MEMPHIS MINNIE
The renegade star of Beale Street became one of the most incendiary guitarists of her day.
You can’t talk about the leading lights of blues without mentioning Memphis Minnie. An extremely prolific, confessional recording artist and a no-bullshit character (Homesick James said: “She chewed tobacco all the time, even while singing or playing the guitar, and always had a cup at hand in case she wanted to spit”), she had a tough life, which she skillfully poured into her music.
Born Lizzie Douglas in Louisiana in 1897, as a teenager she ran away to
Memphis, where she played guitar and sang on street corners, supplementing her income with prostitution when she had to. For a stint from 1916 to 1920 she toured the South with the Ringling Brothers Circus. But it was when she started performing with her first husband, Joe McCoy, in 1929, that her career really took off. Columbia Records snapped them up and gave them the stage names Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie, and they performed as a duo until their divorce in 1935. But by this time Minnie was an established figure on the scene who could comfortably hold her own, and so she began experimenting with different styles.
When she made her first recordings with McCoy she was 32 – a contemporary of Tommy Johnson, a few years older than Son House and Skip James. More than 20 years later, when all those men were largely forgotten, she was still drawing audiences in clubs, still making records. Her professional career in blues is matched by no other female musician, and by very few men.
How she managed that is clear on the 2016 compilation Keep On Going: 1930-1953: from the intricate guitar duets of the early 30s with thenhusband McCoy, through the small-band tracks of the later 30s, the pluggedin 1941 recordings with next husband Ernest ‘Little Son Joe’ Lawlars, such as her hit Me And My Chauffeur Blues, and the still-punchy music she made in the 50s such as Kissing In The Dark and Broken Heart.
What Minnie had was adaptability. Like Big Bill Broonzy – who recalled her beating him in a ‘cutting contest’ in a Chicago nightclub in 1933 (he admitted she could “pick a guitar and sing as good as any man I’ve ever heard”) – she heard how the sounds and themes of the blues were changing with the times and she kept pace with them. Johnson, House and James were greats, but this kind of musical re-invention would have been beyond them.
During the 60s she reaped the benefits of the young generation’s renewed interest in blues, with the new wave of players and enthusiasts recognising her role in laying crucial foundations of the genre. And in 1971 Led Zeppelin reworked her song When The Levee Breaks. Their version might have been bigger and bolder (not least thanks to John Bonham’s huge drum sound), but the grounding hoodoo at the heart of it was all Minnie.
Killer Track: Bumble Bee