Memphis Minnie, Guitar Legend Spotlight

That’s right, guys, women get the blues, too! Here’s a short look at one of the greatest all-time female blues artists.

Lizzie Douglas (June 3, 1897 – August 6, 1973), known as Memphis Minnie, was a blues guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter whose recording career lasted for over three decades. She recorded around 200 songs, some of the best known being “Bumble Bee,” “Nothing in Rambling,” and “Me and My Chauffeur Blues”. I have known about Memphis Minnie, but I admit that I was unfamiliar with her songs, so now I come to find out that the song “When The Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin was written and recorded by Memphis Minnie and her husband, Kansas Joe McCoy, in 1929, two years after the Great Flood Of 1927, the most destructive flooding in U.S. history. This same area, around New Orleans, Louisiana, was the place that Hurricane Katrina wreaked such havoc in late August, 2005.

Born in New Orleans, the oldest of thirteen children, her family worked its way up through the Mississippi Delta and settled outside Memphis around 1910. Having an early start, she was already performing on the streets of Memphis and in traveling shows while still in her teens. In the 1920’s she was frequently seen on Beale Street as well as in juke joints and house parties down in the Delta.

After her recording career began in 1929 with her then husband Kansas Joe McCoy, the couple moved to Chicago, the center of blues recording in the 1930’s. By 1939, when she teamed up with her second husband, Ernest Lawlars, who became known as Little Son Joe, Minnie was at the peak of her popularity.

Minnie had a driving rhythmic guitar style, and basically fingerpicked on acoustic, with a steady-thumb Travis type sound. Then around 1941 she began to play electric guitar which must have caused a wave of excitement weaving in and out of the low-lit nightclubs and dance halls. Big Bill Broonzy said that she could “pick a guitar and sing as good as any man I’ve ever heard.”

Also of note, Jefferson Airplane recorded “My Chauffeur Blues” and Donovan adapted her song “Can I Do It For You” to his own style, which shows that the newer generation of musicians were doing their homework. This is just a tiny peek into the life of a little known, but great, American musician. Dig it!