The forgotten queen

Was Memphis Minnie the mother of electric blues guitarists?

by JoBeth Briton

Of all the great pre-war blues musicians whose music was rediscovered by British boy bands in the '60s and turned into a new kind of rock and roll, only one was a woman. Big Bill Broonzy spoke for the rest of her peers when he declared that Memphis Minnie could "pick a guitar and sing as good as any man I've ever heard." But just like the phrase that almost every girl who's ever thrown a sandlot football in a picture-perfect arc has heard -- "She throws pretty good for a girl" -- the language obscured the truth.

The truth is that Memphis Minnie was a phenomenal pioneering musician who moved beyond intricate blues fingerpicking and phrasing to playing ferocious stand-up electric guitar live on stage in Chicago at least one year before Muddy Waters is reported to have begun playing electric. And that was five years before Muddy's first big electric blues single, "I Can't Be Satisfied"/"I Feel like Going Home," was released on Chess Records (in 1948), a watershed moment in the history of American music. The truth is that Memphis was never recorded playing guitar that way.

This June marks the centennial birthday of Memphis Minnie in the town of Algiers, Louisiana, which sits in the mouth of the Mississippi River just across from the old slave docks of New Orleans. Born the first of 13 children to sharecropping Baptist farmers of African lineage, Memphis came into the world as Lizzie Douglas, but everyone called her Kid, just plain, androgynous, anonymous-sounding Kid. But Kid was never invisible.

By the time she was seven, her family had relocated to a small community called Walls on the edge of the Delta near Memphis. One year later, young Kid had started running away with her guitar to Beale Street in Memphis. High life and low life, business -- legal and illegal -- and music, great music. Beale Street offered Kid a vision of what she could be. The fact that her parents paid for the guitar she took with her shows that she was lucky enough to be recognized for what she was, by her own people, at a tender age.

After a stint touring the South with a circus she'd joined in 1917, Memphis became even more serious about her music. A peripatetic soul by nature, she went down to the Bedford Plantation in Mississippi and spent five or six years woodshedding with the young guitar and mandolin player Willie Brown, who'd been a one-time partner to both Charley Patton and Robert Johnson. Although some people have speculated that Memphis's idiosyncratic habit of restricting herself to three frets on her guitar bespoke some sort of limit to her musical ability, that isn't the picture provided by Willie Moore, a guitarist who sometimes played with Memphis and Brown as a trio.

"Wasn't nothing he could teach her," Moore said of the relationship between Memphis and her mentor Brown. "Everything Willie Brown could play, she could play, and then she could play some things he couldn't play." Throughout her life -- whether playing with Brown, with her first husband, Kansas Joe (Joe McCoy), or with her second, Little Son Joe (Ernest Lawler), all accomplished guitar players -- Memphis always played lead, her intricately fingerpicked lines and fills working on top of her partner's counterpoint or harmony.

Not only did Memphis write most of the more than 200 sides she recorded during her career, she also wrote songs for other outstanding blues musicians, including Robert Nighthawk. Her virtuosity as an instrumentalist was matched by her brilliance and subtlety as a lyricist; with the keen mind of a poet, she transmuted the facts of life in the Delta and beyond into contemplations of identity, desire, and power.

By the late '20s, when Memphis left the Bedford Plantation, she knew where she needed to go: Chicago. Among her peers in the all-male bastion of great Chicago blues musicians -- Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy, Sunnyland Slim, Jimmy Rogers, Muddy Waters, and others -- she was both admired and resented.

"She was a great girl, but she was a woman," Muddy Waters once said of Memphis. "You know, in this business, I don't know how you is in your business, you can be a little evil when . . . [he laughs]. Yeah, you know, when a woman's out there doing the job, you're doing the job she's doing, it could get a little evil sometimes." (This after Muddy and other bluesmen had repeatedly lost to Memphis in music duels fought out in Chicago clubs where crowd applause decided the winner.)

When most blues guitarists were still performing from a chair, Memphis began standing up, with her guitar slung down over her hips. She paid a lot of attention to new styles, and new instruments, too. So it should come as no surprise that she was one of the first to play electric guitar. What has remained obscure in the annals of music history is her pioneering command of the instrument.

Early in 1943, when poet/writer Langston Hughes saw Memphis play at the 230 Club, he was so overwhelmed by her literally electrifying show that he devoted his entire column in the January 9 Chicago Defender to her: " . . . Memphis Minnie . . . beats out blues on an electric guitar. . . . She grabs the microphone and yells, `Hey now!' Then she hits a few deep chords at random, leans forward ever so slightly on her guitar, bows her head and begins to beat out . . . a rhythm so contagious that often it makes the crowd holler out loud. . . . All these things cry through the strings on Memphis Minnie's electric guitar, amplified to machine proportions -- a musical version of electric welders plus a rolling mill."

This impressive account shows that Memphis was playing electric guitar with a ferocious power that was virtually unparalleled at the time. The work of other early electric-guitar players -- such as T-Bone Walker and Eddie Durham of Texas, who had been playing electric since the '30s -- appears to have been far more restrained and jazzlike than the Memphis Minnie whom Langston Hughes saw. Unfortunately, no vinyl exists to verify what she surely was: the foremother of electric blues-based rock guitar.

Why Memphis Minnie has never acclaimed as such is open to speculation, but it surely has something to do with a man named Lester Melrose.

Melrose, the impresario who oversaw everything (from talent scouting to producing to contracts) at many of the major "race records" labels (with the exception of Decca) in the '30s and '40s, had Memphis virtually under his thumb for most of her recording career. Although Memphis and her first husband/music partner recorded some sides for Decca in 1934 and '35, most of her work was done in association with Melrose -- he of the "Melrose Sound," also known as "the Bluebird Beat," "the Melrose Mess," and "the Melrose Machine." Just as he did with everyone else in his "stable" of artists, Melrose recorded Memphis with a formulaic house band.

In addition to his leanings toward "sophisticated" -- i.e., assembly line -- blues recordings, Melrose had no vision with regard to Memphis Minnie's potential. Neither he nor anyone else ever recorded her when she was playing hard-driving electric guitar. Worse, her last recording dates in the '50s, as the vinyl results attest, were failed efforts to stay commercially viable within parameters that contravened her natural instincts and gifts. (Big mistake, Lester. You fumbled the ball, man.)

"She always would tell me that she'd been messed around in the music," Brewer Phillips, her late-career protégé, once related. "So I'd say, `How can they mess you around? She'd say, `They'll take your money.' And she'd always say, `You can learn to play, but don't let them take your money.' "

Memphis was as self-possessed a woman as has ever breathed; the stories about her legendary Blue Monday "cocktail parties," her drinking and gambling, her ability to defend herself with any weapon at hand, as well as the nurture and guidance that she gave to many young, aspiring musicians -- these are too numerous to repeat here. There were some things that in her own time not even Memphis Minnie could accomplish. But that was hardly her fault.

Dropped by her record label, Memphis returned home with Son Joe in 1958 to the town from which her stage name derived. The couple lived in poverty until Joe died in 1961; a disabling stroke kept Memphis confined to a wheelchair for the last 13 years of her life, which ended in August 1973. During those final years, she was taken care of by her beloved sister Daisy and received the occasional visitor who found time to come by and pay respect.