The Douglas farm was like thousands of farms all over the South, with a small-town address but miles from the nearest gas station. Walls is only what Daisy’s son Lee called “a wide spot in the road.” It had a cotton gin, but Daisy’s comments showed how the importance of rural areas like Walls had shifted with the passing years. “The IC train used to run right through there, the Illinois Central, and it stopped in Walls. It went on through Tunica, Lakeview, Robinsonville, Clarksdale, below there— Mound Bayou. Right through the Delta. But they don’t have no train run down there now. They stopped that train fifteen years ago or more.”11
Daisy Johnson had rattled off the stops as if they came straight from the Illinois Central timetable. The Memphis-to-Vicksburg route was covered by the IC’s “Delta Express” and “The Planter,” with stops at Lake Cormorant, Robinsonville, Hollywood, Tunica, Clayton, Dundee, Lula, Coahoma, Clarksdale, Alligator, Mound Bayou, Merigold, Cleveland and smaller stops in between. Hollywood, Mississippi, would soon become a stop-on-request-only station, as Walls had been for a number of years. But the train traveled north and south just east of the Mississippi River, through Delta towns that were rich in blues history. Lake Cormorant hosted Willie Brown and Memphis Minnie, and decades later, it was the site of the famous Library of Congress session where Son House, Fiddlin’ Joe Martin, and Willie Brown were recorded. Muddy Waters sang of Dundee for the Library of Congress in his Burr Clover Blues, and Gus Cannon and his Jug Stompers recorded Hollywood Rag. Clarksdale was the site of the Afro-American Hospital where the dying Bessie Smith was taken after her grisly road accident. The hospital is now the Riverside Hotel where many a blues singer has passed the night. Robert Johnson was a regular in the Robinsonville area, and Charlie Patton sang of Lula in his Dry Well Blues. Patton, Johnson, Son House and countless others traveled through Merigold, Tunica, and so many similar towns that anyone familiar with Delta blues repertoires hears the same towns mentioned a hundred times in the songs. Our dreams are full of the rich textures of the names’ magical ferment. Every wide spot in the road was a milepost of the blues’ evolution.
But Minnie didn’t care much for the wide spot on Highway 61, not when Beale Street was so close. What was it about Beale Street that drew so many rural dwellers to Memphis? Blacks were leaving the rural South in droves, and many were migrating out of the South entirely, some to Chicago, some to Detroit and other large cities of the North. But many rural blacks traveled shorter migratory routes and landed in the large cities of the South: Birmingham, Atlanta, New Orleans or Memphis. While one of the chief motivations for rural blacks to move to the urban areas was greater economic opportunity, discriminatory activities still held sway in these cities of the deep South. For example, while the Negro Urban Leagues in Kansas City, Baltimore and Louisville helped Negro mechanics organize for the first time, they ran into trouble in Memphis. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) denounced the Memphis mechanics’ association as “communistic,” and the league was forced to abandon its labor activities, lest they be cut off from community-chest funding.12
Other racist practices guaranteed that black children would receive a poor education. Schools for blacks opened and closed in synchrony with planting and harvesting, and when all was said and done, many black children went to school only three months a year.13 No aspect of everyday life was free of racist taint. For example, Lena Horne’s scenes were cut out of Stormy Weather and Until the Clouds Roll By, and Annie Get Your Gun was banned in 1947 because the part of a railroad conductor was played by a black.14 It was amid this atmosphere that the black citizens of Memphis carried on their affairs.
Memphis had always had a large black population, and its history has been a colorful one. Indeed, the violence along the infamous black thoroughfare of Beale Street led to Memphis being called “the murder capitol of the world.”15As Will Shade of the Memphis Jug Band recalled,
You could walk down the street in days of 1900 and like that and you could find a man wit’ throat cut from y’ear to y’ear. Also you could find people layin’ dead wit’ not their throat cut, money took and everything in their pockets, everything took out of their pockets and thrown outside the house. Sometimes you find them with no clothes on and all such as that. Sometimes you could find them throwed out of winders and so forth, here on Beale Street. Sportin’ class o’ women runnin’ up and down the street all night long … git knocked in the head with bricks and hatchets and hammers—pocket knives, razors and so forth like that.16
Such accounts illuminate one aspect of black Memphis life among the lower classes, but there is another side to the story. Diurnal Beale Street was also the focus for the most mundane activities of everyday living, and not simply gambling, drugs and prostitution; thus, in among the clubs and dives were the doctors’ offices, grocery stores and insurance companies one finds in every neighborhood.
But Memphis’s, and Beale Street’s main claim to fame was its music, and the most famous name in Memphis music was composer/bandleader W. C. Handy. Handy was born in Alabama, but his path to fame began in Memphis in 1909 on the eve of Boss Crump’s election as mayor. Club-owner/politico Jim Mulcahy hired Handy to play for Crump. Mulcahy was the most recent proprietor of the Panama Club at Fourth and Beale—its first three owners had all died violent deaths—and he would be warmly regarded for his beneficent treatment of Memphis blacks during the Depression. “They spent money with me when they had it—how could I not feed them now?” he remarked. If these words have a familiar ring, we should remember that when Mulcahy did time in Atlanta on liquor charges, he became friends with radical labor leader Eugene Debs, and became a staunch supporter of Debsian ideals.17 Handy’s enticing Mr. Crump helped carry Boss Crump to victory. St. Louis Blues, Beale Street Blues, Make Me a Pallet on the Floor, Yellow Dog Blues, Hesitation Blues, these too were Handy numbers, but these carefully and formally composed pieces had only a little to do with the downhome blues, or country blues of our subject, Memphis Minnie. Nonetheless, Handy’s existence as a Memphis figure is an important aspect of the city’s musical history. As for his pieces, many people will recognize Mr. Crump, in its most popular guise, as Mama Don’t Allow No Easy Riders Here.
Memphis was also the site of the founding of the Theater Owner’s Booking Association in 1909. The TOBA gave many black musicians and entertainers an opportunity to play in dozens of locations throughout the eastern United States. Of course, blues artists on the TOBA circuit tended to be Classic blues singers like Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith, and their more vaude-villian counterparts. Blues guitarists like Minnie didn’t work the TOBA, although they did appear in various theaters, like the Indiana Theatre in Chicago. As these remarks make clear, much of Memphis’s blues fame derives from the more sophisticated blues of W. C. Handy and the vaudeville-oriented blues sung from the TOBA stage. Even pianist Memphis Slim was at pains to separate the classier sort of bluesmen, like himself, from the more raggedy guitarists who played in Church’s Park.18 And yet the Church’s Park singers pointed to the existence of a mighty blues current flowing rapidly along beneath the veneer established by W. C. Handy and the TOBA, a current not so much subterranean as unheralded, a current at home in the dives and joints along Beale.
Guitarists Frank Stokes and Furry Lewis, two participants in that current, both provided advice and inspiration to Minnie in her early days in Memphis. Minnie’s duets with Kansas Joe drew as much inspiration from the guitar teamwork of Frank Stokes and Dan Sane,19 who recorded as the Beale Street Sheiks, as from her own early “partnership” with Willie Brown. Jim Jackson was already popular by that time, and he could be seen playing in Church’s Park along with other musicians like the guitarist Robert Wilkins. Wilkins remembered that Minnie “was beginning to learn guitar and he was able to teach her a few things,”20