With some justice, one could think of the Columbia sessions as mere appetizers to the luscious feast that would soon follow on Vocalion. The relationship with Vocalion began in February 1930, and for Minnie it was an affiliation that lasted for nearly a decade, in spite of interruptions to record for Okeh, Decca and Bluebird in the early to mid-1930s. Vocalion’s own history, however, was just as complicated and just as full of interruptions. The label had been purchased by Brunswick-Balke-Collender in the summer of 1925, and by 1929, under the direction of J. Mayo Williams, it was regularly recording race items in the field, instead of in Chicago. Ultimately the field unit visited Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, San Antonio, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Knoxville, Hot Springs, Birmingham and, most important from our perspective, Memphis.
Vocalion had inaugurated its 1000 series of race records in March 1926, and it ran for 746 records in six years. Many of the great blues hits of the day were on Vocalion: Jim Jackson’s Jim Jackson’s Kansas City Blues, Tampa Red and Georgia Tom’s It’s Tight Like That, and Leroy Carr’s How Long—How Long Blues.47 Nearly all of Minnie and Joe’s vintage material was issued in this race series. Vocalion was absorbed into the American Record Corporation (ARC) stable of labels at the end of 1931, and a new race series began at 25001 in September 1933. Minnie never appeared on the 25000 series, which was changed after number 25021 to 2522. Race and country items were then prefixed with a zero, like Minnie’s Stinging Snake Blues, issued on Vocalion 02711 in 1934. The race series items were dropped in price from 75 cents to 35 cents.
Minnie’s 1930s sides were usually issued only on Vocalion, while the more popular Big Bill had many of his records issued on ARC’s dime-store labels as well. The ARC labels controlled a large segment of the market by virtue of their having Tampa Red, Big Bill, Memphis Minnie, and, for awhile, Peetie Wheatstraw, but this was not to last. Tampa Red soon became a Bluebird artist, and Wheatstraw decided to stick with Decca, for whom he had begun to record in mid-1934. Even Minnie didn’t settle down with Vocalion until late 1935.
Minnie and Joe first recorded for Vocalion’s Memphis field unit in February 1930. After that they traveled regularly to Chicago to record, finally moving there themselves in the early 1930s. While we don’t know precisely when they moved north, Sunnyland Slim recalled Minnie and Joe traveling to Chicago to record, and then returning to Memphis where they still lived,48 and his recollection is supported by Big Bill.49 This was a common pattern, as Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup has testified: “I had to record, I had a big family. And I’d go to Chicago to record and go back South and work.”50
Minnie’s family had not yet moved to Memphis, although they did move to Brunswick, Tennessee, a few miles northeast of the city. Other members of the family lived closer to Cordova, a few miles to the south. “It was a little town, right out from Cordova, called Leno, Tennessee.51 And that’s where I went to school,” said Daisy, reminiscing about the 1920s. “We went to school at Brunswick for awhile and we went at this little school they call Morning Grove School, that was between Leno and Cordova.”52 Shortly after Gertrude died in 1922, Abe Douglas moved back to Walls. He had been dissatisfied with the farming in the hills around Brunswick, and he farmed the richer Delta land in Walls until he died in 1935.
Ethel commented, “You know, it was up in Brunswick where my house caught fire … around 1925, 1926, before the flood. When the house burned, I moved in with [Daisy’s] Papa. And by there being no fire department and no water, the house burned to the ground. No water around. The next year we all moved back to Walls.”53 Fire was a significant agency that wound its way through Minnie’s repertoire—another brother’s house burned to the ground a year later—and Ethel’s very words are uncannily similar to the lyrics of Minnie’s Call the Fire Wagon.
Minnie and Joe cut their first two double-sided duets during their second Vocalion session: What Fault You Find of Me, Part 1 and 2, and Can I Do It for You?, Part 1 and 2. Almost unnoticed was Minnie’s lilting harmony on Joe’s She Wouldn’t Give Me None, a lovely contribution, in a role she never played again. But the two-sided duets established a pattern for the teasing, please-give-it-to-me, you-can’t-have-it songs with which Minnie and Joe punctuated their repertoire. While these duets shared much with the vaudeville tradition—Minnie probably got her feet wet playing pieces like these in traveling shows—their musical qualities often set them above and apart from their vaudeville counterparts. When the period of the duets ended, Minnie’s lyrics often still sounded as if the replying male was only a few feet off-mike. Jed Davenport and His Beale Street Jug Band also cut six sides for Vocalion on that same February day. Kansas Joe is obviously the vocalist on two of the numbers, You Ought to Move Out of Town and Save Me Some, and both he and Minnie may share guitar honors. Minnie may even play mandolin on one cut, as she does on her own After While Blues, cut two years later.54 Minnie is said to have learned banjo even before she learned guitar,55 but none of her associates has ever mentioned her playing banjo, and her banjo playing has gone unrecorded. She may have even been able to play piano, having learned from a fellow musician from Walls, Kid Crackintine.56
Minnie and Joe’s last Memphis session was for Victor in May 1930. Many of the details surrounding the Victor session remain obscure. Minnie’s name appeared on the Victor label as Minnie McCoy, while Joe appeared as either “Joe Johnson” or as one-half of “McCoy and Johnson.” It’s possible that Joe McCoy had signed an exclusive contract with Vocalion and Minnie had not, for many blues pseudonyms functioned as a means of avoiding the typically exploitative contractual obligations of the major record labels. Nonetheless, for years many listeners thought “Joe Johnson” was a cousin, even though he sounded surprisingly like Joe McCoy.57
After Minnie and Joe cut a remake of their duet Goin’ Back to Texas, as I’m Going Back Home, Minnie recorded a third version of her hit Bumble Bee, and the first of two versions of Memphis Minnie-Jitis Blues, here called simply Meningitis Blues. For Bumble Bee Blues and Meningitis Blues, she was accompanied by the popular Memphis Jug Band, all colleagues and friends, who were recording that day for Victor. It’s worth noting, however, that the careers of the Memphis Jug Band, like ninety percent of the other blues stars of the twenties, were winding down; they had a few more sessions with Victor, and a session or two in the thirties, but after that, their recording opportunities were almost nonexistent. Minnie and Joe’s careers were just beginning.
Also in the Victor studio was Washington White, a fiercely powerful Delta bluesman who recorded later as Bukka White and who eventually became popular among young whites in the years of the blues revival. This was Bukka’s first session, and in the background of I Am in the Heavenly Way and Promise True and Grand, singing above the popped strings of White’s steel-bodied National, is a woman’s voice, the singer identified only as “Miss Minnie,” but probably Minnie McCoy.
After White’s sides, the Victor engineers recorded four sermons with singing, and then closed up shop for the day. The next two days were devoted to recording old-time music for Victor’s several hillbilly series, and on May 29, Joe and Minnie returned to the studio. They were joined by Bessie McCoy, who played no instrument and who sang on only one number, the unissued Midnight Special. Other than the appearance of her name in the files, we know nothing else about her. No test pressing or master of Midnight Special has been made available. Minnie and Joe’s titles were eventually released, but less than a thousand copies were pressed of I Don’t Want No Woman and I Never Told a Lie, and less than 200 were pressed of Georgia Skin and I’m Going Back Home.58
Joe