Читать книгу Woman with Guitar - Paul Garon - Страница 14

I want to be the opening act between this planet and the sun.

—Jayne Cortez

When Woman with Guitar was first published, we wrote that Memphis Minnie’s family moved from Algiers, Louisiana, located right across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, to Walls, Mississippi, just outside Memphis, Tennessee. Visiting Walls for the first time, we wrote that nearly a century later, you could stand on the railroad tracks in Walls, and with your face turned to the west, look out over dusty farmlands that had changed little in the last hundred years. That the view to the east was dissimilar and a bit more modern gave you the eerie feeling that for just the moment of your standing there, you actually embodied, in a symbolic way to be sure, part of the history of Memphis Minnie. For the drama that began there and unfolded in Chicago and Memphis and all points in between, and that finally played itself out in Memphis, never freed itself from the critical crossing of the modern with the old, the city with the country, the urban with the rural. Within the nexus of these contradictory and opposing forces, and probably rarely at peace, Memphis Minnie sang her blues.

It is tempting to believe that Minnie had one idea in mind almost from the day she was born: to leave the farm and go to town, to leave the site of back-breaking labor and meager wages for the land of good times and loud music: Memphis, Tennessee. Decades later, after Memphis seemed no longer misty and far away, Chicago became the far-off land, and she soon conquered it as well. Indeed, the tension between her distaste for farm work and her desire for an active musician’s career may have been the prime source of energy that carried her through life. We would not be surprised to learn that the unconscious vicissitudes of these forces drew her back to Memphis from the North, again and again, just as they sent her north at the start, and just as they set her out on the road, time after time. But before we begin to follow the wayward path of these currents, let us go back to the beginning.

Was Minnie really born in Algiers (Orleans parish), Louisiana, on June 3, 1897, as we’ve always thought?¹ Figures from the 1900 census suggest otherwise.² In our case, they show Minnie in Tunica County in 1900, at around three or four years old. She is in Beat 3 in the east central part of the county, perhaps near Beaver Dam or Little Texas. Most interesting is the fact that her father, Abe Douglas, is said to be from Tennessee and her mother Gertrude is from Mississippi. A Tennessee father and a Mississippi mother, living in northern Mississippi in 1900, makes one wonder—considering they were farmers—what they would have been doing near New Orleans in 1897. We have no hard evidence for the Algiers connection, although the census figure does endorse 1897 as her birth year. Minnie claims to be from Algiers in one of her songs, and Daisy endorsed this, but she could have gotten her information from Minnie. On the other hand, the Douglas family did move around frequently and they could have just come from Louisiana prior to the 1900 census. Still, we believe the 1900 census data—and all known subsequent census data—offers the strongest evidence of Minnie’s birth place: Mississippi.

She was the oldest of the thirteen Douglas children. Daisy Douglas Johnson, Minnie’s only surviving sister and an important informant for this work, was the youngest.³ Minnie’s father was Abe Douglas and her mother was Gertrude Wells Douglas. Abe was a sharecropper all his life, and his level of education, as well as that of his wife, is unknown. There were nine children who grew to adulthood and four who died young. The brothers Willie, Leo, Miller and Jack all did “factory work,” while Edward worked for the city of Memphis and Hun was a minister. A sister, Dovie, died in 1941. Minnie’s given name was Lizzie Douglas, although the family always called her “Kid,” and “Kid” Douglas is how she was first known in the music world. “She never liked ‘Lizzie,’” Daisy said, “she never would use that name.” Ultimately, “Kid” Douglas became known to the world as “Memphis Minnie,” the name she used on nearly all of her records and in her personal and professional life as well. At home, she was still called “Kid,” but everyone in the world outside called her “Minnie” or “Memphis Minnie.” A few of her colleagues even referred to her as “Memphis.”

Daisy had heard that the family moved to Walls around 1904. But the 1910 census finds them in Tunica County, near Hollywood. Minnie, or Lizzie, is thirteen and is said to have some schooling. No one knows exactly how far Minnie got in school, but she was able to read and write.⁴ Minnie was a wild youngster who never took to the farming life, and she ran away from home at an early age. Her first guitar had been a Christmas present given to her in 1905, a significant event for a talented musician like Minnie. Indeed, such individuals frequently report that in their childhoods, they always had “music in their head,” and it is for precisely these people that the “first instrument” has such totemic significance.⁵ For Minnie, musical instruments only intensified her desire to leave home. She began to run away to Memphis’s Beale Street with some regularity. When times were tough and nickels and dimes were hard to find, she returned to the farm to live, but rarely to work.⁶ By the time the next census was taken in 1920, Minnie is gone from the nest and the nest itself has moved to Desoto County on the Tennessee border. The family is enumerated near Lake Cormorant rather than Walls, but Daisy, who was born in 1915, remembers Walls, so we must assume that shortly thereafter they did move to Walls.

Traveling with a show was one way to gain experience, and Minnie toured the South in the war years with a Ringling Brothers show she joined in Clarksdale, Mississippi.⁷ “She was a showman,” said James Watt, “a showman all the way. She’d stand up out of that chair, she’d take that guitar and put it all ‘cross her head and everywhere, you know.”⁸ Minnie was to become an expert and professional entertainer, but the lessons were not easily learned. A young girl in a traveling show needed more than psychic defenses, and this rugged way of life gave her valuable experience not only as a polished professional, but as a woman who could take care of herself. Johnny Shines recalled, “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; y’know Memphis Minnie used to be a hell-cat… . I never had no problem with her. I know others that did.”⁹

Echoes of this rugged life appear throughout Minnie’s songs, but her repertoire also presents a nearly opposite face. In spite of her aversion to farm life, many farm and rural images are also distributed liberally through her early pieces, and songs like Frankie Jean (That Trottin’ Fool), Sylvester and His Mule Blues, and Plymouth Rock Blues are steeped in the lore of the farm and farm life. The Douglas farm had Plymouth Rocks—chickens of all kinds, in fact—as well as hogs, cows, and a mule. In Walls, “we raised sugarcane, cotton, corn and ‘garden,’ you know, like peas, beans. We used to raise something you call sorghum. It’s sugarcane; you strip it, and then you carry it to the mill, and they grind it up, get the juice, and they cook it,” said Daisy. Minnie’s nephew (Daisy’s son) Lee added, “When I was a kid, that was my job, to walk behind the mule with a switch. They had a machine that would grind the cane, run by a mule to turn the wheel, and I was a little kid with a switch, walking behind the mule.”¹⁰ Needless to say, Minnie had songs about that too, and her Good Soppin’ uses the imagery of cane and cane stripping, while What’s the Matter with the Mill? uses the imagery of the grinding mill.

The Douglas farm was like thousands of farms all over the South, with a small-town address but miles from the nearest gas station. Walls is only what Daisy’s son Lee called “a wide spot in the road.” It had a cotton gin, but Daisy’s comments showed how the importance of rural areas like Walls had shifted with the passing years. “The IC train used to run right through there, the Illinois Central, and it stopped in Walls. It went on through Tunica, Lakeview, Robinsonville, Clarksdale, below there— Mound Bayou. Right through the Delta. But they don’t have no train run down there now. They stopped that train fifteen years ago or more.”¹¹

Daisy Johnson had rattled off the stops as if they came straight from the Illinois Central timetable. The Memphis-to-Vicksburg route was covered by the IC’s “Delta Express” and “The Planter,” with stops at Lake Cormorant, Robinsonville, Hollywood, Tunica, Clayton, Dundee, Lula, Coahoma, Clarksdale, Alligator, Mound Bayou, Merigold, Cleveland and smaller stops in between. Hollywood, Mississippi, would soon become a stop-on-request-only station, as Walls had been for a number of years. But the train traveled north and south just east of the Mississippi River, through Delta towns that were rich in blues history. Lake Cormorant hosted Willie Brown and Memphis Minnie, and decades later, it was the site of the famous Library of Congress session where Son House, Fiddlin’ Joe Martin, and Willie Brown were recorded. Muddy Waters sang of Dundee for the Library of Congress in his Burr Clover Blues, and Gus Cannon and his Jug Stompers recorded Hollywood Rag. Clarksdale was the site of the Afro-American Hospital where the dying Bessie Smith was taken after her grisly road accident. The hospital is now the Riverside Hotel where many a blues singer has passed the night. Robert Johnson was a regular in the Robinsonville area, and Charlie Patton sang of Lula in his Dry Well Blues. Patton, Johnson, Son House and countless others traveled through Merigold, Tunica, and so many similar towns that anyone familiar with Delta blues repertoires hears the same towns mentioned a hundred times in the songs. Our dreams are full of the rich textures of the names’ magical ferment. Every wide spot in the road was a milepost of the blues’ evolution.

But Minnie didn’t care much for the wide spot on Highway 61, not when Beale Street was so close. What was it about Beale Street that drew so many rural dwellers to Memphis? Blacks were leaving the rural South in droves, and many were migrating out of the South entirely, some to Chicago, some to Detroit and other large cities of the North. But many rural blacks traveled shorter migratory routes and landed in the large cities of the South: Birmingham, Atlanta, New Orleans or Memphis. While one of the chief motivations for rural blacks to move to the urban areas was greater economic opportunity, discriminatory activities still held sway in these cities of the deep South. For example, while the Negro Urban Leagues in Kansas City, Baltimore and Louisville helped Negro mechanics organize for the first time, they ran into trouble in Memphis. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) denounced the Memphis mechanics’ association as “communistic,” and the league was forced to abandon its labor activities, lest they be cut off from community-chest funding.¹²

Other racist practices guaranteed that black children would receive a poor education. Schools for blacks opened and closed in synchrony with planting and harvesting, and when all was said and done, many black children went to school only three months a year.¹³ No aspect of everyday life was free of racist taint. For example, Lena Horne’s scenes were cut out of Stormy Weather and Until the Clouds Roll By, and Annie Get Your Gun was banned in 1947 because the part of a railroad conductor was played by a black.¹⁴ It was amid this atmosphere that the black citizens of Memphis carried on their affairs.

Memphis had always had a large black population, and its history has been a colorful one. Indeed, the violence along the infamous black thoroughfare of Beale Street led to Memphis being called “the murder capitol of the world.”¹⁵As Will Shade of the Memphis Jug Band recalled,

You could walk down the street in days of 1900 and like that and you could find a man wit’ throat cut from y’ear to y’ear. Also you could find people layin’ dead wit’ not their throat cut, money took and everything in their pockets, everything took out of their pockets and thrown outside the house. Sometimes you find them with no clothes on and all such as that. Sometimes you could find them throwed out of winders and so forth, here on Beale Street. Sportin’ class o’ women runnin’ up and down the street all night long … git knocked in the head with bricks and hatchets and hammers—pocket knives, razors and so forth like that.¹⁶

Such accounts illuminate one aspect of black Memphis life among the lower classes, but there is another side to the story. Diurnal Beale Street was also the focus for the most mundane activities of everyday living, and not simply gambling, drugs and prostitution; thus, in among the clubs and dives were the doctors’ offices, grocery stores and insurance companies one finds in every neighborhood.

But Memphis’s, and Beale Street’s main claim to fame was its music, and the most famous name in Memphis music was composer/bandleader W. C. Handy. Handy was born in Alabama, but his path to fame began in Memphis in 1909 on the eve of Boss Crump’s election as mayor. Club-owner/politico Jim Mulcahy hired Handy to play for Crump. Mulcahy was the most recent proprietor of the Panama Club at Fourth and Beale—its first three owners had all died violent deaths—and he would be warmly regarded for his beneficent treatment of Memphis blacks during the Depression. “They spent money with me when they had it—how could I not feed them now?” he remarked. If these words have a familiar ring, we should remember that when Mulcahy did time in Atlanta on liquor charges, he became friends with radical labor leader Eugene Debs, and became a staunch supporter of Debsian ideals.¹⁷ Handy’s enticing Mr. Crump helped carry Boss Crump to victory. St. Louis Blues, Beale Street Blues, Make Me a Pallet on the Floor, Yellow Dog Blues, Hesitation Blues, these too were Handy numbers, but these carefully and formally composed pieces had only a little to do with the downhome blues, or country blues of our subject, Memphis Minnie. Nonetheless, Handy’s existence as a Memphis figure is an important aspect of the city’s musical history. As for his pieces, many people will recognize Mr. Crump, in its most popular guise, as Mama Don’t Allow No Easy Riders Here.

Memphis was also the site of the founding of the Theater Owner’s Booking Association in 1909. The TOBA gave many black musicians and entertainers an opportunity to play in dozens of locations throughout the eastern United States. Of course, blues artists on the TOBA circuit tended to be Classic blues singers like Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith, and their more vaude-villian counterparts. Blues guitarists like Minnie didn’t work the TOBA, although they did appear in various theaters, like the Indiana Theatre in Chicago. As these remarks make clear, much of Memphis’s blues fame derives from the more sophisticated blues of W. C. Handy and the vaudeville-oriented blues sung from the TOBA stage. Even pianist Memphis Slim was at pains to separate the classier sort of bluesmen, like himself, from the more raggedy guitarists who played in Church’s Park.¹⁸ And yet the Church’s Park singers pointed to the existence of a mighty blues current flowing rapidly along beneath the veneer established by W. C. Handy and the TOBA, a current not so much subterranean as unheralded, a current at home in the dives and joints along Beale.

Guitarists Frank Stokes and Furry Lewis, two participants in that current, both provided advice and inspiration to Minnie in her early days in Memphis. Minnie’s duets with Kansas Joe drew as much inspiration from the guitar teamwork of Frank Stokes and Dan Sane,¹⁹ who recorded as the Beale Street Sheiks, as from her own early “partnership” with Willie Brown. Jim Jackson was already popular by that time, and he could be seen playing in Church’s Park along with other musicians like the guitarist Robert Wilkins. Wilkins remembered that Minnie “was beginning to learn guitar and he was able to teach her a few things,”²⁰ but before long, Minnie herself was the reigning blues queen of Memphis, and there was little she could learn from the competition.²¹ The proximity of Memphis, Walls and Lake Cormorant to the Mississippi Delta blurred any distinctions that might be invoked to separate the Memphis singers from the Mississippi ones, and comparisons of the Memphis blues with the Mississippi blues may not accomplish much. For example, Minnie played at a roadhouse with Frank Stokes and Memphis Willie B, all Memphis artists, but across the street at another club were Mississippians Son House and Willie Brown (ex-partner of the legendary Charlie Patton).²² And as we shall see, Minnie and Willie Brown were partners for a number of years.

Like many blues singers, Minnie was, in her own words, a “downhome girl,” and while she would come to play in finer clubs, she was still willing to play for friends at home, or at a picnic, or even on the street. “She’d play anywhere,” Memphis Slim recalled. “I’m tellin’ you. She came in there from Mississippi playin’ around in the streets and different places and people’s houses and house parties and things, until she made Bumble Bee Blues, and then she [got famous and] came to Chicago.”²³

Minnie babysat for future bluesman Eddie Taylor, with whose mother she had gone to school,²⁴ but she wasn’t home enough to do much babysitting. She traveled through Texas with the circus, and she worked in Greenville, Mississippi, with trombonist Pee Wee Whittaker.²⁵ When she wasn’t traveling, she was hanging out on Beale Street playing with various local musicians, from Joe McCoy or the Jed Davenport jug band to the Memphis Jug Band or the band led by Jack Kelly.

It was in these years when Minnie was still in her teens or twenties that she may have been the common-law wife of Will Weldon. For many years, blues aficionados thought that Will Weldon, who recorded with the Memphis Jug Band in the 1920s, was the same person as Casey Bill Weldon, who recorded with Minnie in the 1930s. New evidence (2013) shows that they were two different people. Will Weldon was born between 1904 and 1906 and died at an early age in 1934.²⁶ One 78rpm record was issued under his name: Hitch Me to Your Buggy, and Drive Me Like a Mule and Turpentine Blues.27 The information that Minnie was in a relationship with Weldon before she met Kansas Joe apparently came from Mike Leadbitter via Daisy Douglas Johnson. “He was a member of the Memphis Jug Band and was a lot younger than Minnie,” Leadbitter reported. But neither Daisy nor her sister-in-law Ethel recognized his name in 1992. If Memphis Minnie was with a Weldon at this juncture in her career, it would likely have been Will Weldon, a documented resident of Memphis who better fits the description of being not only a jug band member but also “a lot younger than Minnie.”

Little detailed information about Casey Bill Weldon was available until recently. Big Bill wrote that Weldon was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in 1909. However, his death certificate and other records indicate that he was probably born in Plumerville, Arkansas, in 1901. But he maintained mysterious multiple identities, under William Weldon, Nathan Hammond and possibly other names, and at times gave Chanute, Kansas, as his birthplace and 1902 as his year of birth. In his recording of Way Down in Louisiana, he also sang “Memphis is my home,” and Big Joe Williams said that Casey Bill was from Brownsville, Tennessee, thus adding to the confusion with Will Weldon of Memphis. He emerged on record first as “Kansas City Bill Weldon” and later became “Casey Bill, the Hawaiian Guitar Wizard.” “Casey” was an expanded variation of “KC,” for Kansas City, and he seems to have been in and out of KC, where several brothers and sisters moved from Arkansas. He lived in Chicago for a few years after his brief but important recording career there (1935–1938); his movements subsequently became hard to trace, as he may have used different names, but he was reportedly in California and Detroit before returning to Kansas City, where he died in 1972.²⁸

Even before Casey Bill was considered a contender for a role in Minnie’s life, many critics, including us, the authors, doubted whether the relationship even existed.²⁹ Indeed, it may be that he and Minnie not only never married but never even met until their recording session together in 1935. It is noteworthy that in Georges Adins’s pioneering interview with Minnie and her family, the name Casey Bill Weldon was never mentioned. Casey Bill was at least a part-time participant in the Chicago music scene, but none of our informants knew him or linked him with Minnie. Big Bill wrote about both of them but never as a couple. According to at least one source, Minnie lived with a man called Squirrel in the mid- to late 1930s,³⁰ and this may or may not have been Joe McCoy. It could also have been Casey Bill if he and Minnie did indeed have a relationship.

If the image of Minnie’s relationship with Weldon has melted away, a new and different image has come to replace it. Shortly after World War I, Minnie turned up at the Bedford plantation, just west of Lake Cormorant, not far from where the Douglas farm was counted in the 1920 census. This was where Willie Brown had lived since 1916,³¹ and it was with Brown that Minnie formed one of her early liaisons. When bluesman Willie Moore first saw Minnie, “Her and a boy was playin’ mandolin and a guitar together… . All of us called her ‘Kid’ Douglas.”³² Moore was already impressed with how superbly she played the guitar, even as a young girl: “She could make a guitar ‘talk’, say: ‘Fare thee well.’”³³

Along with Willie Brown and Willie Moore, Minnie often played for white parties, either when W. C. Handy couldn’t make it down from Memphis, or when the party was too small to warrant his august presence. Minnie, like Brown, played popular material when she played for whites, and one of her favorite pieces was What Makes You Do Me Like You Do Do Do [sic],³⁴ a piece also prized by Leadbelly. Minnie, Brown and Moore also played for local storekeepers who used their talents to attract black customers. Minnie always played lead when playing with Willie Brown, or with the three-guitar trio of Brown, Moore and herself. She also handled the vocal chores, although occasionally Brown sang too. Minnie was clearly Brown’s superior when it came to guitar skill, and Moore commented, “Wasn’t nothing he could teach her… . Everything Willie Brown could play, she could play, and then she could play some things he couldn’t play.” Minnie played with Brown around five or six years, during the time she lived in Bedford, but even in those days she was well known as a traveler—”she’d skip around every which a-way,” and by the late twenties, she had left the Bedford area to make her fortune elsewhere.³⁵ This is our first view of Minnie as an exceptional performer, and it won’t be our last. Critics agree that her guitar skills were remarkable, and her guitar playing on the early When the Levee Breaks has been called the most rhythmically varied accompaniment in “Spanish” tuning. “Though fingerpicking, she plays with the speed and finesse of a flatpicker. The variety of her performance is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that it is basically confined to the first three frets.”³⁶ Her recorded performances reveal the same sort of verbal creativity and agility as well. For example, for a Bumble Bee Slim song which became a blues standard, Sail On, Little Girl, Sail On, Minnie took the word “sailor” and made it a sexual figure in an innovative way, not used by other purveyors of the song or, indeed, by any other blues artist at all. The first and last verse were present in the original:

KEEP ON SAILING

Sail on, sail on, aww baby, sail on. (2x)

I don’t mind you sailing, but please don’t sail so long.

Ooh, boy(s), now don’t you want to ride with me. (2x)

I’m got the best sailor in this world you ever seen.

Going away, going away but I ain’t gonna stay. (2x)

‘Cause that sailor you got, I sees it each and every day.

Sail on, sail on, aww baby, sail on. (2x)

You gonna keep a-sailing till you find your mama gone.

We shall see many more examples of Minnie’s songs, but for the moment, let us return to her early years. Soon she teamed up with Joe McCoy in Memphis, and it was with McCoy that Minnie made many of her most exciting records. Joe McCoy was born in 1905, in Raymond, Mississippi, located in the southwestern part of the state, just west of Jackson and a bit north of Crystal Springs. His younger brother Charlie was born several years later, and he too recorded with Minnie. The McCoys were close to the Chatmans, who hailed from nearby Bolton, and who became the widely recorded and influential Mississippi Sheiks, a recording unit consisting of Walter Vinson (also from Bolton) and various members of the Chatman clan, fiddler Lonnie or guitarists Bo (Carter) or Sam. The McCoys and Chatmans often played together, and like many Jackson-area musicians, they were influenced in varying degrees by Tommy Johnson. As one would expect, Joe and Minnie often played in the Jackson area. McCoy was a talented and versatile musician who recorded under many pseudonyms. While his records with Minnie are marked by his sharply articulated bass runs that were the perfect foil for Minnie’s treble leads, his solo outings show him to be a more skilled guitarist than the duets suggest. His heavily accented voice had power and control, if not subtlety, and he sang in various groups, from the Jed Davenport jug band in Memphis to the Harlem Hamfats, a jazz group fronted by trumpeter Herb Morand.³⁷ Even with the Hamfats, Joe sounded right at home, another mark of his versatility.

Minnie and Joe met sometime in the 1920s, and they played on the Memphis streets until the pair was discovered by a Columbia scout, playing in a Beale Street barbershop for dimes.³⁸ Their first recording session was arranged, and in the summer of 1929, they traveled to New York to record for Columbia. Their first session for Vocalion took place on February 20, 1930, and they were married the same day. The marriage license, from Shelby County, was discovered by assiduous blues researcher Jim O’Neal, and it identifies the couple as “Kansas Joe McCoy” and “Minnie Douglas.”

Minnie also had numerous informal liaisons. Fiddlin’ Joe Martin, Willie Brown, perhaps Blind John Davis, possibly Homesick James, and even Peter Chatman, Sr. (father of Peter Chatman, also known as Memphis Slim) have all been linked with Minnie. About the latter, Sunnyland Slim commented, “I met her, I met Minnie … around ‘25, ‘27 in there… . Memphis Slim’s daddy was really in love with her, see he was running through the country trying to do everything he could, trying to keep her, you know,” and according to Memphis Slim, his father had been instrumental in bringing Minnie to Chicago.³⁹

When Johnny Shines came upon Minnie in Memphis, she was already with Joe McCoy. “I met Minnie the first time in 1928 or 1929. She and Joe and [his brother] Charlie was all in Memphis. They knew this fellow that kind of ran something like an open house, and they were just there playing and people buying booze and stuff like that for ‘em. It was in North Memphis.” For Shines this was ultimately a crucial meeting. “It was an influence because I liked what I heard, and I’d never heard anything like it before. I played a couple of her songs myself. Bumble Bee Blues, and something else I used to play, Black Rat.”40

One of the songs that Shines remembered—Bumble Bee— was recorded at Minnie and Joe’s first session. They cut six sides for Columbia in 1929, accompanying themselves on guitar and performing vocals in various combinations. The first coupling to be released, That Will Be Alright and When the Levee Breaks, had vocals by Joe alone. It was scheduled for release in early August and first appeared in the Columbia Supplement catalog for late September. Two months later, Frisco Town and Goin’ Back to Texas were released, marking Minnie’s first vocal appearance on a record. She soloed on Frisco Town and shared vocals with Joe on Goin’ Back to Texas. Columbia waited until mid-August of 1930 to release the final two numbers, Bumble Bee and I Want That. The latter song was sung by Joe, while Bumble Bee, sung by Minnie, became one of the best known songs of the period.

Regardless of who performed the vocal, all of the Columbia sides were labeled as by “Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie”; Minnie would keep her nom de disque throughout her life, both on record and off, but Joe stopped recording as Kansas Joe at the end of 1935. From what Daisy and Ethel knew, a Columbia A&R man had named Minnie and Joe “Memphis Minnie” and “Kansas Joe.”⁴¹ It would not be the only time white record company personnel gave blues singers their pseudonyms, and Sunnyland Slim recalled that he met Minnie back in the late 1920s, back before a white man gave him the name “Sunnyland.”⁴²

It has also been suggested that Minnie’s name derived from Cab Calloway’s famous piece, Minnie the Moocher, but Cab’s tune dates from 1931. In his autobiography, Calloway notes that his composition was inspired by the melody of St. James Infirmary and by two torch songs, Willie the Weeper and Minnie the Mermaid,⁴³ but the latter song was from 1930, again too late to have inspired Minnie’s pseudonym.

Others have suggested that the popularity of Walt Disney’s Minnie Mouse was at the root of Minnie’s pseudonym.⁴⁴ There is no evidence to support this idea either, but the character made her first appearance, carrying a guitar case, in the Mickey Mouse cartoon “Steamboat Willie” in 1928. But the very existence of Minnie the Mermaid, Minnie Mouse and Minnie the Moocher all suggest that between the mouse and the mermaid, the name “Minnie” was sufficiently in vogue in 1929 to strike the fancy of either “Kid” Douglas or a Columbia A&R man.

It was on July 31, 1929, that the New York Amsterdam News published the first ad for a Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie record, That Will Be Alright on Columbia (recorded on June 18). (The same ad appeared in the Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier on August 3.) But the earliest appearance of the name Memphis Minnie in newspaper articles may have been in notices about two plays, It Is Love (1927) and Corporal Eagen: The Sensational Comedy of the American Rookie (1929). These references were printed not in the black press, but in mainstream daily and weekly newspapers. It Is Love, by playwright Martin Brown, was submitted for copyright on June 24, 1925, under the title Praying Curve, with a cast of characters including a prostitute named Memphis Minnie. The play was reviewed in the January 5, 1927, edition of the Bridgeport Telegram, with the cast including Grace Huff in the role of Memphis Minnie.

Corporal Eagen was presented widely. In a minstrel section of the play, between acts, white men played the “high brown” roles of the “Dark Town Shuffling Gals,” which included characters with the names Memphis Minnie, Birmingham Bertha, Kansas City Kitty, Louisville Lou, Hattie Green from Fort Worth, St. Louis Woman, Mammy, Flamin’ Mamie and San Francisco Sal— most derived from popular songs of the time, but some possibly concocted for the script. The first copyright on Corporal Eagen was filed on June 20, 1929, by Universal Producing Company of Fairfield, Iowa. The play’s debut was thus roughly concurrent with the release of the first Memphis Minnie record. The authors may have taken Minnie’s name from the record, but on the other hand, a Columbia exec may have noticed the name in this play, if not in the earlier Praying Curve.

“Kansas Joe,” meanwhile, was already a well established name decades before Wilbur McCoy acquired it. A report from Deadwood, South Dakota, in the Cleveland Leader of November 23, 1880, relayed the news that the notorious local outlaw Kansas Joe had been killed. Various newspapers subsequently published news items on a gambler, a hobo, an Arizona shootout victim, a character in a Wild West play, a soldier, a gentleman drinker, a miner, a boxer and even a Greyhound racing dog, all called Kansas Joe, prior to Minnie and Joe’s recording debut. Other nicknames or pseudonyms based on cities and states were also common, but the geographical naming of blues recording artists seems to have begun in earnest only with Mississippi John Hurt in 1928, then Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, and when Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie debuted, the trend grew, and continues to this day.

When the Levee Breaks, cut at their first session, reveals the breadth of experience from which Minnie and Joe drew their songs. The devastating effects of the 1927 flood were still more than a memory for many of Minnie and Joe’s listeners, and Minnie’s sister-in-law Ethel Douglas vividly remembers the flood:

When we lived on the levee, right near Walls, [Minnie] and her oldest brother lived with us then. The levee did break, and we left from there. I’m sure that’s what she was singing about “when the levee broke” ‘cause we were scared to death when it broke, 1927. The levee broke and the water come over. Me and my two little children left and went to Walls, up on the hill there. “Kid” and them, they come on to town. When the water went down, we went back.⁴⁵

The floodwaters left scars upon the land and upon the heart, but the blues is a technique of psychic mastery. When the Levee Breaks was not so much a cry of pain as an announcement of a new beginning, even in its sadness.

Minnie and Joe returned to the Columbia studio a second day to record two pieces, both of which featured Joe’s vocals, but neither was released. They eventually remade the same songs, and they were issued by Vocalion in 1930. This pattern would be repeated throughout Minnie and Joe’s partnership: nearly every piece that was rejected by the record company was eventually accepted and issued, although some pieces required three takes, done at three separate studio sessions, before an acceptable master was cut. Only a few songs remained permanently unissued, like Minnie’s Midnight Special, recorded for Victor with “Bessie McCoy,” or Joe’s Rowdy Old Soul, cut as by “The Hillbilly Plowboy.”⁴⁶

With some justice, one could think of the Columbia sessions as mere appetizers to the luscious feast that would soon follow on Vocalion. The relationship with Vocalion began in February 1930, and for Minnie it was an affiliation that lasted for nearly a decade, in spite of interruptions to record for Okeh, Decca and Bluebird in the early to mid-1930s. Vocalion’s own history, however, was just as complicated and just as full of interruptions. The label had been purchased by Brunswick-Balke-Collender in the summer of 1925, and by 1929, under the direction of J. Mayo Williams, it was regularly recording race items in the field, instead of in Chicago. Ultimately the field unit visited Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, San Antonio, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Knoxville, Hot Springs, Birmingham and, most important from our perspective, Memphis.

Vocalion had inaugurated its 1000 series of race records in March 1926, and it ran for 746 records in six years. Many of the great blues hits of the day were on Vocalion: Jim Jackson’s Jim Jackson’s Kansas City Blues, Tampa Red and Georgia Tom’s It’s Tight Like That, and Leroy Carr’s How Long—How Long Blues.⁴⁷ Nearly all of Minnie and Joe’s vintage material was issued in this race series. Vocalion was absorbed into the American Record Corporation (ARC) stable of labels at the end of 1931, and a new race series began at 25001 in September 1933. Minnie never appeared on the 25000 series, which was changed after number 25021 to 2522. Race and country items were then prefixed with a zero, like Minnie’s Stinging Snake Blues, issued on Vocalion 02711 in 1934. The race series items were dropped in price from 75 cents to 35 cents.

Minnie’s 1930s sides were usually issued only on Vocalion, while the more popular Big Bill had many of his records issued on ARC’s dime-store labels as well. The ARC labels controlled a large segment of the market by virtue of their having Tampa Red, Big Bill, Memphis Minnie, and, for awhile, Peetie Wheatstraw, but this was not to last. Tampa Red soon became a Bluebird artist, and Wheatstraw decided to stick with Decca, for whom he had begun to record in mid-1934. Even Minnie didn’t settle down with Vocalion until late 1935.

Minnie and Joe first recorded for Vocalion’s Memphis field unit in February 1930. After that they traveled regularly to Chicago to record, finally moving there themselves in the early 1930s. While we don’t know precisely when they moved north, Sunnyland Slim recalled Minnie and Joe traveling to Chicago to record, and then returning to Memphis where they still lived,⁴⁸ and his recollection is supported by Big Bill.⁴⁹ This was a common pattern, as Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup has testified: “I had to record, I had a big family. And I’d go to Chicago to record and go back South and work.”⁵⁰

Minnie’s family had not yet moved to Memphis, although they did move to Brunswick, Tennessee, a few miles northeast of the city. Other members of the family lived closer to Cordova, a few miles to the south. “It was a little town, right out from Cordova, called Leno, Tennessee.⁵¹ And that’s where I went to school,” said Daisy, reminiscing about the 1920s. “We went to school at Brunswick for awhile and we went at this little school they call Morning Grove School, that was between Leno and Cordova.”⁵² Shortly after Gertrude died in 1922, Abe Douglas moved back to Walls. He had been dissatisfied with the farming in the hills around Brunswick, and he farmed the richer Delta land in Walls until he died in 1935.

Ethel commented, “You know, it was up in Brunswick where my house caught fire … around 1925, 1926, before the flood. When the house burned, I moved in with [Daisy’s] Papa. And by there being no fire department and no water, the house burned to the ground. No water around. The next year we all moved back to Walls.”⁵³ Fire was a significant agency that wound its way through Minnie’s repertoire—another brother’s house burned to the ground a year later—and Ethel’s very words are uncannily similar to the lyrics of Minnie’s Call the Fire Wagon.

Minnie and Joe cut their first two double-sided duets during their second Vocalion session: What Fault You Find of Me, Part 1 and 2, and Can I Do It for You?, Part 1 and 2. Almost unnoticed was Minnie’s lilting harmony on Joe’s She Wouldn’t Give Me None, a lovely contribution, in a role she never played again. But the two-sided duets established a pattern for the teasing, please-give-it-to-me, you-can’t-have-it songs with which Minnie and Joe punctuated their repertoire. While these duets shared much with the vaudeville tradition—Minnie probably got her feet wet playing pieces like these in traveling shows—their musical qualities often set them above and apart from their vaudeville counterparts. When the period of the duets ended, Minnie’s lyrics often still sounded as if the replying male was only a few feet off-mike. Jed Davenport and His Beale Street Jug Band also cut six sides for Vocalion on that same February day. Kansas Joe is obviously the vocalist on two of the numbers, You Ought to Move Out of Town and Save Me Some, and both he and Minnie may share guitar honors. Minnie may even play mandolin on one cut, as she does on her own After While Blues, cut two years later.⁵⁴ Minnie is said to have learned banjo even before she learned guitar,⁵⁵ but none of her associates has ever mentioned her playing banjo, and her banjo playing has gone unrecorded. She may have even been able to play piano, having learned from a fellow musician from Walls, Kid Crackintine.⁵⁶

Minnie and Joe’s last Memphis session was for Victor in May 1930. Many of the details surrounding the Victor session remain obscure. Minnie’s name appeared on the Victor label as Minnie McCoy, while Joe appeared as either “Joe Johnson” or as one-half of “McCoy and Johnson.” It’s possible that Joe McCoy had signed an exclusive contract with Vocalion and Minnie had not, for many blues pseudonyms functioned as a means of avoiding the typically exploitative contractual obligations of the major record labels. Nonetheless, for years many listeners thought “Joe Johnson” was a cousin, even though he sounded surprisingly like Joe McCoy.⁵⁷

After Minnie and Joe cut a remake of their duet Goin’ Back to Texas, as I’m Going Back Home, Minnie recorded a third version of her hit Bumble Bee, and the first of two versions of Memphis Minnie-Jitis Blues, here called simply Meningitis Blues. For Bumble Bee Blues and Meningitis Blues, she was accompanied by the popular Memphis Jug Band, all colleagues and friends, who were recording that day for Victor. It’s worth noting, however, that the careers of the Memphis Jug Band, like ninety percent of the other blues stars of the twenties, were winding down; they had a few more sessions with Victor, and a session or two in the thirties, but after that, their recording opportunities were almost nonexistent. Minnie and Joe’s careers were just beginning.

Also in the Victor studio was Washington White, a fiercely powerful Delta bluesman who recorded later as Bukka White and who eventually became popular among young whites in the years of the blues revival. This was Bukka’s first session, and in the background of I Am in the Heavenly Way and Promise True and Grand, singing above the popped strings of White’s steel-bodied National, is a woman’s voice, the singer identified only as “Miss Minnie,” but probably Minnie McCoy.

After White’s sides, the Victor engineers recorded four sermons with singing, and then closed up shop for the day. The next two days were devoted to recording old-time music for Victor’s several hillbilly series, and on May 29, Joe and Minnie returned to the studio. They were joined by Bessie McCoy, who played no instrument and who sang on only one number, the unissued Midnight Special. Other than the appearance of her name in the files, we know nothing else about her. No test pressing or master of Midnight Special has been made available. Minnie and Joe’s titles were eventually released, but less than a thousand copies were pressed of I Don’t Want No Woman and I Never Told a Lie, and less than 200 were pressed of Georgia Skin and I’m Going Back Home.58

Joe and Minnie’s next recording session, June 5, resulted in Minnie’s humorous Plymouth Rock Blues, and five unissued pieces that were all eventually remade and issued: Joe’s Cherry Ball Blues and Botherin’ That Thing, Minnie’s Bumble Bee No. 2 and Georgia Skin, and the traded-verse duet, I Don’t Want No Woman I Have to Give My Money To. The guitar interplay on Joe’s Botherin’ That Thing was superb, with Joe’s aggressively high-timbred bass-string runs playing hopscotch over Minnie’s treble teasings. Critics of guitar music, even outside the field of blues, were impressed with Minnie’s and Joe’s skills.⁵⁹ Sometimes the ear is deceived as to precisely what type of guitar each is playing. A picture from the Victor files of this period shows a young Minnie standing by a seated Joe, both holding wooden guitars, yet we know from their records that by then both also played steel-bodied National guitars.

Joe Calicott remembered Minnie recording for Vocalion while he was also at the studio recording. “She and Tampa Red had the first steel boxes we ever saw.”⁶⁰ Early pictures of Tampa Red do indeed show him with a National steel, but Minnie and Joe were as significant as Tampa in this regard, and one critic notes that these Nationals “were first brought to Jackson by Memphis Minnie and Joe McCoy in either late 1929 or early 1930 when the pair came from Chicago to play a club date.”⁶¹ Johnny Shines also remembers Minnie and Joe’s guitars, from the first time he saw them play in 1929. He hadn’t yet begun to play himself, but he vividly recalls the performance by Minnie, Joe, Charlie McCoy and a fourth musician. “And they all had the first steel guitars I had ever seen, they all had National steels. They was such pretty things.”⁶² Who actually brought the first National to the region is obviously a matter for speculation—Walter Vinson of the Mississippi Sheiks was known to play a steel-bodied National guitar, and he was from the Jackson area and acquainted with Joe and Charlie McCoy—but the testimony we do have suggests that Minnie and Joe were among the first to use them, and that those who saw them were much taken with them.

Each new trip to the Vocalion studio brought new successes for Joe and Minnie and more listening treats for their audience, occasionally including new versions of Minnie’s “old” standards like Bumble Bee and I’m Talking about You. New Dirty Dozen, however, may have derived the designation “new” from its having been recorded by Minnie in her role as guitarist for the Jed Davenport version five months earlier.⁶³ If this is so, it provides a backhanded confirmation of the presence of Minnie’s guitar on the Davenport sides. By this time, Minnie was not only producing more solo records than Joe—she was producing the hits. Another ominous sign from Joe’s point of view was the legend running beneath the “Kansas Joe” artist credit on his solo vocal (with two guitars), Botherin’ That Thing: “Guitar by Memphis Minnie.” This notation was to appear with increasing frequency on his records.

In spite of this, all of their duets for Vocalion were labeled as by “Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie.” They were never labeled as by “Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe,” although it was clearer each day that Minnie was the more popular and the more appealing artist of the duo. No doubt this was just another sign of how male-dominated country blues recording was at the time. “If a male sang on a record, he was probably the star,” may have been their motto, and Kansas Joe was treated as such, even on those duets where his part was relatively minor like What’s the Matter with the Mill? and You Stole My Cake.

Every two or three months, Minnie and Joe would return to the Vocalion studio to record. Some sessions would result in two Kansas Joe vocal sides, issued under Joe’s name, and one vocal by Minnie, but the latter might be labeled as by “Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie.” Others would result in two songs under Minnie’s name, and no others; but often as not, they’d be back in the studio a few days later to record a few other pieces that would be issued under their various combinations of names. Thus, on October 9, 1930, Minnie sang You Dirty Mistreater and the haunting Dirt Dauber Blues, the former to the tune of the Mississippi Sheiks’ hit, Sitting on Top of the World.64 They returned two days later and cut Joe’s That’s Your Yas Yas Yas and I’m Fixed for You, Minnie’s North Memphis Blues, and the rousing duet masterpiece, What’s the Matter with the Mill?

This was a typical recording pattern for many blues artists on many labels, and the session of January 30, 1931, not only resulted in no rejects, it generated several magnificent sides. Joe’s Shake Mattie and especially My Washwoman’s Gone featured biting slide guitar work, probably by Joe himself, while Minnie cut the startling Crazy Crying Blues and Lucille Bogan’s famous Tricks Ain’t Walking No More, one of the few songs Minnie sang that was identified with, and written by, another singer. Four classics in one day wasn’t a bad day’s work. A rich legacy was being created for their many followers, and this period fittingly culminated with the February 4, 1932, session—back in New York for the first time since their debut in 1929—where they waxed the final, quartet version of Minnie’s hit, this time titled, Minnie Minnie Bumble Bee, featuring Vocalion all-stars Memphis Minnie, Georgia Tom, Tampa Red and Kansas Joe.