lower classes, but there is another side to the story. Diurnal Beale Street was also the focus for the most mundane activities of everyday living, and not simply gambling, drugs and prostitution; thus, in among the clubs and dives were the doctors’ offices, grocery stores and insurance companies one finds in every neighborhood.
But Memphis’s, and Beale Street’s main claim to fame was its music, and the most famous name in Memphis music was composer/bandleader W. C. Handy. Handy was born in Alabama, but his path to fame began in Memphis in 1909 on the eve of Boss Crump’s election as mayor. Club-owner/politico Jim Mulcahy hired Handy to play for Crump. Mulcahy was the most recent proprietor of the Panama Club at Fourth and Beale—its first three owners had all died violent deaths—and he would be warmly regarded for his beneficent treatment of Memphis blacks during the Depression. “They spent money with me when they had it—how could I not feed them now?” he remarked. If these words have a familiar ring, we should remember that when Mulcahy did time in Atlanta on liquor charges, he became friends with radical labor leader Eugene Debs, and became a staunch supporter of Debsian ideals.17 Handy’s enticing Mr. Crump helped carry Boss Crump to victory. St. Louis Blues, Beale Street Blues, Make Me a Pallet on the Floor, Yellow Dog Blues, Hesitation Blues, these too were Handy numbers, but these carefully and formally composed pieces had only a little to do with the downhome blues, or country blues of our subject, Memphis Minnie. Nonetheless, Handy’s existence as a Memphis figure is an important aspect of the city’s musical history. As for his pieces, many people will recognize Mr. Crump, in its most popular guise, as Mama Don’t Allow No Easy Riders Here.
Memphis was also the site of the founding of the Theater Owner’s Booking Association in 1909. The TOBA gave many black musicians and entertainers an opportunity to play in dozens of locations throughout the eastern United States. Of course, blues artists on the TOBA circuit tended to be Classic blues singers like Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith, and their more vaude-villian counterparts. Blues guitarists like Minnie didn’t work the TOBA, although they did appear in various theaters, like the Indiana Theatre in Chicago. As these remarks make clear, much of Memphis’s blues fame derives from the more sophisticated blues of W. C. Handy and the vaudeville-oriented blues sung from the TOBA stage. Even pianist Memphis Slim was at pains to separate the classier sort of bluesmen, like himself, from the more raggedy guitarists who played in Church’s Park.18 And yet the Church’s Park singers pointed to the existence of a mighty blues current flowing rapidly along beneath the veneer established by W. C. Handy and the TOBA, a current not so much subterranean as unheralded, a current at home in the dives and joints along Beale.
Guitarists Frank Stokes and Furry Lewis, two participants in that current, both provided advice and inspiration to Minnie in her early days in Memphis. Minnie’s duets with Kansas Joe drew as much inspiration from the guitar teamwork of Frank Stokes and Dan Sane,19 who recorded as the Beale Street Sheiks, as from her own early “partnership” with Willie Brown. Jim Jackson was already popular by that time, and he could be seen playing in Church’s Park along with other musicians like the guitarist Robert Wilkins. Wilkins remembered that Minnie “was beginning to learn guitar and he was able to teach her a few things,”20 but before long, Minnie herself was the reigning blues queen of Memphis, and there was little she could learn from the competition.21 The proximity of Memphis, Walls and Lake Cormorant to the Mississippi Delta blurred any distinctions that might be invoked to separate the Memphis singers from the Mississippi ones, and comparisons of the Memphis blues with the Mississippi blues may not accomplish much. For example, Minnie played at a roadhouse with Frank Stokes and Memphis Willie B, all Memphis artists, but across the street at another club were Mississippians Son House and Willie Brown (ex-partner of the legendary Charlie Patton).22 And as we shall see, Minnie and Willie Brown were partners for a number of years.
Like many blues singers, Minnie was, in her own words, a “downhome girl,” and while she would come to play in finer clubs, she was still willing to play for friends at home, or at a picnic, or even on the street. “She’d play anywhere,” Memphis Slim recalled. “I’m tellin’ you. She came in there from Mississippi playin’ around in the streets and different places and people’s houses and house parties and things, until she made Bumble Bee Blues, and then she [got famous and] came to Chicago.”23
Minnie babysat for future bluesman Eddie Taylor, with whose mother she had gone to school,24 but she wasn’t home enough to do much babysitting. She traveled through Texas with the circus, and she worked in Greenville, Mississippi, with trombonist Pee Wee Whittaker.25 When she wasn’t traveling, she was hanging out on Beale Street playing with various local musicians, from Joe McCoy or the Jed Davenport jug band to the Memphis Jug Band or the band led by Jack Kelly.
It was in these years when Minnie was still in her teens or twenties that she may have been the common-law wife of Will Weldon. For many years, blues aficionados thought that Will Weldon, who recorded with the Memphis Jug Band in the 1920s, was the same person as Casey Bill Weldon, who recorded with Minnie in the 1930s. New evidence (2013) shows that they were two different people. Will Weldon was born between 1904 and 1906 and died at an early age in 1934.26 One 78rpm record was issued under his name: Hitch Me to Your Buggy, and Drive Me Like a Mule and Turpentine Blues.27 The information that Minnie was in a relationship with Weldon before she met Kansas Joe apparently came from Mike Leadbitter via Daisy Douglas Johnson. “He was a member of the Memphis Jug Band and was a lot younger than Minnie,” Leadbitter reported. But neither Daisy nor her sister-in-law Ethel recognized his name in 1992. If Memphis Minnie was with a Weldon at this juncture in her career, it would likely have been Will Weldon, a documented resident of Memphis who better fits the description of being not only a jug band member but also “a lot younger than Minnie.”
Little detailed information about Casey Bill Weldon was available until recently. Big Bill wrote that Weldon was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in 1909. However, his death certificate and other records indicate that he was probably born in Plumerville, Arkansas, in 1901. But he maintained mysterious multiple identities, under William Weldon, Nathan Hammond and possibly other names, and at times gave Chanute, Kansas, as his birthplace and 1902 as his year of birth. In his recording of Way Down in Louisiana, he also sang “Memphis is my home,” and Big Joe Williams said that Casey Bill was from Brownsville, Tennessee, thus adding to the confusion with Will Weldon of Memphis. He emerged on record first as “Kansas City Bill Weldon” and later became “Casey Bill, the Hawaiian Guitar Wizard.” “Casey” was an expanded variation of “KC,” for Kansas City, and he seems to have been in and out of KC, where several brothers and sisters moved from Arkansas. He lived in Chicago for a few years after his brief but important recording career there (1935–1938); his movements subsequently became hard to trace, as he may have used different names, but he was reportedly in California and Detroit before returning to Kansas City, where he died in 1972.28
Even before Casey Bill was considered a contender for a role in Minnie’s life, many critics, including us, the authors, doubted whether the relationship even existed.29 Indeed, it may be that he and Minnie not only never married but never even met until their recording session together in 1935. It is noteworthy that in Georges Adins’s pioneering interview with Minnie and her family, the name Casey Bill Weldon was never mentioned. Casey Bill was at least a part-time participant in the Chicago music scene, but none of our informants knew him or linked him with Minnie. Big Bill wrote about both of them but never as a couple. According to at least one source, Minnie lived with a man called Squirrel in the mid- to late 1930s,30 and this may or may not have been Joe McCoy. It could also have been Casey Bill if he and Minnie did indeed have a relationship.
If the image of Minnie’s relationship with Weldon has melted away, a new and different image has come to replace it. Shortly after World War I, Minnie turned up at the Bedford plantation, just west of Lake Cormorant, not far from where the Douglas farm was counted in the 1920 census. This was where Willie Brown had lived since 1916,31 and it was with Brown that Minnie formed one of her early liaisons. When bluesman Willie Moore first saw Minnie,
