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
