WOMAN
WITH GUITAR
MEMPHIS MINNIE’S BLUES
Revised and Expanded Edition
Paul Garon and Beth Garon
Foreword by Jim O’Neal
Copyright © 2014 by Paul Garon and Beth Garon
Foreword copyright © 2014 by Jim O’Neal
Cover photo copyright © Frank Driggs Collection
First published in different form in 1992 by Da Capo Press.
First City Lights Books edition, 2014
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Garon, Paul, 1942-
Woman with guitar : Memphis Minnie’s blues / Paul Garon and Beth Garon ; foreword by Jim O’Neal.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-87286-621-8
1. Memphis Minnie, 1896-1973. 2. Blues musicians—United States— Biography. 3. Memphis Minnie, 1896-1973—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Blues (Music)—History and criticism. I. Garon, Beth. II. Title.
ML420.M376G4 2013
782.421643092—dc23
[B]
2013046200
City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore,
261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Without the help of the Pace Trust—and our friends, the trustees Laura Orr and David Orr—this book would not have been able to appear in its present form. To them we owe our greatest thanks.
The information supplied by Daisy Douglas Johnson and Ethel Douglas was crucial to our ability to sketch such a solid version of Minnie, as was that supplied by Brewer Phillips, Homesick James, Jimmy Rogers, Johnny Shines, Sunnyland Slim, Big Lucky Carter, Bill Dicey, Champion Jack Dupree, Joe Duskin, Mose Vinson and Wade Walton. What secrets would have remained hidden without the extraordinary interviewing talents of Jim O’Neal (Homesick James, Jimmy Rogers) and Steve Cushing (Brewer Phillips). The testimony they were able to elicit shaped this book in many important ways. To Jim O’Neal we owe an extra debt of thanks for combing through his numerous interview tapes and unearthing diverse and wonderful reminiscences by Blind John Davis, Memphis Slim, Sunnyland Slim, James Watt and more.
Critical assistance and advice was supplied by Georges Adins, David Evans, Don Kent, David Orr, Pam Raitz, David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, Penelope Rosemont, Adena Siegel and Bev Zeldin. Photographs were kindly made available to us by Georges Adins, Blues Unlimited, Dennis Bonner, The Center for Southern Folklore, Amie Devereux, The Harry Godwin Collection, Juke Blues, Jo Ann Kelly, Harvey Newland, Nick Perls and John Summaria. Composer credits from 78 rpm issues came from our own collection and from Howard Berg, Joe Bussard, Don Kent, Mike Rowe, Russ Shor, Darryl Stolper, Sherman Tolen, Clint Wilson and Terry Zwigoff.
Various documents that appear throughout the book were supplied by the Blues Archive at the University of Mississippi, the staff at the Chicago Federation of Musicians (Local 10-208 of the American Federation of Musicians), Larry Cohn, Joel Silver and William Cagle of The Lilly Library, Paul Oliver, The Rodgers and Hammerstein Sound Archives of the New York Public Library, Sharon Howard at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Dick Shurman.
Indeed, we have even more to be grateful for, and we extend our heartfelt thanks to the following individuals and institutions: the Catfish Institute; Michel Chaigne; Columbia College Library; James Craddock; David R. Crippen, Curator of Automotive History, Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village; Norman Darwen; F. Wentworth Ford; Hugh Ford; M. Forshage; Gérard Herzhaft; Terry House; Robert G. Koester; Sam Lehman, MD; Sandra Lieb; Living Blues; Thomas Magee; Memphis Shelby County Public Library and Information Center, History Department, and Memphis Room; Memphis and Shelby County Film, Tape and Music Commission; Brian Myers; Hal Rammel; Mike Rowe; Neil Slaven; Soul Bag; Richard Spottswood; Christopher Starr; Chris Strachwitz; Charles Sweningsen; Tom Tsotsi; Ernest Virgo; John Waldrop; and Ted Watts.
Part of the chapter on Dirt Dauber Blues appeared earlier in Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion 4. (Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1989).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR THE NEW EDITION
Jim O’Neal, Robert Pruter and Bob Eagle were tireless in turning up fresh information about Memphis Minnie. Jim discovered Minnie and Kansas Joe’s marriage license and a new photo of Minnie (and much more, as well), Bob Pruter sent us countless display advertisements from the Chicago Defender, and Bob Eagle passed along all of his newly discovered census data about Minnie’s early life. To them I owe my greatest thanks.
The generosity of other blues scholars and historians has been outstanding, and we thank Cliff Warnken, Felix Wohrstein, Guido van Rijn, Bob West/Arcola Records, Frank Scott of Roots & Rhythm Mail Order, Scott Dirks, Robert Ford, Chris Smith, Howard Rye, Melanie Keithley, and Scott Barretta for their kindness.
Revising the discography to account for all of the LP and CD reissues of Minnie’s records since 1992 was a bigger job than we realized, but once again, many friends were eager to lend a hand. Other workers passed along items of interest that contributed to the richness that will make this edition superior to the last one, and we’d like to thank each one of them: Byron Foulger, Catherine Yronrode, Helge Thygesen, Art Schuna, Gorgen Antonsson, Robert Ford, Howard Rye, Kate Lewis, Jonny Meister, Alan Balfour and Stefan Wirz.
We would be remiss if we didn’t mention the usefulness of several online lists for desseminating our requests for new information: the Prewar Blues List at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pre-war-blues/ and the facebook group, the Real Blues Forum. Thank you one and all.
TECHNICAL NOTE
Minnie’s rushed and compressed delivery presents a number of problems, not the least of which is the number of words that exist somewhere short of articulation, in the vicinity of the implicit and the suggested. Often a word like “you” is only broached with a barely detectable “y” sound, and we are faced with the choice of rendering it “you” or “y’”, or ignoring it entirely. This difficulty leads to another. Rather than print lyrics in pseudo-dialect, we have chosen not to attempt to render every aspect of Minnie’s (or any singer’s) accent. But this decision puts even more strain on the question of the words whose first syllable is barely articulated, if that. There is no ideal solution to this problem, but we feel our quoted texts accurately represent the songs.
We use a standard method of transcribing verses where the first two lines are alike or similar by adding a “(2x)” at the end of the first line, and following it with the third line thus:
I found my rooster this morning by looking at his comb. (2x)
You can look out now, pullets, it won’t be long.
This method ignores the idiosyncrasies that occur between Minnie’s various renderings of the same line, where line two is of the form, “awwwwww, by looking at his comb,” but it is otherwise textually faithful. Further, the (2x) system became an economic necessity for a book of this size. All songs appearing in the text without an author credit are by Memphis Minnie.
In all cases, “harp” refers to harmonica.
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