of countless male country blues artists as well. When the economic situation began to improve, and blues singers began to return to the studios, neither Classic blues singers nor country blues artists would last very long. The artists who survived would be those of both sexes who had sufficiently urbanized their styles, or who could demonstrate the greatest affinity for the new swing-influenced rhythms.8
Minnie was a pioneer at precisely the time and place that all of these forces coalesced. Before attempting to understand how she survived the Depression, we must first understand how she faced it, as a self-accompanied guitarist playing country blues. Almost by default, “women’s blues” has come to denote Classic, vaudeville-style blues. Minnie’s fame thus fell into the gap created by the prominence of the vaudeville blues singers on one side and the progressive aspects of the male country blues stylists on the other. A number of women refused the Classic designation by virtue of their having seized some of the privileges customarily reserved for men. To “play as good as any man” also meant to be doing what men were supposed to be doing and what women were not supposed to be doing, for such a music style was largely confined to men, or so it has been thought. But guitar-playing women like Minnie (yes, there were others) constituted an effective link that served to give female blues singing a continuity in its leanest years. Even their number is impressive.
Many of these singers are known to us through their phonograph records: The rough-voiced Mattie Delaney; Ethel McCoy; Rosa Lee Hill, Precious Bryant, all of these women accompanied themselves on guitar, as did the obscure Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley, and as did Jessie Mae Hemphill, who died in 2006. Other female instrumentalists never recorded, and it was all too easy to read a hint or two about their existence without its ever registering in one’s consciousness. For example, one writer noted that Teddy Darby had “fooled around with his mother’s [guitar] … but had made slight progress on it at that time.”9 Nothing more is known about the guitar talents of Darby’s mother, and this isn’t the only enticing reference of this kind. McKinley James, Robert Shaw, Louis Myers, J. B. Lenoir, and Tommie Lee Russell all had guitar-playing mothers.10 In sum, while dozens of female performers gained a reputation as blues singers on the vaudeville stage in the early twenties, the later twenties saw the rise in popularity of the self-accompanied, downhome male blues singer. Hidden by this schematic, however, were a number of women who performed in a rural style and accompanied themselves on guitar. How well hidden they were can be seen from this comment by bluesman James Watt, when asked about Minnie’s same-sex competitors. “There was only Memphis Minnie. There wasn’t too many girl blues singers out.”11
Thus, there was a significant current of women country blues performers, hidden from us through the traditional manipulation of “opposing” categories like male/female, urban/rural, downhome/city.12 What was also hidden was the degree to which this performance style embodied, for the blueswoman, a real gain in autonomy and independence, usually reserved for male artists. Even the most pragmatic assessment reveals considerable personal benefit.
For example, much glamour was attached to the role of blues singer, regardless of how and where it was fulfilled. The wages of even the lower-paying music jobs were considerably in excess of the pitiful amounts paid to women in agriculture and domestic service or the lowest-level factory work open to poor and under-educated black women. In factory work, black women were often paid less than black men. And blues singing was far easier than back-breaking work like picking cotton.13 We will see that it was this latter task that Minnie would do anything to avoid. What made her so unusual was that she could do something.
Performance at picnics, suppers and juke joints also enabled her to establish an intimacy with her audience that the vaudeville stage made difficult. Further, Minnie wrote much of her own material. This not only enabled her to avoid the pressure and management of the often exploitative male songwriters, but it reinforced her own imaginative committment to her songs. She was also her own manager, a gratifying role for such an obviously independent woman. Finally, Minnie played the lead guitar of her partnerships and performed more lead and solo vocals than did her partners. She also released more single records than her partner(s) or husbands. All of these factors combined to make it possible for Minnie to assume a musical identity that before her time had been achieved mostly by males. And there is considerable evidence that Minnie was acutely aware of the unusual aspects of the life she chose to live.
THREE
SOUTHERN NIGHTS
I want to be the opening act between this planet and the sun.
—Jayne Cortez
When Woman with Guitar was first published, we wrote that Memphis Minnie’s family moved from Algiers, Louisiana, located right across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, to Walls, Mississippi, just outside Memphis, Tennessee. Visiting Walls for the first time, we wrote that nearly a century later, you could stand on the railroad tracks in Walls, and with your face turned to the west, look out over dusty farmlands that had changed little in the last hundred years. That the view to the east was dissimilar and a bit more modern gave you the eerie feeling that for just the moment of your standing there, you actually embodied, in a symbolic way to be sure, part of the history of Memphis Minnie. For the drama that began there and unfolded in Chicago and Memphis and all points in between, and that finally played itself out in Memphis, never freed itself from the critical crossing of the modern with the old, the city with the country, the urban with the rural. Within the nexus of these contradictory and opposing forces, and probably rarely at peace, Memphis Minnie sang her blues.
It is tempting to believe that Minnie had one idea in mind almost from the day she was born: to leave the farm and go to town, to leave the site of back-breaking labor and meager wages for the land of good times and loud music: Memphis, Tennessee. Decades later, after Memphis seemed no longer misty and far away, Chicago became the far-off land, and she soon conquered it as well. Indeed, the tension between her distaste for farm work and her desire for an active musician’s career may have been the prime source of energy that carried her through life. We would not be surprised to learn that the unconscious vicissitudes of these forces drew her back to Memphis from the North, again and again, just as they sent her north at the start, and just as they set her out on the road, time after time. But before we begin to follow the wayward path of these currents, let us go back to the beginning.
Was Minnie really born in Algiers (Orleans parish), Louisiana, on June 3, 1897, as we’ve always thought?1 Figures from the 1900 census suggest otherwise.2 In our case, they show Minnie in Tunica County in 1900, at around three or four years old. She is in Beat 3 in the east central part of the county, perhaps near Beaver Dam or Little Texas. Most interesting is the fact that her father, Abe Douglas, is said to be from Tennessee and her mother Gertrude is from Mississippi. A Tennessee father and a Mississippi mother, living in northern Mississippi in 1900, makes one wonder—considering they were farmers—what they would have been doing near New Orleans in 1897. We have no hard evidence for the Algiers connection, although the census figure does endorse 1897 as her birth year. Minnie claims to be from Algiers in one of her songs, and Daisy endorsed this, but she could have gotten her information from Minnie. On the other hand, the Douglas family did move around frequently and they could have just come from Louisiana prior to the 1900 census. Still, we believe the 1900 census data—and all known subsequent census data—offers the strongest evidence of Minnie’s birth place: Mississippi.
She was the oldest of the thirteen Douglas children. Daisy Douglas Johnson, Minnie’s only surviving sister and an important informant for this work, was the youngest.3 Minnie’s father was Abe Douglas and her mother was Gertrude Wells Douglas. Abe was a sharecropper all his life, and his level of education, as well as that of his wife, is unknown. There were nine children who grew to adulthood and four who died young. The brothers Willie, Leo, Miller and Jack all did “factory work,” while Edward worked for the city of Memphis and Hun was a minister. A
