These demarcations are neither as linear nor as finely drawn as our sketch suggests, however, and last night’s Classic blues queen could easily be the morning’s country blues artist. Singers like Lottie Kimbrough (née Beaman), for example, performed in both styles, with either Classic or downhome accompaniment, and many 1930s as well as postwar performances also refuse to fit the molds we’ve created for them. Sara Martin was most frequently recorded in the early 1920s with a piano or small group accompaniment. Sylvester Weaver, a country blues guitarist, accompanied Sara Martin for several sessions and was hailed for pioneering this unusual combination of vaudeville-styled woman singer and country blues guitarist. Were these records country blues or classic vaudeville-style blues?
Looking at the accompaniment for Gertrude Perkins, recorded in Dallas in 1927, presents us with the same potential for contradiction. Perkins was accompanied by guitarist Coley Jones and Octave Gaspard on tuba. Was this city or country blues? Straining like this against these categories suggests the categories themselves obscure as much as they clarify. But it is important to understand these structures in order to understand how Minnie cracked them.
While the vaudeville-style blues singers were relatively sophisticated women singers who performed on the stage, the country blues artists tended to be unsophisticated males who accompanied themselves on acoustic guitars.4 These downhome musicians played for family and friends, at home or at parties, in juke joints or at picnics and suppers. Country blues performers tended to be semi-professionals who also farmed or performed other seasonal labor in the logging industry, levee camps, turpentine camps and similar places, but the most famous performers were often able to get by on their musical skills alone.
In many ways the ascendancy of country blues seemed progressive, and a new and younger audience was quick to respond to these highly rhythmic songs. The self-accompanied country blues performer embodied a new autonomy, and for many rural record buyers, country blues on record, as well as in person, was a fascinating step into the future. This was an exciting dance music, and the couple and individual dances that listeners did to blues accompaniment represented greater individualism for blacks than the square dances that were done to pre-blues forms.5
That most of the guitar-playing country blues artists on record were male is of critical importance, however, for such “progress” often contains a secret: the oppression and exploitation of women. If we are inspired by Fourier’s notion that the general index of emancipation is the level of the emancipation of women, we are confronted with the fact that just such moments as the “ascendancy” of country blues need reevaluation. Have we not already seen that there is major resistance to calling the period of female-dominated blues recording Classic, even though “Classic” satisfies the requirements of many defininitions of the term and is used to describe the period that was, in fact, the vocal blues’ first heyday on record? In contrast, the vintage years of recorded (male) country blues, 1927–1933, are usually considered the “prime” years of blues recording. For example, in 1965 one critic gloated that country blues 78s were finally being recognized as valuable, while the previously highly esteemed Classic blues of the vaudeville-influenced blueswomen were now being devalued.6
From one perspective, then, what had happened to the vaudeville blueswomen was not at all unusual. To hire black men to fill jobs once held by black women was consistent with sexist practices of the day and upheld the mainstream cultural notions that a woman’s place was in the home, that men were better than women at most jobs, and that it was a man’s role to work for a living for the rest of “his” family. Further, it was a pact between males—songwriter/bandleader Perry Bradford and Okeh’s Fred Hager—that allowed Mamie Smith to make her first record. While this view should not be allowed to obscure the fact that Bradford and Smith were a black team that achieved an important victory for black culture, the very fact that Smith’s recording sessions had to be negotiated by Bradford supports the thesis of the pact between two males with a woman as its object.
Add to this the fact that the Classic blueswomen were being paid far more than the country bluesmen, and the former’s disappearance from record is more easily understood. For example, at the beginning of her career with Columbia, Bessie Smith was paid $125 per usable side, the same amount she was paid during her last year with Columbia; but at her peak, she was receiving $200 per usable side. Meanwhile, Columbia’s male country blues “stars” like Peg Leg Howell or Barbecue Bob received only $15 per side. Minnie and Joe were probably paid at this latter rate for their first Columbia sides, and it’s doubly ironic that Minnie, who was so often said to “play like a man” was also paid like a man in this atypical case where women were paid more than men.7
But it would be a mistake to think that the men replaced the women, or that country blues replaced the Classic blues. The Depression not only ended many vaudeville blues careers—just as it ended vaudeville—but it put the same final stamp on the livelihood of countless male country blues artists as well. When the economic situation began to improve, and blues singers began to return to the studios, neither Classic blues singers nor country blues artists would last very long. The artists who survived would be those of both sexes who had sufficiently urbanized their styles, or who could demonstrate the greatest affinity for the new swing-influenced rhythms.8
Minnie was a pioneer at precisely the time and place that all of these forces coalesced. Before attempting to understand how she survived the Depression, we must first understand how she faced it, as a self-accompanied guitarist playing country blues. Almost by default, “women’s blues” has come to denote Classic, vaudeville-style blues. Minnie’s fame thus fell into the gap created by the prominence of the vaudeville blues singers on one side and the progressive aspects of the male country blues stylists on the other. A number of women refused the Classic designation by virtue of their having seized some of the privileges customarily reserved for men. To “play as good as any man” also meant to be doing what men were supposed to be doing and what women were not supposed to be doing, for such a music style was largely confined to men, or so it has been thought. But guitar-playing women like Minnie (yes, there were others) constituted an effective link that served to give female blues singing a continuity in its leanest years. Even their number is impressive.
Many of these singers are known to us through their phonograph records: The rough-voiced Mattie Delaney; Ethel McCoy; Rosa Lee Hill, Precious Bryant, all of these women accompanied themselves on guitar, as did the obscure Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley, and as did Jessie Mae Hemphill, who died in 2006. Other female instrumentalists never recorded, and it was all too easy to read a hint or two about their existence without its ever registering in one’s consciousness. For example, one writer noted that Teddy Darby had “fooled around with his mother’s [guitar] … but had made slight progress on it at that time.”9 Nothing more is known about the guitar talents of Darby’s mother, and this isn’t the only enticing reference of this kind. McKinley James, Robert Shaw, Louis Myers, J. B. Lenoir, and Tommie Lee Russell all had guitar-playing mothers.10 In sum, while dozens of female performers gained a reputation as blues singers on the vaudeville stage in the early twenties, the later twenties saw the rise in popularity of the self-accompanied, downhome male blues singer. Hidden by this schematic, however, were a number of women who performed in a rural style and accompanied themselves on guitar. How well hidden they were can be seen from this comment by bluesman James Watt, when asked about Minnie’s same-sex competitors. “There was only Memphis Minnie. There wasn’t too many girl blues singers out.”11
Thus, there was a significant current of women country blues performers, hidden from us through the traditional manipulation of “opposing” categories like