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Woman with Guitar. Paul Garon
Читать онлайн.Название Woman with Guitar
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780872868533
Автор произведения Paul Garon
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Minnie and Joe met sometime in the 1920s, and they played on the Memphis streets until the pair was discovered by a Columbia scout, playing in a Beale Street barbershop for dimes.38 Their first recording session was arranged, and in the summer of 1929, they traveled to New York to record for Columbia. Their first session for Vocalion took place on February 20, 1930, and they were married the same day. The marriage license, from Shelby County, was discovered by assiduous blues researcher Jim O’Neal, and it identifies the couple as “Kansas Joe McCoy” and “Minnie Douglas.”
Minnie also had numerous informal liaisons. Fiddlin’ Joe Martin, Willie Brown, perhaps Blind John Davis, possibly Homesick James, and even Peter Chatman, Sr. (father of Peter Chatman, also known as Memphis Slim) have all been linked with Minnie. About the latter, Sunnyland Slim commented, “I met her, I met Minnie … around ‘25, ‘27 in there… . Memphis Slim’s daddy was really in love with her, see he was running through the country trying to do everything he could, trying to keep her, you know,” and according to Memphis Slim, his father had been instrumental in bringing Minnie to Chicago.39
When Johnny Shines came upon Minnie in Memphis, she was already with Joe McCoy. “I met Minnie the first time in 1928 or 1929. She and Joe and [his brother] Charlie was all in Memphis. They knew this fellow that kind of ran something like an open house, and they were just there playing and people buying booze and stuff like that for ‘em. It was in North Memphis.” For Shines this was ultimately a crucial meeting. “It was an influence because I liked what I heard, and I’d never heard anything like it before. I played a couple of her songs myself. Bumble Bee Blues, and something else I used to play, Black Rat.”40
One of the songs that Shines remembered—Bumble Bee— was recorded at Minnie and Joe’s first session. They cut six sides for Columbia in 1929, accompanying themselves on guitar and performing vocals in various combinations. The first coupling to be released, That Will Be Alright and When the Levee Breaks, had vocals by Joe alone. It was scheduled for release in early August and first appeared in the Columbia Supplement catalog for late September. Two months later, Frisco Town and Goin’ Back to Texas were released, marking Minnie’s first vocal appearance on a record. She soloed on Frisco Town and shared vocals with Joe on Goin’ Back to Texas. Columbia waited until mid-August of 1930 to release the final two numbers, Bumble Bee and I Want That. The latter song was sung by Joe, while Bumble Bee, sung by Minnie, became one of the best known songs of the period.
Regardless of who performed the vocal, all of the Columbia sides were labeled as by “Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie”; Minnie would keep her nom de disque throughout her life, both on record and off, but Joe stopped recording as Kansas Joe at the end of 1935. From what Daisy and Ethel knew, a Columbia A&R man had named Minnie and Joe “Memphis Minnie” and “Kansas Joe.”41 It would not be the only time white record company personnel gave blues singers their pseudonyms, and Sunnyland Slim recalled that he met Minnie back in the late 1920s, back before a white man gave him the name “Sunnyland.”42
It has also been suggested that Minnie’s name derived from Cab Calloway’s famous piece, Minnie the Moocher, but Cab’s tune dates from 1931. In his autobiography, Calloway notes that his composition was inspired by the melody of St. James Infirmary and by two torch songs, Willie the Weeper and Minnie the Mermaid,43 but the latter song was from 1930, again too late to have inspired Minnie’s pseudonym.
Others have suggested that the popularity of Walt Disney’s Minnie Mouse was at the root of Minnie’s pseudonym.44 There is no evidence to support this idea either, but the character made her first appearance, carrying a guitar case, in the Mickey Mouse cartoon “Steamboat Willie” in 1928. But the very existence of Minnie the Mermaid, Minnie Mouse and Minnie the Moocher all suggest that between the mouse and the mermaid, the name “Minnie” was sufficiently in vogue in 1929 to strike the fancy of either “Kid” Douglas or a Columbia A&R man.
It was on July 31, 1929, that the New York Amsterdam News published the first ad for a Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie record, That Will Be Alright on Columbia (recorded on June 18). (The same ad appeared in the Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier on August 3.) But the earliest appearance of the name Memphis Minnie in newspaper articles may have been in notices about two plays, It Is Love (1927) and Corporal Eagen: The Sensational Comedy of the American Rookie (1929). These references were printed not in the black press, but in mainstream daily and weekly newspapers. It Is Love, by playwright Martin Brown, was submitted for copyright on June 24, 1925, under the title Praying Curve, with a cast of characters including a prostitute named Memphis Minnie. The play was reviewed in the January 5, 1927, edition of the Bridgeport Telegram, with the cast including Grace Huff in the role of Memphis Minnie.
Corporal Eagen was presented widely. In a minstrel section of the play, between acts, white men played the “high brown” roles of the “Dark Town Shuffling Gals,” which included characters with the names Memphis Minnie, Birmingham Bertha, Kansas City Kitty, Louisville Lou, Hattie Green from Fort Worth, St. Louis Woman, Mammy, Flamin’ Mamie and San Francisco Sal— most derived from popular songs of the time, but some possibly concocted for the script. The first copyright on Corporal Eagen was filed on June 20, 1929, by Universal Producing Company of Fairfield, Iowa. The play’s debut was thus roughly concurrent with the release of the first Memphis Minnie record. The authors may have taken Minnie’s name from the record, but on the other hand, a Columbia exec may have noticed the name in this play, if not in the earlier Praying Curve.
“Kansas Joe,” meanwhile, was already a well established name decades before Wilbur McCoy acquired it. A report from Deadwood, South Dakota, in the Cleveland Leader of November 23, 1880, relayed the news that the notorious local outlaw Kansas Joe had been killed. Various newspapers subsequently published news items on a gambler, a hobo, an Arizona shootout victim, a character in a Wild West play, a soldier, a gentleman drinker, a miner, a boxer and even a Greyhound racing dog, all called Kansas Joe, prior to Minnie and Joe’s recording debut. Other nicknames or pseudonyms based on cities and states were also common, but the geographical naming of blues recording artists seems to have begun in earnest only with Mississippi John Hurt in 1928, then Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, and when Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie debuted, the trend grew, and continues to this day.
When the Levee Breaks, cut at their first session, reveals the breadth of experience from which Minnie and Joe drew their songs. The devastating effects of the 1927 flood were still more than a memory for many of Minnie and Joe’s listeners, and Minnie’s sister-in-law Ethel Douglas vividly remembers the flood:
When we lived on the levee, right near Walls, [Minnie] and her oldest brother lived with us then. The levee did break, and we left from there. I’m sure that’s what she was singing about “when the levee broke” ‘cause we were scared to death when it broke, 1927. The levee broke and the water come over. Me and my two little children left and went to Walls, up on the hill there. “Kid” and them, they come on to town. When the water went down, we went back.45
The floodwaters left scars upon the land and upon the heart, but the blues is a technique of psychic mastery. When the Levee Breaks was not so much a cry of pain as an announcement of a new beginning, even in its sadness.
Minnie and Joe returned to the Columbia studio a second day to record two pieces, both of which featured Joe’s