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percent of the servant work in Chicago.⁹

      With economic opportunities so constricted during the Depression, the fact that Minnie’s and Joe’s recording careers were nearly curtailed is no surprise. Minnie was always able to support herself with her music, and the vicissitudes of the Chicago industrial and service-oriented job market never affected her directly. On the one session that Minnie had amid the bleakness of 1933, however, Joe was nowhere to be seen.¹⁰ The first stylistic phase of Minnie’s career was coming to an end. In 1934 and 1935, she began to experiment with the new sounds that would carry her through the thirties and forties. But before renewing her contract with Vocalion (now under new management), she recorded nearly twenty sides for Decca, and eight sides for Victor’s Bluebird subsidiary. Thus, Minnie recorded for all three of the major race series labels of the 1930s. When the Depression began to ease in 1934, only Victor/Bluebird and the American Record Corporation (ARC) remained as powerful race contenders, but they were soon challenged by Decca, which began its race series in 1934. Blues and jazz were issued in the 7000 series, for which Decca charged a competitive 35 cents.¹¹ Bluebird was a dime-store label that Victor introduced to compete with the other 35-cent labels.¹²

      The Decca sides retained the flavor of Minnie’s rural-sounding duets, but they were slightly less intricate. As a soloist, her need to support her treble runs with her own bass line may have made complex passages more difficult, e.g., in Chickasaw Train Blues (Low Down Dirty Thing) or Keep It to Yourself, but the truth is that even with Joe—You Got to Move (You Ain’t Got to Move) or Hole in the Wall—the complicated interplay of the two guitars, so common in 1930–1932, was no longer in evidence. Yet the Decca sides especially, as well as the sides cut at the first Bluebird session of July 27, 1935, retained a downhome flavor that was absent from much of her 1930s recorded repertoire. It’s also worth noting that it was in the Decca days that “Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe” finally appeared on a record as an artist credit, instead of Vocalion’s insistent “Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie.”

      The ribald Decca session of January 10, 1935, was one of her most interesting, not only for the songs recorded—Dirty Mother for You, You Can’t Give It Away and the topical Sylvester and His Mule Blues—but for the accompaniment as well: this was the first outing in which Minnie was seriously accompanied by a piano. The pianist is yet to be agreed upon, although discographers Dixon and Godrich cite Jimmie Gordon, who was in the Decca studio the next day. As Minnie clearly says to the piano player, “Play it, Dennis,” and as the composer credits on the “Gospel Minnie” sides—made five days later in the same studio—are to “Dennis-McCoy” we suggest the piano player is not Jimmie Gordon, but rather a still unidentified pianist named Dennis.

      The “Gospel Minnie” sides are engaging, but Minnie never got religion before, during, or after recording them. Indeed, Minnie never went to church, and according to Brewer Phillips, the only time she was in a church was to hear a gospel group perform in Hughes, Arkansas.¹³ Her sister Daisy had never heard about the “Gospel Minnie” sides, although she was thrilled at their existence when we played them for her, saying, “She never told me about those.” Perhaps Minnie thought Daisy wouldn’t approve of such hypocritical treatment of gospel music, although there is a long and established history of blues singers doing a few gospel numbers, with or without “the feeling.”

      Perhaps Minnie was simply going along with Joe who recorded four sermons with singing that day (as Hallelujah Joe), but if that’s what she was doing, it’s the last time she did it. Minnie’s September 10, 1934, Squat It and Moaning the Blues, released on Decca 7146 and 7037, both issued as by “Memphis Minnie,” mark the last time she and Joe recorded together. The last record issued as by “Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe” was Decca 7038, the two-part You Got to Move (You Ain’t Got to Move), part 2 of which was cut on August 31, 1934. Joe’s reputed jealousy at Minnie’s fame and success is often given as the reason for their breakup. For example, Leadbitter has noted, “Joe had a hard time with such a popular wife, and they split up in 1935 or so.”¹⁴ However, no corroborating evidence has come to light to support this idea. Other sources confirm that he actually did become a preacher,¹⁵ and unlike Minnie he returned to the studio a second time to record four more Halleluhah Joe sermons. But in early 1937 Joe and the Harlem Hamfats cut a number called Hallelujah Joe Ain’t Preachin’ No More; so presumably his preaching career had ended.¹⁶

      Joe seemed to do better for himself at Decca, where his output was not overshadowed by Minnie’s like it was at Vocalion. He not only recorded solo pieces before and after the gospel sides, but he continued to record with the Harlem Hamfats jazz group through the rest of the decade.¹⁷ His stint with the Hamfats ended a few years later, and by 1940 we find him leading various washboard bands, recording as either Big Joe and His Rhythm or as Big Joe and His Washboard Band. The records from these sessions are all quite interesting and feature Robert Lee McCoy (later known as Robert Nighthawk) on harp or guitar, Amanda Sortier or Washboard Sam on washboard, Charlie McCoy on mandolin, and Joe on guitar. Most of the vocals were done by Joe, but Sortier sang one duet with him, and Harmon “Peetie Wheatstraw’s Buddy” Ray sang on several numbers.¹⁸ But Joe didn’t seem to be a regular part of the Chicago milieu in which most of the singers participated, and neither Jimmy Rogers or Johnny Shines ever met him. Even Ethel Douglas, who married Leo Douglas in 1921, couldn’t remember much about the quiet and retiring Joe McCoy, although he and Minnie had lived with Leo and Ethel in Walls.

      Joe McCoy died on January 28, 1950, of “spontaneous cerebral apoplexy due to hypertension heart disease” and was buried in Rest Vale Cemetary in Alsip, Illinois. His death certificate gave his occupation as “laborer,” although he’d been a professional musician for at least twenty-five years. The informant on the death certificate was Virginia McCoy, possibly his second wife who is said to have had two children by Joe. Her address is different than his, however, which was 4216 Calumet at the time of his death. Thus, Virginia McCoy may have been separated from Joe by 1950, or she may not have been his wife at all. Big Bill wrote that not even Minnie or his friends from the Harlem Hamfats attended the funeral,¹⁹ and for Memphis Slim, the funeral was an especially bitter occasion:

      Joe wrote this song, Why Don’t You Do Right?, and Irving Berlin presented this song at the Chicago Theatre, with Peggy Lee and all that thing. And at this particular time, Joe McCoy was laying in state at the Metropolitan Funeral Home, and we had to beg money to bury him. Boy, I’ll never forget that. I thought that was a damn shame. They had the headlines of the Chicago Theatre. Peggy Lee and Irving Berlin. And here’s the man that wrote it, and he told me he never get no money. That Lester Melrose. The “great” Lester Melrose. He stole all our money. And then went and had a accident and got paralyzed from the waist down. [Smirks] He had to go around in a wheelchair until he died, which wasn’t long, I don’t think, after that. But, you know, he took everybody’s money.²⁰

      Was Joe McCoy the man called Squirrel who Jimmy Rogers remembered as Minnie’s companion in the mid- to late 1930s? Rogers knew that Squirrel played guitar and recorded with Minnie, but he could take us no closer to Squirrel’s true identity. No other informant recognized the name. “They say she was kind of rough with him,” Rogers recalled.²¹

      As we’re coming to see, the image of Minnie as a rough customer rings true. “She chewed tobacco,” said Homesick James. “She kept it in her mouth all the time. Even when she was singing, she kept that tobacco in her mouth. She had a coffee cup, be singing, spit right in there, the spit-cup right over there. Hee, hee, hee. She did that seriously, man, and when she got through, she’d just pick it up and spit, man, she didn’t care.”²² Brewer Phillips used to pick up Minnie’s tobacco and snuff for her at the store, along with Wild Irish Rose and food for the evening meal. “She didn’t only chew tobacco, she dipped snuff. Her brand of snuff was this Copenhagen and her tobacco was Brown Mule. She didn’t smoke, though. She would get her a little twig and she would get the ends off, and dip it down in the snuff bottle and dip it down in her jaw. And the chewing tobacco, she’d put that in her jaw, and you know a lot of times, she’d be singing, she’d have that chewing tobacco in her jaw.”²³ By the time she came to Daisy’s house

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