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
