A bit of black history month blues: Memphis Minnie

[the_future_modernes]

So I have been remiss in posting blues music, have i not been? Sorry. Let me begin to redress this balance. let me introduce ya'll to Blues Guitar Legend Memphis Minnie. The guitar work on Crazy Cryi' Blues is my favourite of the songs of hers that I've heard so far.


'Crazy Cryin' Blues' MEMPHIS MINNIE (1931) Memphis Blues Guitar Legend

Memphis Minnie: Guitar Queen by Hobemian records is an absolutely SPLENDID article about her music and influence. If you never read a damn thing else in this post, read you this.

Why has this musician who recorded over two hundred sides and was well-loved by the Black blues audiences of the '30s and '40s been comparatively ignored by later, whiter audiences? Perhaps it's because Memphis Minnie doesn't fit the myth of the young, tragic, haunted blues man and she is too complex of a character to be easily marketed. She shaped a life very different from the limited possibilities offered to the women of her time. She lived a long life, was at her best in middle age, and would spit tobacco wearing a chiffon ball gown. Memphis Minnie's music remained popular over two decades because it was lyrically and instrumentally in tune with the lives of Black Americans. It remains vital and influential today because of her inventive, rhythmic guitar playing and her songs, which capture people and events and bring them to life across the years.

Starting in 1929, her records lead us through twenty years of recorded blues and illustrate her life, as she moved from the rural South to urban Chicago. Musically there were three basic phases to her style: the duet years with Kansas Joe, the "Melrose" band sound of the late thirties and early forties, and her later electric playing. She was always a finger picker, and played in Spanish (DGDGBD), in open D (DADF#AD) and standard tunings, often using a capo. For guitar players, the first part of her career is definitely the most inspiring, as her inventive variations make masterpieces of tunes like "When The Levee Breaks"(1930) or "Let's Go To Town"(1931). In terms of her influence on the development of blues, she was an important player in the Chicago clubs during the '40s when musicians like Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rodgers and Johnny Shines, were coming up. MORE

When The Levee Breaks - MEMPHIS MINNIE (1929) Memphis Blues Guitar Legend

Wikipedia sez:

Memphis Minnie (June 3, 1897 – August 6, 1973^[1]) was an American blues guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter. She was the only female blues artist considered a match to male contemporaries as both a singer and an instrumentalist.^[2]

Born Lizzie Douglas in Algiers, Louisiana, Minnie was one of the most influential and pioneering female blues musicians and guitarists of all time.^[1] She recorded for forty years, almost unheard of for any woman in show business at the time and unique among female blues artists. A flamboyant character who wore bracelets made of silver dollars, she was a very popular blues recording artist from the early Depression years through World War II. One of the first generation of blues artists to take up the electric guitar, in 1942, she combined her Louisiana-country roots with Memphis blues to produce her own unique country-blues sound; along with Big Bill Broonzyand Tampa Red, she took country blues into electric urban blues, paving the way for Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, Little Walter, and Jimmy Rogers to travel from the small towns of the south to the big cities of the north.MORE

She was a multi-instrumentalist, with Guitar, electric guitar, bass, banjo, drums under her belt.


'Pickin' The Blues' MEMPHIS MINNIE (1929) Memphis Blues Guitar Legend

Trail of the Hellhound points out that:

During the 1930s, Minnie moved to Chicago where she set the musical style by taking up bass and drum accompaniment, anticipating the sound of the 1950s Chicago blues. After her breakup with Kansas Joe, Minnie married Ernest Lawlars, known as "Little Son Joe," and continued to record into the early 1950s. Poor health prompted her to return to Memphis and forsake the musician's life in 1958. Memphis Minnie was the greatest female country blues singer, and the popularity of her songs made her one of the blues most influential artists.MORE

Memphis Minnie - Kissing In The Dark

Memphis Minnie - Me And My Chauffeur Blues