Like many blues singers, Minnie was, in her own words, a “downhome girl,” and while she would come to play in finer clubs, she was still willing to play for friends at home, or at a picnic, or even on the street. “She’d play anywhere,” Memphis Slim recalled. “I’m tellin’ you. She came in there from Mississippi playin’ around in the streets and different places and people’s houses and house parties and things, until she made Bumble Bee Blues, and then she [got famous and] came to Chicago.”23
Minnie babysat for future bluesman Eddie Taylor, with whose mother she had gone to school,24 but she wasn’t home enough to do much babysitting. She traveled through Texas with the circus, and she worked in Greenville, Mississippi, with trombonist Pee Wee Whittaker.25 When she wasn’t traveling, she was hanging out on Beale Street playing with various local musicians, from Joe McCoy or the Jed Davenport jug band to the Memphis Jug Band or the band led by Jack Kelly.
It was in these years when Minnie was still in her teens or twenties that she may have been the common-law wife of Will Weldon. For many years, blues aficionados thought that Will Weldon, who recorded with the Memphis Jug Band in the 1920s, was the same person as Casey Bill Weldon, who recorded with Minnie in the 1930s. New evidence (2013) shows that they were two different people. Will Weldon was born between 1904 and 1906 and died at an early age in 1934.26 One 78rpm record was issued under his name: Hitch Me to Your Buggy, and Drive Me Like a Mule and Turpentine Blues.27 The information that Minnie was in a relationship with Weldon before she met Kansas Joe apparently came from Mike Leadbitter via Daisy Douglas Johnson. “He was a member of the Memphis Jug Band and was a lot younger than Minnie,” Leadbitter reported. But neither Daisy nor her sister-in-law Ethel recognized his name in 1992. If Memphis Minnie was with a Weldon at this juncture in her career, it would likely have been Will Weldon, a documented resident of Memphis who better fits the description of being not only a jug band member but also “a lot younger than Minnie.”
Little detailed information about Casey Bill Weldon was available until recently. Big Bill wrote that Weldon was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in 1909. However, his death certificate and other records indicate that he was probably born in Plumerville, Arkansas, in 1901. But he maintained mysterious multiple identities, under William Weldon, Nathan Hammond and possibly other names, and at times gave Chanute, Kansas, as his birthplace and 1902 as his year of birth. In his recording of Way Down in Louisiana, he also sang “Memphis is my home,” and Big Joe Williams said that Casey Bill was from Brownsville, Tennessee, thus adding to the confusion with Will Weldon of Memphis. He emerged on record first as “Kansas City Bill Weldon” and later became “Casey Bill, the Hawaiian Guitar Wizard.” “Casey” was an expanded variation of “KC,” for Kansas City, and he seems to have been in and out of KC, where several brothers and sisters moved from Arkansas. He lived in Chicago for a few years after his brief but important recording career there (1935–1938); his movements subsequently became hard to trace, as he may have used different names, but he was reportedly in California and Detroit before returning to Kansas City, where he died in 1972.28
Even before Casey Bill was considered a contender for a role in Minnie’s life, many critics, including us, the authors, doubted whether the relationship even existed.29 Indeed, it may be that he and Minnie not only never married but never even met until their recording session together in 1935. It is noteworthy that in Georges Adins’s pioneering interview with Minnie and her family, the name Casey Bill Weldon was never mentioned. Casey Bill was at least a part-time participant in the Chicago music scene, but none of our informants knew him or linked him with Minnie. Big Bill wrote about both of them but never as a couple. According to at least one source, Minnie lived with a man called Squirrel in the mid- to late 1930s,30 and this may or may not have been Joe McCoy. It could also have been Casey Bill if he and Minnie did indeed have a relationship.
If the image of Minnie’s relationship with Weldon has melted away, a new and different image has come to replace it. Shortly after World War I, Minnie turned up at the Bedford plantation, just west of Lake Cormorant, not far from where the Douglas farm was counted in the 1920 census. This was where Willie Brown had lived since 1916,31 and it was with Brown that Minnie formed one of her early liaisons. When bluesman Willie Moore first saw Minnie, “Her and a boy was playin’ mandolin and a guitar together… . All of us called her ‘Kid’ Douglas.”32 Moore was already impressed with how superbly she played the guitar, even as a young girl: “She could make a guitar ‘talk’, say: ‘Fare thee well.’”33
Along with Willie Brown and Willie Moore, Minnie often played for white parties, either when W. C. Handy couldn’t make it down from Memphis, or when the party was too small to warrant his august presence. Minnie, like Brown, played popular material when she played for whites, and one of her favorite pieces was What Makes You Do Me Like You Do Do Do [sic],34 a piece also prized by Leadbelly. Minnie, Brown and Moore also played for local storekeepers who used their talents to attract black customers. Minnie always played lead when playing with Willie Brown, or with the three-guitar trio of Brown, Moore and herself. She also handled the vocal chores, although occasionally Brown sang too. Minnie was clearly Brown’s superior when it came to guitar skill, and Moore commented, “Wasn’t nothing he could teach her… . Everything Willie Brown could play, she could play, and then she could play some things he couldn’t play.” Minnie played with Brown around five or six years, during the time she lived in Bedford, but even in those days she was well known as a traveler—”she’d skip around every which a-way,” and by the late twenties, she had left the Bedford area to make her fortune elsewhere.35 This is our first view of Minnie as an exceptional performer, and it won’t be our last. Critics agree that her guitar skills were remarkable, and her guitar playing on the early When the Levee Breaks has been called the most rhythmically varied accompaniment in “Spanish” tuning. “Though fingerpicking, she plays with the speed and finesse of a flatpicker. The variety of her performance is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that it is basically confined to the first three frets.”36 Her recorded performances reveal the same sort of verbal creativity and agility as well. For example, for a Bumble Bee Slim song which became a blues standard, Sail On, Little Girl, Sail On, Minnie took the word “sailor” and made it a sexual figure in an innovative way, not used by other purveyors of the song or, indeed, by any other blues artist at all. The first and last verse were present in the original:
KEEP ON SAILING
Sail on, sail on, aww baby, sail on. (2x)
I don’t mind you sailing, but please don’t sail so long.
Ooh, boy(s), now don’t you want to ride with me. (2x)
I’m got the best sailor in this world you ever seen.
Going away, going away but I ain’t gonna stay. (2x)
‘Cause that sailor you got, I sees it each and every day.
Sail on, sail on, aww baby, sail on. (2x)
You gonna keep a-sailing till you find your mama gone.
We shall see many more examples of Minnie’s songs, but for the moment, let us return to her early years. Soon she teamed up with Joe McCoy in Memphis, and it was with McCoy that Minnie made many of her most exciting records. Joe McCoy was born in 1905, in Raymond, Mississippi, located in the southwestern part of the state, just west of Jackson and a bit north of Crystal Springs. His younger brother Charlie was born several years later, and he too recorded with Minnie. The McCoys were close to the Chatmans, who hailed from nearby Bolton, and who became the widely recorded and influential Mississippi Sheiks, a recording