Minnie’s life and songs, we will also examine Minnie’s songs as exceptional examples of the blues genre, stunning pieces that reveal not only Minnie’s magnificence, but the grandeur of the blues as well. The hundreds of sides Minnie recorded are the perfect material to teach us about the blues. For the blues are at once general and particular, speaking for millions but in a highly singular, individual voice. That is part of their magic, their art. Listening to Minnie’s songs, we will hear her fantasies, her dreams, her desires, but we will hear them as if they were our own.
TWO
WOMAN WITH GUITAR: THE RISE OF MEMPHIS MINNIE
Knock hard. Life is deaf.
—Mimi Parent
Mamie Smith’s 1920 recording of Crazy Blues was one of the first records to demonstrate that there was a sizable African American audience who would buy vocal blues recordings performed by an African American singer.1 In the ensuing years blues performance styles on record underwent numerous modifications as they reflected the subtle changes in tastes, economic pressures, and trends in the entertainment industry. The first blues to be recorded were the vaudeville-style “Classic” blues, usually sung by women like Bessie Smith or Ida Cox, from a stage, and accompanied by a male pianist or band. The songs themselves were often composed by black male songwriters, although a few of these women singers, e.g., Ma Rainey, wrote a number of their own songs. Their heyday on record began in 1920 and ended with the Depression. The label “Classic” has been assailed for its unsuitability, but its detractors have not been convincing.2 For some, there may be a reluctance to grant “Classic” status to a period of blues dominated by women, especially when they can point to a subsequent period that seemed to be dominated by men, but the priority on record of Classic blues, and the women who sang them, speaks for itself.3 The term “Classic” blues, to describe vaudeville-style blues performance, has nonetheless disappeared from scholarly commentary.
These vaudeville-style blues dominated the blues recording industry for five or six years, beginning in 1920, but by the mid-1920s, “country blues” began to appear more and more frequently in the record company catalogs. Country blues continued to be widely recorded until the Depression brought the recording industry to a near standstill in 1932–1933. By 1934, when the recording industry began to stir again, a new combo style of blues was in the air. Throughout the thirties and into the forties and fifties, blues singers on record tended to be accompanied by a piano and drums, a bass, one or two guitars, and occasional horns or harmonicas. Amplifiers for guitars became a common sight by the 1940s. While this combo style dominated the blues scene of the 1930s and 1940s, neither “jump blues,” “urban blues,” “city blues,” “Chicago blues,” or half a dozen other nominees, has ever become the standard term to describe the music played by these small blues groups of the thirties and forties. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, this urban style had crystalized in the hands of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and many others to produce the well-known electric sound of what came to be called the the postwar blues, or Chicago blues.
These demarcations are neither as linear nor as finely drawn as our sketch suggests, however, and last night’s Classic blues queen could easily be the morning’s country blues artist. Singers like Lottie Kimbrough (née Beaman), for example, performed in both styles, with either Classic or downhome accompaniment, and many 1930s as well as postwar performances also refuse to fit the molds we’ve created for them. Sara Martin was most frequently recorded in the early 1920s with a piano or small group accompaniment. Sylvester Weaver, a country blues guitarist, accompanied Sara Martin for several sessions and was hailed for pioneering this unusual combination of vaudeville-styled woman singer and country blues guitarist. Were these records country blues or classic vaudeville-style blues?
Looking at the accompaniment for Gertrude Perkins, recorded in Dallas in 1927, presents us with the same potential for contradiction. Perkins was accompanied by guitarist Coley Jones and Octave Gaspard on tuba. Was this city or country blues? Straining like this against these categories suggests the categories themselves obscure as much as they clarify. But it is important to understand these structures in order to understand how Minnie cracked them.
While the vaudeville-style blues singers were relatively sophisticated women singers who performed on the stage, the country blues artists tended to be unsophisticated males who accompanied themselves on acoustic guitars.4 These downhome musicians played for family and friends, at home or at parties, in juke joints or at picnics and suppers. Country blues performers tended to be semi-professionals who also farmed or performed other seasonal labor in the logging industry, levee camps, turpentine camps and similar places, but the most famous performers were often able to get by on their musical skills alone.
In many ways the ascendancy of country blues seemed progressive, and a new and younger audience was quick to respond to these highly rhythmic songs. The self-accompanied country blues performer embodied a new autonomy, and for many rural record buyers, country blues on record, as well as in person, was a fascinating step into the future. This was an exciting dance music, and the couple and individual dances that listeners did to blues accompaniment represented greater individualism for blacks than the square dances that were done to pre-blues forms.5
That most of the guitar-playing country blues artists on record were male is of critical importance, however, for such “progress” often contains a secret: the oppression and exploitation of women. If we are inspired by Fourier’s notion that the general index of emancipation is the level of the emancipation of women, we are confronted with the fact that just such moments as the “ascendancy” of country blues need reevaluation. Have we not already seen that there is major resistance to calling the period of female-dominated blues recording Classic, even though “Classic” satisfies the requirements of many defininitions of the term and is used to describe the period that was, in fact, the vocal blues’ first heyday on record? In contrast, the vintage years of recorded (male) country blues, 1927–1933, are usually considered the “prime” years of blues recording. For example, in 1965 one critic gloated that country blues 78s were finally being recognized as valuable, while the previously highly esteemed Classic blues of the vaudeville-influenced blueswomen were now being devalued.6
From one perspective, then, what had happened to the vaudeville blueswomen was not at all unusual. To hire black men to fill jobs once held by black women was consistent with sexist practices of the day and upheld the mainstream cultural notions that a woman’s place was in the home, that men were better than women at most jobs, and that it was a man’s role to work for a living for the rest of “his” family. Further, it was a pact between males—songwriter/bandleader Perry Bradford and Okeh’s Fred Hager—that allowed Mamie Smith to make her first record. While this view should not be allowed to obscure the fact that Bradford and Smith were a black team that achieved an important victory for black culture, the very fact that Smith’s recording sessions had to be negotiated by Bradford supports the thesis of the pact between two males with a woman as its object.
Add to this the fact that the Classic blueswomen were being paid far more than the country bluesmen, and the former’s disappearance from record is more easily understood. For example, at the beginning of her career with Columbia, Bessie Smith was paid $125 per usable side, the same amount she was paid during her last year with Columbia; but at her peak, she was receiving $200 per usable side. Meanwhile, Columbia’s male country blues “stars” like Peg Leg Howell or Barbecue Bob received only $15 per side. Minnie and Joe were probably paid at this latter rate for their first Columbia sides, and it’s doubly ironic that Minnie, who was so often said to “play like a man” was also paid like a man in this atypical case where women were paid more than men.7
But it would be a mistake to think that the men replaced the women, or that country blues replaced the Classic blues. The Depression not only ended many vaudeville blues careers—just as it ended
