While Billboard’s reviews indicated sales potential for Minnie’s records, the discs never sold quite well enough for her to make the magazine’s charts for “race” or rhythm & blues records, which only began in October 1942 as the Harlem Hit Parade, leaving the earlier years of blues releases in uncharted territory.
In reconstructing blues history, researchers have relied heavily on the Defender and other black papers as well as Billboard when seeking what press coverage there was of blues artists. But with the advances in digitalization and microfilming, ads and record reviews have come to the light from a far-flung variety of daily and weekly local newspapers revealing that, while many readers may not have known Minnie’s music well if at all, a substantial general (primarily white) readership at least saw Minnie’s name in print.
In a series of ads that ran on the “Farm News” pages of a number of small weeklies in Texas and Oklahoma from August 1930 to May 1931, Brunswick branches in Dallas and Kansas City advertised more records by Minnie (on Vocalion) than by any other artist, black or white. Leroy Carr’s Vocalion discs were also regularly listed in the ads, which sometimes also advertised blues by Charley Jordan, Peetie Wheatstraw, Lee Green, Robert Wilkins, Lucille Bogan, Funny Paper Smith and others, along with gospel, pop, jazz and hillbilly releases and a picture of a Brunswick portable phonograph in every ad. These ads, in the Columbus (Texas) Colorado Citizen, the Hearne (Texas) Democrat, the Eufala (Oklahoma) Indian Journal and others, directed buyers simply to “Brunswick and Vocalion Dealers” and also solicited “Responsible Merchants” from areas where the company had no dealers.6
Advertising for records hit its lowest point during the remainder of the 1930s. But, with a boost from the wartime and early postwar economy, many music shops and other stores that carried records, including furniture dealers, jewelers, and department stores, actively advertised beginning in early 1945. Minnie’s Columbia releases were listed in store ads in such diverse periodicals as the Canton (Ohio) Repository, Naugatuck (Connecticut) Daily News, Council Bluffs (Iowa) Nonpareil, Las Cruces (New Mexico) Sun-News, Anniston (Alabama) Star and Charleston (West Virginia) Daily News. These stores listed a number of releases in each ad—pop, country, jazz and classical, with typically only a few blues, if any. Sometimes Minnie was the only blues artist listed in ads alongside Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and Harry James. The widespread coverage was evidence of Minnie’s status as a top Columbia artist and of the broad reach of Columbia’s major-label distribution. Columbia also included Minnie in ads promoting its roster in the entertainment trade magazine Variety in the 1940s.
Columbia and other labels also provided review copies to newspapers. While Billboard and the Associated Negro Press affiliates reviewed Minnie’s records most frequently, again her records occasionally popped up in the mainstream press, including some major outlets. Sometimes the releases were merely listed but some reviewers also offered opinions. The Chicago Tribune, no less, noted Cherry Ball and I Don’t Want No Woman I Have to Give My Money To by Kansas Joe & Memphis Minnie on November 30, 1930, along with other Vocalion and Brunswick records by Robert Wilkins, Joe Callicott and Lee Green.7 On November 14, 1935, the San Antonio Light recognized her Joe Louis Strut as an example of recent songs with topical themes.8 Minnie made the Tribune again on March 25, 1945, when critic Will Davidson enthused, “There is an art to appreciating good blues singing, but how can you miss the strange appeal of Minnie in When You Love Me or Love Come and Go?”9 Columbia evidently put extra promotional push behind this Okeh single as part of its first batch of releases upon the lifting of a record ban imposed by the American Federation of Musicians in 1942.10 It was also reviewed in the New York Herald Tribune (by music critic Paul Bowles, a noted novelist and composer), Times-Picayune, New Orleans States, Cleveland Plain Dealer and Greensboro Daily News.11
A scattering of ads and news items from 1946 help track Minnie’s touring that year, perhaps booked by Ferguson Brothers of Indianapolis, a leading agency in the representation of black entertainers of the era. Her appearance in Ocala, Florida, on June 8, was publicized in the black press, including the Defender and Pittsburgh Courier, while other ads appeared in local daily newspapers including the Augusta (Georgia) Chronicle, Kokomo (Indiana) Tribune and Danville (Virginia) Bee for concerts in those cities.12 In several ads, in Chicago and on tour dates, the billing was to “Memphis Minnie and Her Electric Guitar,” her amplified instrument already having been documented as a strong element of her live shows by Langston Hughes’s Defender review of her show at the 230 Club. An October 7, 1944, Martin’s Corner Defender ad touted her as “Master of Electric Guitar.” It raises the question of how much more powerful her live performance sound may have been than on her studio recordings; likewise, several 1946 tour dates advertised her with Leo Hines’s fourteen-piece orchestra, a configuration that was never captured in her recording sessions. Occasional ads and articles prove, or sometimes at least suggest, that she was also performing for white or mixed audiences, presumably on the excursion steamer mentioned in the Defender in 1936, at black and tan clubs, on her 1946 concert tour where separate white seating was advertised in Virginia, and at Schindler’s Theatre in Chicago in 1951, where she was advertised in the December 22 Defender as “Queen of the Blues.” A Chicago Tribune notice of November 9, 1952, indicates that the folk music movement was attuned to her music as well, as she took Big Bill Broonzy’s place at a “Come for to Sing” program at the Blue Note.
During her post-Columbia career Minnie’s presence in the press declined, although Billboard did continue to cover her releases on Regal, Checker and J.O.B., and her Chicago appearances were still advertised for a few years in the Defender. Just as her star was waning with the black American blues audience, European blues enthusiasts began writing about her. Georges Adins from Belgium corresponded with her prior to visiting her in Memphis in 1962, resulting in a 1963 article in R and B Panorama. He, along with Big Bill Broonzy and Yannick Bruynoghe, may have supplied Hugues Panassié with information for the Memphis Minnie entry in Dictionnaire du Jazz in 1954. Adins’s article and a Mike Leadbitter piece in the British journal Blues Unlimited provided much of the framework for Minnie’s biography as we know it.
In the United States, jazz critic Leonard Feather, a British transplant, included a short entry on Minnie in the New Edition of the Encyclopedia of Jazz in 1960 (after omitting her from the first edition) but it seems entirely based on Broonzy’s book. Following Minnie’s stroke and retirement there was little written about her in the American press in the 1960s, although on May 25, 1968, her hometown Memphis Commercial Appeal reported on a gathering organized in her honor by local aficionado Harry Godwin at the nursing home where Minnie resided (see p. 139).
This sampling of Memphis Minnie in the press represents only what a few blues researchers have found over the years along with recent results of digital searches of newspaper archives on genealogy web sites. Undoubtedly as more and more newspapers are microfilmed and digitized, there will be more to discover about Memphis Minnie and her music. But with what we already know we can better appreciate the broader national scope of her fame and her importance, and the special appeal of a remarkable “Woman with Guitar.”
—Jim O’Neal, January 2014
(Thanks to Rob Ford, Robert Pruter, Scott Dirks and Frank Hoffman’s Jazz Advertised in the Negro Press for information on articles and ads, and to Elin Peltz for Library of Congress copyright research. Thanks also to Vicente P. Zumel for research assistance.)
ONE
THE HEROINE
If women remain passive, I think there is little hope for survival of life on this earth.
—Leonora