Woman with Guitar - Paul Garon

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or magazine even reported as much as her age, birth date or home town. Not even Langston Hughes, an obvious admirer who wrote an evocative Defender review of a Minnie performance, bothered to gather specific details of her life. Her first published biographies, brief but significant, appear to have been published in French, in Dictionnaire du Jazz by Hugues Panassié and Madeleine Gautier (1954)1 and in Big Bill Blues (1955) by Big Bill Broonzy and Yannick Bruynoghe, when Minnie’s career was nearing its end. Onah Spencer submitted a one-page typewritten bio on Minnie as part of the Illinois Writers Project Negro Music Survey, dated August 1, 1939, but this apparently was never published until now. (see WPA Interview in appendices).

      While the lives, recordings and careers of blues artists both famous and obscure have been documented in obsessive detail over the past several decades, in Memphis Minnie’s day, blues artists weren’t accorded anywhere near this degree of biographical scrutiny. It was once rare to even see a photo or a news account of a black entertainer in the general daily press and popular magazines largely written by and for white communities. The class-conscious African American press promoted nationally successful black entertainers with a polished uptown image, such as Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Fats Waller, Nat “King” Cole, Louis Jordan, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots— not coincidentally the same acts, by and large, that came to enjoy some degree of crossover popularity with whites. Scant editorial coverage was allotted blues singers of the downhome southern or Chicago variety. But such papers were apparently happy to accept advertisements for records or club appearances by the likes of Minnie, Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Maceo and Tampa Red.

      In Minnie’s case, the primary print outlet was the Chicago Defender. During the 1920s the Defender was loaded with ads for records by blues artists ranging from Bessie Smith and Ida Cox to Charley Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson, often colorfully illustrated with drawings by white ad designers. Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe had the misfortune to begin recording just as the Depression was about to hit, resulting in a drastic cutback in record company advertising. So only a few of their records were advertised in the Defender (and some other black papers, including the New York Amsterdam News and the Baltimore Afro-American) in 1929–1930. After the Depression the record labels rarely advertised individual releases in newspapers any more, although record stores did often publish lists of the latest hits for sale in local papers. By the 1940s the national trade publication, Billboard, had become the major print medium for record label marketing (soon joined by Cash Box).

      The Memphis Minnie records that were advertised in the Defender in the 1940s were listed along with numerous other releases in ads placed by record stores, usually mail-order houses based in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, or New York. What the Defender did print, from at least 1941 on, were ads for Minnie’s Chicago club appearances at the Cotton Club, Martin’s Corner, Frost’s Corner, Joe’s Rendezvous Lounge, and other nightspots, sometimes augmented by short news blurbs and occasional photos promoting her appearances (such items probably coming as part of the sales packages offered advertisers). The ads appeared in the paper’s local edition but the national edition carried occasional news.

      News about Minnie was occasionally mentioned in other Defender reports, including her 1936 stint performing on an excursion boat, appearances in Columbus, Ohio, in 1937, and Ocala, Florida, in 1946, and a fete in her honor in Chicago in 1946.2

      The Columbus report also noted “She hails from Chicago’s radioland”—a rare reference to an intriguing but so far little-documented phase of Minnie’s career when she was broadcasting live on the popular Red Hot and Low Down program (which aired on WCFL, WJJD and WAAF at various times from at least 1932 to 1938 and again on WCFL in 1941–42, according to radio logs from the Chicago Tribune. (These stations offered a variety of general-interest programming; black-oriented stations were still some years away at this point.) Red Hot and Low Down is also mentioned in Onah Spencer’s 1939 notes on Minnie. The regular host of Red Hot and Low Down was Bob Hawk, who later gained national fame hosting quiz shows on the CBS radio network.3 Information on blues artists who appeared on the program is spotty, but another may have been Kokomo Arnold, who was advertised as an “Internationally Famous Radio and Decca Recording Artist” in a July 9, 1938 Defender ad. (Minnie also later performed on KFFA in Helena, Arkansas, and WDIA in Memphis, according to Brewer Phillips. See p. 108.)

      Minnie’s music was also featured in record reviews in the Defender and other papers, notably in “Rating the Records,” a column by the African-American poet and writer Frank Marshall Davis syndicated by the Associated Negro Press (ANP). Davis’s column, later headed “Keeping Up with the Discs,” also appeared in the Atlanta Daily World, Cleveland Call & Post, Baltimore Afro-American, Philadelphia Tribune, California Eagle, and other black newspapers. Davis reviewed a wide range of music, both black and white, and though blues may not have been his favorite genre, his knowledge of blues records seemed well grounded and he deemed blues important enough to include in regular fashion. He was reviewing Minnie’s records as early as the June 12, 1939, edition of the Daily World, praising Low Down Blues on Vocalion in a paragraph headed “Cellar Stuff” as “Another top-notch ‘race record’ … full of belly laughs.” In his August 21, 1941, column, printed in the Philadelphia Tribune, Davis wrote: “Memphis Minnie, who sings mean blues, gets her thumping rhythm going on the Okeh recording of Me and My Chauffeur Blues and Can’t Afford to Lose My Man. She shows good sense on the second side.” But in a November 1 piece in the Baltimore Afro-American he opined: “Memphis Minnie has done better than on her Okeh recording of In My Girlish Days and My Gage Is Going Up.”

      Oddly enough, another singer who used the name Memphis Minnie—Minnie Wallace, who recorded for Victor on September 23, 1929, accompanied by members of the Memphis Jug Band, followed by sessions for Vocalion in 1935—proved more newsworthy, to some publications, for writing a song about a convicted murderer. Wallace penned “Trigger Slim Blues” about a Memphis gunman, James Goodlin, whose crimes had achieved recent notoriety. Jimmie Gordon recorded the song for Decca on June 4, 1940. Reporters for the Memphis Press-Scimitar and Delta Democrat-Times who talked to Wallace published more biographical information about her (a preacher’s daughter, in Port Gibson, Mississippi, and a resident of Greenville before moving to Memphis) than anyone did about our Memphis Minnie at the time.4 Neither paper noted the existence of a more famous Memphis Minnie; if they knew of her at all, they may have assumed she and Minnie Wallace (who recorded only under her own name, never as Memphis Minnie) were the same. The name Memphis Minnie, as a character in plays, actually preceded its appearance on Memphis Minnie’s records.)5

      So it remained the tavern and the phonograph record that provided that the contexts for Minnie’s contemporary press coverage. The jukebox, a medium of both the tavern and the record, became the defining factor in Billboard’s approach to music. Whereas newspaper reviews were consumer-oriented, Billboard rated records in terms of their appeal to jukebox operators. And Minnie’s records were highly rated as likely to bring “coinage to the race locations.” She was even hailed as “the outstanding race blues singer of the day” in one review. Just to sample excerpts from a few reviews:

      Me and My Chauffeur Blues/Can’t Afford to Lose My Man: “In the race register, the blues singing of Memphis Minnie always makes for coin machine magic at the Harlem spots.” (January 30, 1943)

      Looking the World Over: “Operators servicing the out-and-out race business have a natural in Memphis Minnie’s Looking the World Over. The outstanding race singer of the day, Miss Minnie again impresses with her blues chant that tells how she sowed her wild oats, and now that she has had her fun is ready to settle down with her man.” (February 20, 1943)

      I’m So Glad/Mean Mistreater Blues: “It’s top in race shouting that Memphis Minnie delivers, singing it way deep down and phrasing it blue as the guitar and string bass beat out a throbbing rhythmic accompaniment for her own selections.” (May 3, 1947)

      Fish Man Blues: “An old hand at shouting out the backbiting race blues, Memphis Minnie stirs up plenty of excitement

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