Joe Calicott remembered Minnie recording for Vocalion while he was also at the studio recording. “She and Tampa Red had the first steel boxes we ever saw.”60 Early pictures of Tampa Red do indeed show him with a National steel, but Minnie and Joe were as significant as Tampa in this regard, and one critic notes that these Nationals “were first brought to Jackson by Memphis Minnie and Joe McCoy in either late 1929 or early 1930 when the pair came from Chicago to play a club date.”61 Johnny Shines also remembers Minnie and Joe’s guitars, from the first time he saw them play in 1929. He hadn’t yet begun to play himself, but he vividly recalls the performance by Minnie, Joe, Charlie McCoy and a fourth musician. “And they all had the first steel guitars I had ever seen, they all had National steels. They was such pretty things.”62 Who actually brought the first National to the region is obviously a matter for speculation—Walter Vinson of the Mississippi Sheiks was known to play a steel-bodied National guitar, and he was from the Jackson area and acquainted with Joe and Charlie McCoy—but the testimony we do have suggests that Minnie and Joe were among the first to use them, and that those who saw them were much taken with them.
Each new trip to the Vocalion studio brought new successes for Joe and Minnie and more listening treats for their audience, occasionally including new versions of Minnie’s “old” standards like Bumble Bee and I’m Talking about You. New Dirty Dozen, however, may have derived the designation “new” from its having been recorded by Minnie in her role as guitarist for the Jed Davenport version five months earlier.63 If this is so, it provides a backhanded confirmation of the presence of Minnie’s guitar on the Davenport sides. By this time, Minnie was not only producing more solo records than Joe—she was producing the hits. Another ominous sign from Joe’s point of view was the legend running beneath the “Kansas Joe” artist credit on his solo vocal (with two guitars), Botherin’ That Thing: “Guitar by Memphis Minnie.” This notation was to appear with increasing frequency on his records.
In spite of this, all of their duets for Vocalion were labeled as by “Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie.” They were never labeled as by “Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe,” although it was clearer each day that Minnie was the more popular and the more appealing artist of the duo. No doubt this was just another sign of how male-dominated country blues recording was at the time. “If a male sang on a record, he was probably the star,” may have been their motto, and Kansas Joe was treated as such, even on those duets where his part was relatively minor like What’s the Matter with the Mill? and You Stole My Cake.
Every two or three months, Minnie and Joe would return to the Vocalion studio to record. Some sessions would result in two Kansas Joe vocal sides, issued under Joe’s name, and one vocal by Minnie, but the latter might be labeled as by “Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie.” Others would result in two songs under Minnie’s name, and no others; but often as not, they’d be back in the studio a few days later to record a few other pieces that would be issued under their various combinations of names. Thus, on October 9, 1930, Minnie sang You Dirty Mistreater and the haunting Dirt Dauber Blues, the former to the tune of the Mississippi Sheiks’ hit, Sitting on Top of the World.64 They returned two days later and cut Joe’s That’s Your Yas Yas Yas and I’m Fixed for You, Minnie’s North Memphis Blues, and the rousing duet masterpiece, What’s the Matter with the Mill?
This was a typical recording pattern for many blues artists on many labels, and the session of January 30, 1931, not only resulted in no rejects, it generated several magnificent sides. Joe’s Shake Mattie and especially My Washwoman’s Gone featured biting slide guitar work, probably by Joe himself, while Minnie cut the startling Crazy Crying Blues and Lucille Bogan’s famous Tricks Ain’t Walking No More, one of the few songs Minnie sang that was identified with, and written by, another singer. Four classics in one day wasn’t a bad day’s work. A rich legacy was being created for their many followers, and this period fittingly culminated with the February 4, 1932, session—back in New York for the first time since their debut in 1929—where they waxed the final, quartet version of Minnie’s hit, this time titled, Minnie Minnie Bumble Bee, featuring Vocalion all-stars Memphis Minnie, Georgia Tom, Tampa Red and Kansas Joe.
FOUR
CHICAGO DAYS
I believe I’m at the crossroads of the wind.
—Alice Rahon
By this time, nearly 240,000 blacks had moved to Chicago.1 In fact, the growth of Chicago’s black population, most of whom had come from the South, had been phenomenal. In 1850 Chicago had a black population of just over 300.2 By 1900, one hundred times that number of blacks called Chicago their home, and this number was to increase again by more than tenfold over the next five decades. By 1950—around the time of Minnie’s session for Regal—there were 492,000 blacks in Chicago; by 1960, the number had reached 813,000. Most of these new residents had come from the South, and many were potential purchasers of blues records. Ninety percent of US blacks lived in the South in 1900, but by 1960 only sixty percent still lived there. This move from South to North was accompanied by a simultaneous move from rural areas to cities. In 1900, approximately seventy-five percent of southern blacks lived in rural areas, but by 1960 only twenty-five percent lived in rural areas.3 One of the most typical migration paths was from New Orleans through the Mississippi Delta to Memphis and then on to Chicago, precisely the path that Minnie may have followed if she were indeed born in Algiers, Louisiana. Some Minnie followed, while some followed Minnie.
Chicago was by no means “the land of the free,” however. In 1917, after the East St. Louis riot, a number of black Chicagoans armed themselves against the possibility of a similar event taking place in Chicago, and a race riot did occur two years later. While the spark that set it off was an incident at a beach, the riot actually developed amid a series of home bombings aimed at blacks who had moved into the ever-expanding ghetto between 35th and 63rd, Lake Michigan and State Street. Thirty-eight lives were lost during the riot itself.4
Economically, conditions were also far from ideal. By 1930, when the Depression was making life tough on the white masses as well as the black, blacks held only nine percent of the manual labor jobs and two percent of what sociologists Drake and Cayton, in their classic study of Chicago’s black community, called “good” jobs: professional, managerial, clerical.5 In northern cities like Chicago, white workers often protested the hiring of blacks in their plants, but the situation was never as hopeless as in the South. For example, it was in Chicago that the garment workers’ union was able to organize the same black women who had been used as strikebreakers against them in a 1917 labor action.6
Thus, if the Chicago Defender never tired of exhorting southern blacks to flee the South and come north, it was because the possiblility of just such hopeful actions was far higher in the North. In spite of the level of discrimination in Chicago, compared to the the rural South, it was an economic oasis. In Chicago the black median wage in 1949 was $1919; in Mississippi it was $439.7 While men usually led the migratory way to industrial cities like Pittsburgh and Detroit, “Chicago, with its more diversified female occupational structure, [also] attracted single women and wives.”8 Drawing blacks to Chicago were jobs for males in the stockyards, the meatpacking plants, the steel mills, and the foundries. Jobs for women—and men—could be found in the hundreds