie’s magnificence, but the grandeur of the blues as well. 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. That is part of their magic, their art. Listening to Minnie’s songs, we will hear her fantasies, her dreams, her desires, but we will hear them as if they were our own.