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I believe I’m at the crossroads of the wind.

—Alice Rahon

By this time, nearly 240,000 blacks had moved to Chicago.¹ In fact, the growth of Chicago’s black population, most of whom had come from the South, had been phenomenal. In 1850 Chicago had a black population of just over 300.² By 1900, one hundred times that number of blacks called Chicago their home, and this number was to increase again by more than tenfold over the next five decades. By 1950—around the time of Minnie’s session for Regal—there were 492,000 blacks in Chicago; by 1960, the number had reached 813,000. Most of these new residents had come from the South, and many were potential purchasers of blues records. Ninety percent of US blacks lived in the South in 1900, but by 1960 only sixty percent still lived there. This move from South to North was accompanied by a simultaneous move from rural areas to cities. In 1900, approximately seventy-five percent of southern blacks lived in rural areas, but by 1960 only twenty-five percent lived in rural areas.³ One of the most typical migration paths was from New Orleans through the Mississippi Delta to Memphis and then on to Chicago, precisely the path that Minnie may have followed if she were indeed born in Algiers, Louisiana. Some Minnie followed, while some followed Minnie.

Chicago was by no means “the land of the free,” however. In 1917, after the East St. Louis riot, a number of black Chicagoans armed themselves against the possibility of a similar event taking place in Chicago, and a race riot did occur two years later. While the spark that set it off was an incident at a beach, the riot actually developed amid a series of home bombings aimed at blacks who had moved into the ever-expanding ghetto between 35^th and 63^rd, Lake Michigan and State Street. Thirty-eight lives were lost during the riot itself.⁴

Economically, conditions were also far from ideal. By 1930, when the Depression was making life tough on the white masses as well as the black, blacks held only nine percent of the manual labor jobs and two percent of what sociologists Drake and Cayton, in their classic study of Chicago’s black community, called “good” jobs: professional, managerial, clerical.⁵ In northern cities like Chicago, white workers often protested the hiring of blacks in their plants, but the situation was never as hopeless as in the South. For example, it was in Chicago that the garment workers’ union was able to organize the same black women who had been used as strikebreakers against them in a 1917 labor action.⁶

Thus, if the Chicago Defender never tired of exhorting southern blacks to flee the South and come north, it was because the possiblility of just such hopeful actions was far higher in the North. In spite of the level of discrimination in Chicago, compared to the the rural South, it was an economic oasis. In Chicago the black median wage in 1949 was $1919; in Mississippi it was $439.⁷ While men usually led the migratory way to industrial cities like Pittsburgh and Detroit, “Chicago, with its more diversified female occupational structure, [also] attracted single women and wives.”⁸ Drawing blacks to Chicago were jobs for males in the stockyards, the meatpacking plants, the steel mills, and the foundries. Jobs for women—and men—could be found in the hundreds of lighter industrial occupations, the large mail-order businesses, Chicago’s countless warehouses, and domestic work. At the time of the Depression, blacks were doing thirty-four percent of the servant work in Chicago.⁹

With economic opportunities so constricted during the Depression, the fact that Minnie’s and Joe’s recording careers were nearly curtailed is no surprise. Minnie was always able to support herself with her music, and the vicissitudes of the Chicago industrial and service-oriented job market never affected her directly. On the one session that Minnie had amid the bleakness of 1933, however, Joe was nowhere to be seen.¹⁰ The first stylistic phase of Minnie’s career was coming to an end. In 1934 and 1935, she began to experiment with the new sounds that would carry her through the thirties and forties. But before renewing her contract with Vocalion (now under new management), she recorded nearly twenty sides for Decca, and eight sides for Victor’s Bluebird subsidiary. Thus, Minnie recorded for all three of the major race series labels of the 1930s. When the Depression began to ease in 1934, only Victor/Bluebird and the American Record Corporation (ARC) remained as powerful race contenders, but they were soon challenged by Decca, which began its race series in 1934. Blues and jazz were issued in the 7000 series, for which Decca charged a competitive 35 cents.¹¹ Bluebird was a dime-store label that Victor introduced to compete with the other 35-cent labels.¹²

The Decca sides retained the flavor of Minnie’s rural-sounding duets, but they were slightly less intricate. As a soloist, her need to support her treble runs with her own bass line may have made complex passages more difficult, e.g., in Chickasaw Train Blues (Low Down Dirty Thing) or Keep It to Yourself, but the truth is that even with Joe—You Got to Move (You Ain’t Got to Move) or Hole in the Wall—the complicated interplay of the two guitars, so common in 1930–1932, was no longer in evidence. Yet the Decca sides especially, as well as the sides cut at the first Bluebird session of July 27, 1935, retained a downhome flavor that was absent from much of her 1930s recorded repertoire. It’s also worth noting that it was in the Decca days that “Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe” finally appeared on a record as an artist credit, instead of Vocalion’s insistent “Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie.”

The ribald Decca session of January 10, 1935, was one of her most interesting, not only for the songs recorded—Dirty Mother for You, You Can’t Give It Away and the topical Sylvester and His Mule Blues—but for the accompaniment as well: this was the first outing in which Minnie was seriously accompanied by a piano. The pianist is yet to be agreed upon, although discographers Dixon and Godrich cite Jimmie Gordon, who was in the Decca studio the next day. As Minnie clearly says to the piano player, “Play it, Dennis,” and as the composer credits on the “Gospel Minnie” sides—made five days later in the same studio—are to “Dennis-McCoy” we suggest the piano player is not Jimmie Gordon, but rather a still unidentified pianist named Dennis.

The “Gospel Minnie” sides are engaging, but Minnie never got religion before, during, or after recording them. Indeed, Minnie never went to church, and according to Brewer Phillips, the only time she was in a church was to hear a gospel group perform in Hughes, Arkansas.¹³ Her sister Daisy had never heard about the “Gospel Minnie” sides, although she was thrilled at their existence when we played them for her, saying, “She never told me about those.” Perhaps Minnie thought Daisy wouldn’t approve of such hypocritical treatment of gospel music, although there is a long and established history of blues singers doing a few gospel numbers, with or without “the feeling.”

Perhaps Minnie was simply going along with Joe who recorded four sermons with singing that day (as Hallelujah Joe), but if that’s what she was doing, it’s the last time she did it. Minnie’s September 10, 1934, Squat It and Moaning the Blues, released on Decca 7146 and 7037, both issued as by “Memphis Minnie,” mark the last time she and Joe recorded together. The last record issued as by “Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe” was Decca 7038, the two-part You Got to Move (You Ain’t Got to Move), part 2 of which was cut on August 31, 1934. Joe’s reputed jealousy at Minnie’s fame and success is often given as the reason for their breakup. For example, Leadbitter has noted, “Joe had a hard time with such a popular wife, and they split up in 1935 or so.”¹⁴ However, no corroborating evidence has come to light to support this idea. Other sources confirm that he actually did become a preacher,¹⁵ and unlike Minnie he returned to the studio a second time to record four more Halleluhah Joe sermons. But in early 1937 Joe and the Harlem Hamfats cut a number called Hallelujah Joe Ain’t Preachin’ No More; so presumably his preaching career had ended.¹⁶

Joe seemed to do better for himself at Decca, where his output was not overshadowed by Minnie’s like it was at Vocalion. He not only recorded solo pieces before and after the gospel sides, but he continued to record with the Harlem Hamfats jazz group through the rest of the decade.¹⁷ His stint with the Hamfats ended a few years later, and by 1940 we find him leading various washboard bands, recording as either Big Joe and His Rhythm or as Big Joe and His Washboard Band. The records from these sessions are all quite interesting and feature Robert Lee McCoy (later known as Robert Nighthawk) on harp or guitar, Amanda Sortier or Washboard Sam on washboard, Charlie McCoy on mandolin, and Joe on guitar. Most of the vocals were done by Joe, but Sortier sang one duet with him, and Harmon “Peetie Wheatstraw’s Buddy” Ray sang on several numbers.¹⁸ But Joe didn’t seem to be a regular part of the Chicago milieu in which most of the singers participated, and neither Jimmy Rogers or Johnny Shines ever met him. Even Ethel Douglas, who married Leo Douglas in 1921, couldn’t remember much about the quiet and retiring Joe McCoy, although he and Minnie had lived with Leo and Ethel in Walls.

Joe McCoy died on January 28, 1950, of “spontaneous cerebral apoplexy due to hypertension heart disease” and was buried in Rest Vale Cemetary in Alsip, Illinois. His death certificate gave his occupation as “laborer,” although he’d been a professional musician for at least twenty-five years. The informant on the death certificate was Virginia McCoy, possibly his second wife who is said to have had two children by Joe. Her address is different than his, however, which was 4216 Calumet at the time of his death. Thus, Virginia McCoy may have been separated from Joe by 1950, or she may not have been his wife at all. Big Bill wrote that not even Minnie or his friends from the Harlem Hamfats attended the funeral,¹⁹ and for Memphis Slim, the funeral was an especially bitter occasion:

Joe wrote this song, Why Don’t You Do Right?, and Irving Berlin presented this song at the Chicago Theatre, with Peggy Lee and all that thing. And at this particular time, Joe McCoy was laying in state at the Metropolitan Funeral Home, and we had to beg money to bury him. Boy, I’ll never forget that. I thought that was a damn shame. They had the headlines of the Chicago Theatre. Peggy Lee and Irving Berlin. And here’s the man that wrote it, and he told me he never get no money. That Lester Melrose. The “great” Lester Melrose. He stole all our money. And then went and had a accident and got paralyzed from the waist down. [Smirks] He had to go around in a wheelchair until he died, which wasn’t long, I don’t think, after that. But, you know, he took everybody’s money.²⁰

Was Joe McCoy the man called Squirrel who Jimmy Rogers remembered as Minnie’s companion in the mid- to late 1930s? Rogers knew that Squirrel played guitar and recorded with Minnie, but he could take us no closer to Squirrel’s true identity. No other informant recognized the name. “They say she was kind of rough with him,” Rogers recalled.²¹

As we’re coming to see, the image of Minnie as a rough customer rings true. “She chewed tobacco,” said Homesick James. “She kept it in her mouth all the time. Even when she was singing, she kept that tobacco in her mouth. She had a coffee cup, be singing, spit right in there, the spit-cup right over there. Hee, hee, hee. She did that seriously, man, and when she got through, she’d just pick it up and spit, man, she didn’t care.”²² Brewer Phillips used to pick up Minnie’s tobacco and snuff for her at the store, along with Wild Irish Rose and food for the evening meal. “She didn’t only chew tobacco, she dipped snuff. Her brand of snuff was this Copenhagen and her tobacco was Brown Mule. She didn’t smoke, though. She would get her a little twig and she would get the ends off, and dip it down in the snuff bottle and dip it down in her jaw. And the chewing tobacco, she’d put that in her jaw, and you know a lot of times, she’d be singing, she’d have that chewing tobacco in her jaw.”²³ By the time she came to Daisy’s house to stay, Minnie had given up tobacco.

On May 27, 1935, Minnie cut her last session with Decca, producing four splendid, downhome sides: the Milk Cow Blues— influenced Jockey Man Blues, Weary Woman’s Blues, Reachin Pete and Down in New Orleans, with the latter’s enticing implications of hoodoo and conjure. Two months later she cut four sides for Bluebird, three of which were issued under the name “Texas Tessie.” Good Mornin’ was a spin-off of Kokomo Arnold’s wildly successful Milk Cow Blues, but it was rejected by Bluebird, and it only reached the public in mid-1936 when Minnie re-recorded it for Vocalion. The Bluebird session had several highlights, though, not the least of which was Big Bill’s guitar solo on the pop song I’m Waiting on You,²⁴ and Minnie’s dynamic vocal on You Wrecked My Happy Home.

By 1937, the Texas Tessie sides were no longer listed as being available in the current Bluebird race lists, although the “Memphis Minnie” Bluebird sides from the October 1935 session were still in the catalog. A Vocalion catalog from September 1934, when Minnie had just started recording for Decca, showed virtually all of her vintage pieces, solo or with Joe, as being still available at the new price of 35 cents or three for $1. Minnie’s Decca records from 1934–1935 were still available in 1944, but Decca had kept virtually its entire 7000 series in print.

In August 1935, she recorded her two tributes to the black national hero, boxing champion Joe Louis: He’s in the Ring (Doing That Same Old Thing) and Joe Louis Strut. Pianist Black Bob (Ed Hudson), with whom Minnie was to have a lengthy working relationship, made his first appearance as Minnie’s accompanist on this session.²⁵ On the last Bluebird session, October 31, 1935, she was accompanied by Casey Bill Weldon for the first time. Casey Bill accompanied her on two sides, When the Sun Goes Down, Part 2,²⁶ and the prostitution song, Hustlin’ Woman Blues, but he dropped out for Selling My Pork Chops and Doctor, Doctor Blues.

While tracking singers through the recording studio provides insight into a major aspect of their lives, even the stars spent only a small part of their working careers in the studio. What was Minnie doing when she wasn’t recording? Like so many blues artists, Minnie traveled considerably, and she frequently returned to the South to play. Like Johnny Littlejohn, Homesick James and countless others, she continually renewed her music at its source. As James himself declared. “Chicago, then back down South, Chicago, then back down there; Mississippi, all the way through. That woman she used to go… . She’d play at those Saturday night fish fries. They would have a big hall, it was just a big room or house, they would take all the beds down, and the kitchen wood stove back there, that’s where they be frying the fish.”²⁷

Sunnyland Slim emphasized how Chicago was just an anchor point for the various travelers who passed through, stayed awhile, but always kept traveling. “Me and her, she’s just like me, when she come here, she didn’t stay, wouldn’t stay. I’ll go back to Cairo, or like other places in the South.”²⁸ Bobo Jenkins remembered seeing Minnie during the mid-thirties playing at a Mr. Towels’s store in Walls, and thirty-five years later, he still remembered Minnie’s beads and fancy clothes.²⁹

Memphis pianist Mose Vinson played with Minnie frequently throughout the thirties and later as well, while Fiddlin’ Joe Martin played with her on 8^th Street in West Memphis for Big Lewis, and worked the Jackson jukes with her during the later thirties. Minnie and Martin also worked the Robinsonville area, and he was fond of recalling that he had learned the guitar part for Good Morning, School Girl (also known later as Me and My Chauffeur Blues) from Minnie personally. Martin also remembered that Willie Brown could play the same guitar part. Martin played with Minnie on and off over the years, meeting her early on in Shelby, Mississippi, and ultimately traveling with her to Chicago where he was thrown over, probably in favor of Blind John Davis, with whom Minnie began to record.³⁰

Davis himself preserved a priceless anecdote from those years when he accompanied Minnie. “Minnie paid $200 for a wig. At that time women wasn’t wearing wigs, you know, unless they just had to. She paid $200 for a wig, she got drunk and went home that night, leave that wig on a chair. And somebody done give her a little old puppy. She woke up the next morning looking for her wig, her wig was [scattered] all over the house. Minnie hit [the puppy] with her guitar and broke the neck off of it, and Son Joe let him out, and he said that dog didn’t even look back. That puppy didn’t come back there at all. Oh, god, they had me laughing. I had to get up and go in another room. ‘Cause, man, she was cursing, ‘I’ll kill that so-and-so if I catch him.’ That puppy figured that too.”³¹

By late 1935 Minnie had settled into a relaxed groove under the supervision of Lester Melrose. Many blues artists were not able to make the transition from rural-sounding downhome blues to the more sophisticated sounds Melrose’s artists turned out, and it is a remarkable sign of Minnie’s resiliency that she adjusted so well,³² becoming a major figure in the blues world of the next two decades, and continuing to have a new record issued every few weeks until the beginning of the war. One critic described Minnie as a “female Big Bill,”³³ pointing not only to the crucial role Big Bill and Memphis Minnie played in the consolidation of the Melrose sound, but to the ease with which they tailored their music to the new style. Bill’s remarkable popularity can too easily obscure the fact that stylistically Minnie was as much if not more of an innovator than Bill was.

To appreciate the evolution of Minnie’s style, we must look more closely at the Melrose phenomenon. According to Melrose, it was in early 1934, when taverns were reappearing in the wake of the repeal of prohibition, and when every bar had a jukebox, that he sent a letter to Columbia and Victor saying that he could provide unlimited blues talent to meet their recording needs. Their response was enthusiastic, and “from March, 1934, to February, 1951, I recorded at least 90 percent of all rhythm-and-blues talent for RCA Victor [which included their Bluebird subsidiary] and Columbia Records.”³⁴ Among the majors, only Decca went forward without Melrose’s assistance.

Melrose recruited his artists by traveling throughout the country, from city to city, and from bar to bar, looking for blues singers. He also used bluesmen like Big Bill, Big Joe Williams and Walter Davis as talent scouts to bring him new artists. During Minnie’s heyday of the 1930s and 1940s, Melrose was the single most powerful and most influential man in the blues recording field, and one glance at his “stable” shows why: Big Bill, Washboard Sam, Merline Johnson (Yas Yas Girl), Arthur Crudup, Tampa Red, Lil Green, St. Louis Jimmy, Roosevelt Sykes, Memphis Minnie, Curtis Jones, Big Joe Williams, Walter Davis, Sonny Boy Williamson, Doctor Clayton, Lonnie Johnson, Tommy McClennan, Big Maceo, Bumble Bee Slim, and many others were all Melrose artists. No one has ever accused him of exaggerating when he said “90 percent”.

Melrose’s artists often gathered at Tampa Red’s house at 35^th and State, and blues bassist and impresario Willie Dixon first met Melrose there in the mid-1940s. He saw Minnie and Son Joe there, along with Big Maceo, Sonny Boy Williamson (John Lee Williamson), Blind John Davis and others who used to “hang out” and practice at Tampa’s. Playing on Melrose sessions with Minnie and Son, as well as with Sonny Boy Williamson, Lil Green and others, influenced his own later work as a producer.³⁵ Muddy Waters remarked that one had to go through Tampa to be welcome at the rehearsal hall, and there was the implication that Tampa Red was also the route to Melrose’s good graces or managership.

Some critics think Melrose “ruined” the blues by imposing, on so many records, a uniform house style, obtained by repeatedly using the same musicians, on their own and on each others’ records. Thus, phrases like “The Bluebird Beat,” the “Melrose Mess” or the “Melrose machine” emphasize the monotonous regularity imposed by the Melrose regime.³⁶ Big Bill was sharply critical of Melrose’s financial dealings too.³⁷ Brewer Phillips’s remarks seem pertinent here. “She always would tell me that she’d been messed around in the music. So I’d say, ‘How can they mess you around?’ She say, ‘They’ll take your money.’ And she’d always say, ‘You can learn to play, but don’t let them take your money.’”³⁸

Other critics, like Delmark Records’s Bob Koester, point to the New Orleans jazz backgrounds of Melrose sidemen and emphasize the positive aspects of Melrose’s productions, like their danceable rhythm and their popularity. Further, unique and unusual artists like Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup were as much a part of the full Melrose picture as the “regularized” Big Bill or Washboard Sam were. Koester also notes that “Melrose is remembered with unusual fondness by the artists he recorded. There are noticeably fewer complaints of sharp practices and frequent praise of his musical perceptions and social attitudes.”³⁹

In evaluating Melrose’s role in the changes that seemed to sweep through the blues recording world in the New Deal years, two rarely considered perspectives should be emphasized. The reputedly monotonous combo sound of the 1930s may be less a Melrosian artifact than the result of a change in styles already in effect by the late 1920s. The sound was solidified with the rise of the piano, inaugurated by Leroy Carr, who, with Scrapper Blackwell, recorded the instant hit How Long—How Long Blues on June 19, 1928.⁴⁰ Peetie Wheatstraw began recording in 1930, and his post-1933 records were influential in consolidating the sound that had begun with Carr and Blackwell, well before the Melrose empire was in place. Blues record impresario Nick Perls was only half joking when he commented, “Peetie Wheatstraw ruined the blues almost single-handedly,” for Wheatstraw’s smooth style of the 1930s seemed to typify the forces that spelled doom for so many rural-sounding, country blues artists.⁴¹

One should also assess the role of the Melrose musicians from a post–World War II perspective, i.e. from the other end of their period of dominance, to see the vitally important role played by the expressive harp and vocal style of Melrose headliner Sonny Boy Williamson in providing inspiration for the new electric Chicago sound of Little Walter, Snooky Pryor and other newcomers. Sonny Boy had begun recording in 1937, and his records were among the most popular of any blues artist ever.

From these alternating perspectives, Melrose becomes a sign of regularity caught in the midst of two innovations: Carr, Wheatstraw and the rise of the piano, and Sonny Boy, Little Walter and the rise of the harp. Melrose had little personally to do with Carr or Little Walter, but his presence during the critical period of 1934–1951 was strongly felt. At the very least, Melrose’s refractive powers affected the music that passed from Carr to Little Walter, but all concerned would agree that his regime was more than simply catalytic.⁴² And if we query the evidence and not the critics we find that these extremely popular and danceable records are “monotonous” only for those commentators who so ardently and exclusively crave vintage Delta blues or the piercing electric guitars and harps of the 1950s.

Minnie’s last intricately picked guitar duet was recorded in 1932, and the presence of a piano on her January 10, 1935, Decca session was the strongest sign of what the future held. Henceforth, Minnie’s guitar began to play a more supporting role, and even on the two-guitar sessions that lacked a piano, Minnie seldom brought an elaborate picking technique to the recording studio. If a piano wasn’t on a session, it might as well have been. This was a music styled for the tough joints on Chicago’s South Side, and not for the country suppers and fish fries Minnie played for in the South.

But did her city guitar style evolve out of the notion that her more dexterous rural style was old-fashioned and dated, or was it merely the socioeconomic requirements of tavern music? Were her more frequent spoken asides in the later records a way of covering over silences emanating from the gaps in her new style of playing, or did she think she was being urbane and cosmopolitan? While some of her mid- to late-1930s Vocalions might suggest she was a typical Melrose musician, her vocals nonetheless injected a rougher, grittier and more vital feel into many of her songs, and the absence of a piano on her sessions between 1938 and 1947 kept her output from being overly smooth and monotonous. Yet this is only half the story, the part that can be told from Minnie’s childhood through early 1934.

From a modern perspective, i.e. viewed from Chicago instead of from the South, Minnie’s seizure of modern guitar styles was as much innovation as it was adaptation. While other blues artists also sought techniques that would bring their performances up to date, Minnie immediately grasped the lyric quality of the single-string picking that had been pioneered by Lonnie Johnson a decade earlier.⁴³ This same style would eventually emerge victorious in the hands of T-Bone Walker and B. B. King, after passing through the hands of electric guitar pioneers George Barnes and Willie Lacey, in the thirties and forties respectively, and even Django Reinhardt could be said to have blossomed from the same tree. Yet Minnie was one of the first blues artists to use the electric guitar.⁴⁴

She frequently played at the 708 Club with Big Bill, and she played at the Tramor Hotel and Cafe at 740 E. 47^th Street accompanied by Black Bob on piano and Arnett Nelson on clarinet.⁴⁵ Broonzy wrote that he and Minnie had “played in night clubs all over the States together,”⁴⁶ and Minnie and Black Bob traveled together as well, probably in the mid-1930s.⁴⁷ Moody Jones talked about what a perfectionist Black Bob was and how he was likely to stop the band right in the middle of a number, even in front of a big crowd, to say, “You didn’t do that right.”⁴⁸ Much like Minnie, as we shall see. Often when she returned from her travels, she had no home to come back to, and on those occasions she stayed with friends and colleagues like Sunnyland Slim and his wife, Bessie. Sunnyland recalled, “When Memphis Minnie come here … she stayed with Tampa like one night sometimes, or she’d stay with me and Bessie. And then she moved to Milton [Rector’s] daddy’s.⁴⁹ And she stayed there for a little and she got that job at the 708 Club. Well, me and Sykes had been playing there, and I got her that job at that 708 Club. She stayed there. And then I got her another job out in Argo [a Chicago suburb].”⁵⁰

Minnie had had seven recording sessions in 1935, for three different recording companies. On her first session of 1936, she cut four lyrically interesting songs, one of which was I’m a Gambling Woman. “Yeaaah, Minnie shot craps like a man,” said Homesick James, “playing those cards, man, raising all kind of hell, heh, heh. All of them women who’d sing the blues, would curse, be drunk, just sit up and talk a lot of shit, man. What foul language.”⁵¹ Johnny Shines confirmed Homesick’s observation, “Yeah, Minnie gambled like a dog.”⁵²

Minnie’s sidemen are not always easy to identify, especially during this period of her career, where the personnel suggested by Dixon and Godrich can’t easily be confirmed. A number of authorities have challenged the notion that Blind John Davis plays piano on these sessions, and it does seem more likely that the pianist is Black Bob for several sessions that previously were thought to include Davis.⁵³

Sometimes even a mistake will help to verify the personnel on a recording session. Alfred Bell’s trumpet flubs suggest his presence on the November 12, 1936, session as well as the June 9, 1937 session, although Dixon and Godrich note his presence on the second session only.⁵⁴ Whether trumpets were never more than Melrose “experiments” in the first place,⁵⁵ or whether a too-close listen to Bell’s sour notes ultimately soured Melrose on brass, we’ll never know, but Minnie was never to record again with trumpets or even saxes.

She did, however, record an entire session on June 23, 1938, accompanied by Charlie McCoy on mandolin, while in the preceding session, many sides of which exist only as test pressings, Arnett Nelson again accompanies her on clarinet. She herself may have taken up the mandolin again for several sides. Close listening is required to hear the mandolin on many of these—and often it cannot be said with any certainty that a mandolin is present—but it can be clearly heard on take two of Running and Dodging Blues.56

The most important event of this period was the beginning of her assocation with Ernest Lawlars, otherwise known as “Little Son Joe,” soon to be her second husband. Son Joe was a talented guitarist, and he and Minnie were very close. Minnie even gave up one of her later show tours because she couldn’t be accompanied by Son Joe. “She never did do anything that her husband couldn’t follow her about… . She was very faithful to him, you know she never did get carried away, ‘bout her husbands,” said Brewer Phillips.⁵⁷

“Lawlars” is the correct spelling of Ernest and Minnie’s last name, but misspellings, of the type of which they were certainly aware, continued to plague them even beyond their deaths. Ernest’s death certificate cites his wife’s name as “Winnie,” and on Minnie’s death certificate, her last name is given as “Lawlers.” While the Arkansas Department of Health, Division of Vital Records, has no record of Ernest Lawlars’s birth, the death certificate shows Hughes, Arkansas, as his place of birth, and the date as May 18, 1900. The information was supplied by Daisy, who never knew Son’s parents’ names. Son Joe was “Little Son Joe” in the music world, but he was called “Son” by Minnie and her family.

Son Joe’s first recording session, for ARC in Jackson, Mississippi, on October 10, 1935, produced one unissued side, Sin and a Shame Blues. In those days, before he met Minnie, he lived with a woman named Ferdella at 227 12 Mulberry, in Memphis, and a year later, they moved to 124 W. Illinois, rear. Son was a laborer at the time, and Della worked as a domestic. Beyond 1937, however, we lose offical track of Son Joe until he reappears as Minnie’s husband in 1939. Various sources give Minnie and Son’s place of meeting as Memphis, but our first substantial glimpse of them as a couple is the February 3, 1939, recording session in Chicago. Shortly before, Minnie had moved from 230 E. Garfield Boulevard, where she had lived since the early thirties, to 5300 S. Prairie. Both addresses were in the heart of Chicago’s South Side.

But for the abortive attempt in Jackson, this was Son’s first recording session, and all six of his pieces were issued, as were all four of Minnie’s. Son Joe’s Key to the World was even a tribute to the “woman I got now” who was “the key to the world,” Memphis Minnie. The decade closed with another Vocalion session three days later, where for reasons we’ll never know, Minnie reverted to her 1930 picking style and cut the downhome, rural-flavored Call the Fire Wagon. But the decade of her greatest popularity was yet to come.

She made one final career decision at the end of the decade. The Social Security Act became law in 1935, and on December 6, 1939, Minnie applied for a Social Security account (335-16-7910). While she signed her name Minnie Lawlars, the clerk took it down as Minnie Douglas Lawlers. She gave her address as 1903 W. Madison Street, but then we are given pause: she gives her birth year as June 3, 1902, and her age as thirty-seven. She claims Walls, Mississippi, as her birthplace. But the census records of 1900 do not place her family in Walls, and the same records show Minnie as already three or four years old. We must presume Minnie lied about her age when applying for her Social Security card.