Memphis Minnie
The Frank Driggs collection.
Memphis Minnie (born Lizzie Douglas, 1897-1973), considered “Queen of The Blues” (Oliver, 2001), was a blues guitarist singer and songwriter whose career spanned from the 1920s to the 1950s. Her legacy consists of over 200 recordings. Early recordings were completely unplugged, meaning she played a very cheap acoustic guitar as well as a banjo with a distinct style of picking. At age 13 she ran away from home to live in Memphis Tennessee and perform on the sidewalks of Beale Street (Oliver, 2001)).
After her and her second husband Kansas Joe McCoy were discovered by Columbia Records, they were very successful traveling the deep south and recording. “Bumblebee” was their biggest hit of which they recorded five different versions. They recorded sessions for Vocalion Label and Decca Records.
Later in her career during the 1940s, she switched to electric guitar and became a very successful fixture on the thriving Chicago blues nightclub scene with her third husband Little Son Joe (Ernest Lawlars). She is considered one of the first blues musicians to switch to an electric guitar (Absher, 2014, p.73). Her biggest electric guitar hit was “My Chauffeur Blues”, which played on all the juke boxes that were coming out at the time (Absher, 2014).
Memphis Minnie’s influence has reached many artists after her including Big Momma Thornton, Koko Taylor, Chuck Berry, The Rolling Stones and even Led Zeppelin who covered “When the Levee Breaks” a Kansas Joe McCoy/Memphis Minnie composition. Unfortunately, she died in poverty, however, the contemporary artist Bonnie Raitt paid for her headstone.
Absher, A. (2014). From South to South Side: Musicians in 1940s Chicago. In The Black Musician and the White City: Race and Music in Chicago, 1900-1967 (pp. 48-81). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv3znzb4.6
Oliver, P. (2001, January 01). Memphis Minnie. Grove Music Online. Ed. Retrieved 10 Apr. 2019, from http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo- 9781561592630-e-0000018374.