was a typical recording pattern for many blues artists on many labels, and the session of January 30, 1931, not only resulted in no rejects, it generated several magnificent sides. Joe’s Shake Mattie and especially My Washwoman’s Gone featured biting slide guitar work, probably by Joe himself, while Minnie cut the startling Crazy Crying Blues and Lucille Bogan’s famous Tricks Ain’t Walking No More, one of the few songs Minnie sang that was identified with, and written by, another singer. Four classics in one day wasn’t a bad day’s work. A rich legacy was being created for their many followers, and this period fittingly culminated with the February 4, 1932, session—back in New York for the first time since their debut in 1929—where they waxed the final, quartet version of Minnie’s hit, this time titled, Minnie Minnie Bumble Bee, featuring Vocalion all-stars Memphis Minnie, Georgia Tom, Tampa Red and Kansas Joe.
FOUR
CHICAGO DAYS
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 35th and 63rd, 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
