early on in Shelby, Mississippi, and ultimately traveling with her to Chicago where he was thrown over, probably in favor of Blind John Davis, with whom Minnie began to record.30
Davis himself preserved a priceless anecdote from those years when he accompanied Minnie. “Minnie paid $200 for a wig. At that time women wasn’t wearing wigs, you know, unless they just had to. She paid $200 for a wig, she got drunk and went home that night, leave that wig on a chair. And somebody done give her a little old puppy. She woke up the next morning looking for her wig, her wig was [scattered] all over the house. Minnie hit [the puppy] with her guitar and broke the neck off of it, and Son Joe let him out, and he said that dog didn’t even look back. That puppy didn’t come back there at all. Oh, god, they had me laughing. I had to get up and go in another room. ‘Cause, man, she was cursing, ‘I’ll kill that so-and-so if I catch him.’ That puppy figured that too.”31
By late 1935 Minnie had settled into a relaxed groove under the supervision of Lester Melrose. Many blues artists were not able to make the transition from rural-sounding downhome blues to the more sophisticated sounds Melrose’s artists turned out, and it is a remarkable sign of Minnie’s resiliency that she adjusted so well,32 becoming a major figure in the blues world of the next two decades, and continuing to have a new record issued every few weeks until the beginning of the war. One critic described Minnie as a “female Big Bill,”33 pointing not only to the crucial role Big Bill and Memphis Minnie played in the consolidation of the Melrose sound, but to the ease with which they tailored their music to the new style. Bill’s remarkable popularity can too easily obscure the fact that stylistically Minnie was as much if not more of an innovator than Bill was.
To appreciate the evolution of Minnie’s style, we must look more closely at the Melrose phenomenon. According to Melrose, it was in early 1934, when taverns were reappearing in the wake of the repeal of prohibition, and when every bar had a jukebox, that he sent a letter to Columbia and Victor saying that he could provide unlimited blues talent to meet their recording needs. Their response was enthusiastic, and “from March, 1934, to February, 1951, I recorded at least 90 percent of all rhythm-and-blues talent for RCA Victor [which included their Bluebird subsidiary] and Columbia Records.”34 Among the majors, only Decca went forward without Melrose’s assistance.
Melrose recruited his artists by traveling throughout the country, from city to city, and from bar to bar, looking for blues singers. He also used bluesmen like Big Bill, Big Joe Williams and Walter Davis as talent scouts to bring him new artists. During Minnie’s heyday of the 1930s and 1940s, Melrose was the single most powerful and most influential man in the blues recording field, and one glance at his “stable” shows why: Big Bill, Washboard Sam, Merline Johnson (Yas Yas Girl), Arthur Crudup, Tampa Red, Lil Green, St. Louis Jimmy, Roosevelt Sykes, Memphis Minnie, Curtis Jones, Big Joe Williams, Walter Davis, Sonny Boy Williamson, Doctor Clayton, Lonnie Johnson, Tommy McClennan, Big Maceo, Bumble Bee Slim, and many others were all Melrose artists. No one has ever accused him of exaggerating when he said “90 percent”.
Melrose’s artists often gathered at Tampa Red’s house at 35th and State, and blues bassist and impresario Willie Dixon first met Melrose there in the mid-1940s. He saw Minnie and Son Joe there, along with Big Maceo, Sonny Boy Williamson (John Lee Williamson), Blind John Davis and others who used to “hang out” and practice at Tampa’s. Playing on Melrose sessions with Minnie and Son, as well as with Sonny Boy Williamson, Lil Green and others, influenced his own later work as a producer.35 Muddy Waters remarked that one had to go through Tampa to be welcome at the rehearsal hall, and there was the implication that Tampa Red was also the route to Melrose’s good graces or managership.
Some critics think Melrose “ruined” the blues by imposing, on so many records, a uniform house style, obtained by repeatedly using the same musicians, on their own and on each others’ records. Thus, phrases like “The Bluebird Beat,” the “Melrose Mess” or the “Melrose machine” emphasize the monotonous regularity imposed by the Melrose regime.36 Big Bill was sharply critical of Melrose’s financial dealings too.37 Brewer Phillips’s remarks seem pertinent here. “She always would tell me that she’d been messed around in the music. So I’d say, ‘How can they mess you around?’ She say, ‘They’ll take your money.’ And she’d always say, ‘You can learn to play, but don’t let them take your money.’”38
Other critics, like Delmark Records’s Bob Koester, point to the New Orleans jazz backgrounds of Melrose sidemen and emphasize the positive aspects of Melrose’s productions, like their danceable rhythm and their popularity. Further, unique and unusual artists like Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup were as much a part of the full Melrose picture as the “regularized” Big Bill or Washboard Sam were. Koester also notes that “Melrose is remembered with unusual fondness by the artists he recorded. There are noticeably fewer complaints of sharp practices and frequent praise of his musical perceptions and social attitudes.”39
In evaluating Melrose’s role in the changes that seemed to sweep through the blues recording world in the New Deal years, two rarely considered perspectives should be emphasized. The reputedly monotonous combo sound of the 1930s may be less a Melrosian artifact than the result of a change in styles already in effect by the late 1920s. The sound was solidified with the rise of the piano, inaugurated by Leroy Carr, who, with Scrapper Blackwell, recorded the instant hit How Long—How Long Blues on June 19, 1928.40 Peetie Wheatstraw began recording in 1930, and his post-1933 records were influential in consolidating the sound that had begun with Carr and Blackwell, well before the Melrose empire was in place. Blues record impresario Nick Perls was only half joking when he commented, “Peetie Wheatstraw ruined the blues almost single-handedly,” for Wheatstraw’s smooth style of the 1930s seemed to typify the forces that spelled doom for so many rural-sounding, country blues artists.41
One should also assess the role of the Melrose musicians from a post–World War II perspective, i.e. from the other end of their period of dominance, to see the vitally important role played by the expressive harp and vocal style of Melrose headliner Sonny Boy Williamson in providing inspiration for the new electric Chicago sound of Little Walter, Snooky Pryor and other newcomers. Sonny Boy had begun recording in 1937, and his records were among the most popular of any blues artist ever.
From these alternating perspectives, Melrose becomes a sign of regularity caught in the midst of two innovations: Carr, Wheatstraw and the rise of the piano, and Sonny Boy, Little Walter and the rise of the harp. Melrose had little personally to do with Carr or Little Walter, but his presence during the critical period of 1934–1951 was strongly felt. At the very least, Melrose’s refractive powers affected the music that passed from Carr to Little Walter, but all concerned would agree that his regime was more than simply catalytic.42 And if we query the evidence and not the critics we find that these extremely popular and danceable records are “monotonous” only for those commentators who so ardently and exclusively crave vintage Delta blues or the piercing electric guitars and harps of the 1950s.
Minnie’s last intricately picked guitar duet was recorded in 1932, and the presence of a piano on her January 10, 1935, Decca session was the strongest sign of what the future held. Henceforth, Minnie’s guitar began to play a more supporting role, and even on the two-guitar sessions that lacked a piano, Minnie seldom brought an elaborate picking technique to the recording studio. If a piano wasn’t on a session, it might as well have been. This was a music styled for the tough joints on Chicago’s South Side, and not for the country suppers and fish fries Minnie played for in the South.
But did her city guitar style evolve out of the notion that her more dexterous rural style was old-fashioned and dated, or was it merely the socioeconomic requirements of tavern music? Were her more frequent spoken asides in the later records a way of covering over silences emanating from the gaps in her new style of playing, or did she think she was being urbane and cosmopolitan? While some of her mid- to late-1930s Vocalions might suggest
