Woman with Guitar. Paul Garon

for ARC in Jackson, Mississippi, on October 10, 1935, produced one unissued side, Sin and a Shame Blues. In those days, before he met Minnie, he lived with a woman named Ferdella at 227 12 Mulberry, in Memphis, and a year later, they moved to 124 W. Illinois, rear. Son was a laborer at the time, and Della worked as a domestic. Beyond 1937, however, we lose offical track of Son Joe until he reappears as Minnie’s husband in 1939. Various sources give Minnie and Son’s place of meeting as Memphis, but our first substantial glimpse of them as a couple is the February 3, 1939, recording session in Chicago. Shortly before, Minnie had moved from 230 E. Garfield Boulevard, where she had lived since the early thirties, to 5300 S. Prairie. Both addresses were in the heart of Chicago’s South Side.

      But for the abortive attempt in Jackson, this was Son’s first recording session, and all six of his pieces were issued, as were all four of Minnie’s. Son Joe’s Key to the World was even a tribute to the “woman I got now” who was “the key to the world,” Memphis Minnie. The decade closed with another Vocalion session three days later, where for reasons we’ll never know, Minnie reverted to her 1930 picking style and cut the downhome, rural-flavored Call the Fire Wagon. But the decade of her greatest popularity was yet to come.

      She made one final career decision at the end of the decade. The Social Security Act became law in 1935, and on December 6, 1939, Minnie applied for a Social Security account (335-16-7910). While she signed her name Minnie Lawlars, the clerk took it down as Minnie Douglas Lawlers. She gave her address as 1903 W. Madison Street, but then we are given pause: she gives her birth year as June 3, 1902, and her age as thirty-seven. She claims Walls, Mississippi, as her birthplace. But the census records of 1900 do not place her family in Walls, and the same records show Minnie as already three or four years old. We must presume Minnie lied about her age when applying for her Social Security card.