For example, much glamour was attached to the role of blues singer, regardless of how and where it was fulfilled. The wages of even the lower-paying music jobs were considerably in excess of the pitiful amounts paid to women in agriculture and domestic service or the lowest-level factory work open to poor and under-educated black women. In factory work, black women were often paid less than black men. And blues singing was far easier than back-breaking work like picking cotton.13 We will see that it was this latter task that Minnie would do anything to avoid. What made her so unusual was that she could do something.
Performance at picnics, suppers and juke joints also enabled her to establish an intimacy with her audience that the vaudeville stage made difficult. Further, Minnie wrote much of her own material. This not only enabled her to avoid the pressure and management of the often exploitative male songwriters, but it reinforced her own imaginative committment to her songs. She was also her own manager, a gratifying role for such an obviously independent woman. Finally, Minnie played the lead guitar of her partnerships and performed more lead and solo vocals than did her partners. She also released more single records than her partner(s) or husbands. All of these factors combined to make it possible for Minnie to assume a musical identity that before her time had been achieved mostly by males. And there is considerable evidence that Minnie was acutely aware of the unusual aspects of the life she chose to live.
THREE
SOUTHERN NIGHTS
I want to be the opening act between this planet and the sun.
—Jayne Cortez
When Woman with Guitar was first published, we wrote that Memphis Minnie’s family moved from Algiers, Louisiana, located right across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, to Walls, Mississippi, just outside Memphis, Tennessee. Visiting Walls for the first time, we wrote that nearly a century later, you could stand on the railroad tracks in Walls, and with your face turned to the west, look out over dusty farmlands that had changed little in the last hundred years. That the view to the east was dissimilar and a bit more modern gave you the eerie feeling that for just the moment of your standing there, you actually embodied, in a symbolic way to be sure, part of the history of Memphis Minnie. For the drama that began there and unfolded in Chicago and Memphis and all points in between, and that finally played itself out in Memphis, never freed itself from the critical crossing of the modern with the old, the city with the country, the urban with the rural. Within the nexus of these contradictory and opposing forces, and probably rarely at peace, Memphis Minnie sang her blues.
It is tempting to believe that Minnie had one idea in mind almost from the day she was born: to leave the farm and go to town, to leave the site of back-breaking labor and meager wages for the land of good times and loud music: Memphis, Tennessee. Decades later, after Memphis seemed no longer misty and far away, Chicago became the far-off land, and she soon conquered it as well. Indeed, the tension between her distaste for farm work and her desire for an active musician’s career may have been the prime source of energy that carried her through life. We would not be surprised to learn that the unconscious vicissitudes of these forces drew her back to Memphis from the North, again and again, just as they sent her north at the start, and just as they set her out on the road, time after time. But before we begin to follow the wayward path of these currents, let us go back to the beginning.
Was Minnie really born in Algiers (Orleans parish), Louisiana, on June 3, 1897, as we’ve always thought?1 Figures from the 1900 census suggest otherwise.2 In our case, they show Minnie in Tunica County in 1900, at around three or four years old. She is in Beat 3 in the east central part of the county, perhaps near Beaver Dam or Little Texas. Most interesting is the fact that her father, Abe Douglas, is said to be from Tennessee and her mother Gertrude is from Mississippi. A Tennessee father and a Mississippi mother, living in northern Mississippi in 1900, makes one wonder—considering they were farmers—what they would have been doing near New Orleans in 1897. We have no hard evidence for the Algiers connection, although the census figure does endorse 1897 as her birth year. Minnie claims to be from Algiers in one of her songs, and Daisy endorsed this, but she could have gotten her information from Minnie. On the other hand, the Douglas family did move around frequently and they could have just come from Louisiana prior to the 1900 census. Still, we believe the 1900 census data—and all known subsequent census data—offers the strongest evidence of Minnie’s birth place: Mississippi.
She was the oldest of the thirteen Douglas children. Daisy Douglas Johnson, Minnie’s only surviving sister and an important informant for this work, was the youngest.3 Minnie’s father was Abe Douglas and her mother was Gertrude Wells Douglas. Abe was a sharecropper all his life, and his level of education, as well as that of his wife, is unknown. There were nine children who grew to adulthood and four who died young. The brothers Willie, Leo, Miller and Jack all did “factory work,” while Edward worked for the city of Memphis and Hun was a minister. A sister, Dovie, died in 1941. Minnie’s given name was Lizzie Douglas, although the family always called her “Kid,” and “Kid” Douglas is how she was first known in the music world. “She never liked ‘Lizzie,’” Daisy said, “she never would use that name.” Ultimately, “Kid” Douglas became known to the world as “Memphis Minnie,” the name she used on nearly all of her records and in her personal and professional life as well. At home, she was still called “Kid,” but everyone in the world outside called her “Minnie” or “Memphis Minnie.” A few of her colleagues even referred to her as “Memphis.”
Daisy had heard that the family moved to Walls around 1904. But the 1910 census finds them in Tunica County, near Hollywood. Minnie, or Lizzie, is thirteen and is said to have some schooling. No one knows exactly how far Minnie got in school, but she was able to read and write.4 Minnie was a wild youngster who never took to the farming life, and she ran away from home at an early age. Her first guitar had been a Christmas present given to her in 1905, a significant event for a talented musician like Minnie. Indeed, such individuals frequently report that in their childhoods, they always had “music in their head,” and it is for precisely these people that the “first instrument” has such totemic significance.5 For Minnie, musical instruments only intensified her desire to leave home. She began to run away to Memphis’s Beale Street with some regularity. When times were tough and nickels and dimes were hard to find, she returned to the farm to live, but rarely to work.6 By the time the next census was taken in 1920, Minnie is gone from the nest and the nest itself has moved to Desoto County on the Tennessee border. The family is enumerated near Lake Cormorant rather than Walls, but Daisy, who was born in 1915, remembers Walls, so we must assume that shortly thereafter they did move to Walls.
Traveling with a show was one way to gain experience, and Minnie toured the South in the war years with a Ringling Brothers show she joined in Clarksdale, Mississippi.7 “She was a showman,” said James Watt, “a showman all the way. She’d stand up out of that chair, she’d take that guitar and put it all ‘cross her head and everywhere, you know.”8 Minnie was to become an expert and professional entertainer, but the lessons were not easily learned. A young girl in a traveling show needed more than psychic defenses, and this rugged way of life gave her valuable experience not only as a polished professional, but as a woman who could take care of herself. Johnny Shines recalled, “Any men fool with her she’d go for them right away. She didn’t take no foolishness off them. Guitar, pocket-knife, pistol, anything she get her hand on she’d use it; y’know Memphis Minnie used to be a hell-cat… . I never had no problem with her. I know others that did.”9
Echoes of this rugged life appear throughout Minnie’s songs, but her repertoire also presents a nearly opposite face. In spite of her aversion to farm life, many farm and rural images are also distributed liberally through her early pieces, and songs like Frankie Jean (That Trottin’ Fool), Sylvester and His Mule Blues, and Plymouth Rock Blues are steeped in the lore of the farm and farm life. The Douglas farm had Plymouth Rocks—chickens of all kinds, in fact—as well as hogs,