world. “She never liked ‘Lizzie,’” Daisy said, “she never would use that name.” Ultimately, “Kid” Douglas became known to the world as “Memphis Minnie,” the name she used on nearly all of her records and in her personal and professional life as well. At home, she was still called “Kid,” but everyone in the world outside called her “Minnie” or “Memphis Minnie.” A few of her colleagues even referred to her as “Memphis.”
Daisy had heard that the family moved to Walls around 1904. But the 1910 census finds them in Tunica County, near Hollywood. Minnie, or Lizzie, is thirteen and is said to have some schooling. No one knows exactly how far Minnie got in school, but she was able to read and write.4 Minnie was a wild youngster who never took to the farming life, and she ran away from home at an early age. Her first guitar had been a Christmas present given to her in 1905, a significant event for a talented musician like Minnie. Indeed, such individuals frequently report that in their childhoods, they always had “music in their head,” and it is for precisely these people that the “first instrument” has such totemic significance.5 For Minnie, musical instruments only intensified her desire to leave home. She began to run away to Memphis’s Beale Street with some regularity. When times were tough and nickels and dimes were hard to find, she returned to the farm to live, but rarely to work.6 By the time the next census was taken in 1920, Minnie is gone from the nest and the nest itself has moved to Desoto County on the Tennessee border. The family is enumerated near Lake Cormorant rather than Walls, but Daisy, who was born in 1915, remembers Walls, so we must assume that shortly thereafter they did move to Walls.
Traveling with a show was one way to gain experience, and Minnie toured the South in the war years with a Ringling Brothers show she joined in Clarksdale, Mississippi.7 “She was a showman,” said James Watt, “a showman all the way. She’d stand up out of that chair, she’d take that guitar and put it all ‘cross her head and everywhere, you know.”8 Minnie was to become an expert and professional entertainer, but the lessons were not easily learned. A young girl in a traveling show needed more than psychic defenses, and this rugged way of life gave her valuable experience not only as a polished professional, but as a woman who could take care of herself. Johnny Shines recalled, “Any men fool with her she’d go for them right away. She didn’t take no foolishness off them. Guitar, pocket-knife, pistol, anything she get her hand on she’d use it; y’know Memphis Minnie used to be a hell-cat… . I never had no problem with her. I know others that did.”9
Echoes of this rugged life appear throughout Minnie’s songs, but her repertoire also presents a nearly opposite face. In spite of her aversion to farm life, many farm and rural images are also distributed liberally through her early pieces, and songs like Frankie Jean (That Trottin’ Fool), Sylvester and His Mule Blues, and Plymouth Rock Blues are steeped in the lore of the farm and farm life. The Douglas farm had Plymouth Rocks—chickens of all kinds, in fact—as well as hogs, cows, and a mule. In Walls, “we raised sugarcane, cotton, corn and ‘garden,’ you know, like peas, beans. We used to raise something you call sorghum. It’s sugarcane; you strip it, and then you carry it to the mill, and they grind it up, get the juice, and they cook it,” said Daisy. Minnie’s nephew (Daisy’s son) Lee added, “When I was a kid, that was my job, to walk behind the mule with a switch. They had a machine that would grind the cane, run by a mule to turn the wheel, and I was a little kid with a switch, walking behind the mule.”10 Needless to say, Minnie had songs about that too, and her Good Soppin’ uses the imagery of cane and cane stripping, while What’s the Matter with the Mill? uses the imagery of the grinding mill.
The Douglas farm was like thousands of farms all over the South, with a small-town address but miles from the nearest gas station. Walls is only what Daisy’s son Lee called “a wide spot in the road.” It had a cotton gin, but Daisy’s comments showed how the importance of rural areas like Walls had shifted with the passing years. “The IC train used to run right through there, the Illinois Central, and it stopped in Walls. It went on through Tunica, Lakeview, Robinsonville, Clarksdale, below there— Mound Bayou. Right through the Delta. But they don’t have no train run down there now. They stopped that train fifteen years ago or more.”11
Daisy Johnson had rattled off the stops as if they came straight from the Illinois Central timetable. The Memphis-to-Vicksburg route was covered by the IC’s “Delta Express” and “The Planter,” with stops at Lake Cormorant, Robinsonville, Hollywood, Tunica, Clayton, Dundee, Lula, Coahoma, Clarksdale, Alligator, Mound Bayou, Merigold, Cleveland and smaller stops in between. Hollywood, Mississippi, would soon become a stop-on-request-only station, as Walls had been for a number of years. But the train traveled north and south just east of the Mississippi River, through Delta towns that were rich in blues history. Lake Cormorant hosted Willie Brown and Memphis Minnie, and decades later, it was the site of the famous Library of Congress session where Son House, Fiddlin’ Joe Martin, and Willie Brown were recorded. Muddy Waters sang of Dundee for the Library of Congress in his Burr Clover Blues, and Gus Cannon and his Jug Stompers recorded Hollywood Rag. Clarksdale was the site of the Afro-American Hospital where the dying Bessie Smith was taken after her grisly road accident. The hospital is now the Riverside Hotel where many a blues singer has passed the night. Robert Johnson was a regular in the Robinsonville area, and Charlie Patton sang of Lula in his Dry Well Blues. Patton, Johnson, Son House and countless others traveled through Merigold, Tunica, and so many similar towns that anyone familiar with Delta blues repertoires hears the same towns mentioned a hundred times in the songs. Our dreams are full of the rich textures of the names’ magical ferment. Every wide spot in the road was a milepost of the blues’ evolution.
But Minnie didn’t care much for the wide spot on Highway 61, not when Beale Street was so close. What was it about Beale Street that drew so many rural dwellers to Memphis? Blacks were leaving the rural South in droves, and many were migrating out of the South entirely, some to Chicago, some to Detroit and other large cities of the North. But many rural blacks traveled shorter migratory routes and landed in the large cities of the South: Birmingham, Atlanta, New Orleans or Memphis. While one of the chief motivations for rural blacks to move to the urban areas was greater economic opportunity, discriminatory activities still held sway in these cities of the deep South. For example, while the Negro Urban Leagues in Kansas City, Baltimore and Louisville helped Negro mechanics organize for the first time, they ran into trouble in Memphis. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) denounced the Memphis mechanics’ association as “communistic,” and the league was forced to abandon its labor activities, lest they be cut off from community-chest funding.12
Other racist practices guaranteed that black children would receive a poor education. Schools for blacks opened and closed in synchrony with planting and harvesting, and when all was said and done, many black children went to school only three months a year.13 No aspect of everyday life was free of racist taint. For example, Lena Horne’s scenes were cut out of Stormy Weather and Until the Clouds Roll By, and Annie Get Your Gun was banned in 1947 because the part of a railroad conductor was played by a black.14 It was amid this atmosphere that the black citizens of Memphis carried on their affairs.
Memphis had always had a large black population, and its history has been a colorful one. Indeed, the violence along the infamous black thoroughfare of Beale Street led to Memphis being called “the murder capitol of the world.”15As Will Shade of the Memphis Jug Band recalled,
You could walk down the street in days of 1900 and like that and you could find a man wit’ throat cut from y’ear to y’ear. Also you could find people layin’ dead wit’ not their throat cut, money took and everything in their pockets, everything took out of their pockets and thrown outside the house. Sometimes you find them with no clothes on and all such as that. Sometimes you could find them throwed out of winders and so forth, here on Beale Street. Sportin’ class o’ women runnin’ up and down the street all night long … git knocked in the head with bricks and hatchets and hammers—pocket knives, razors and so forth like that.16
Such
