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
