“The hundreds of sides Minnie recorded are the perfect material to teach us about the blues. For the blues are at once general, and particular, speaking for millions, but in a highly singular, individual voice. Listening to Minnie’s songs we hear her fantasies, her dreams, her desires, but we will hear them as if they were our own.”
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” Doctor Doctor Blues “
- 1935 -
(Wiki) Born Lizzie Douglas in Algiers, Louisiana, Minnie was one of the most influential and pioneering female blues musicians and guitarists of all time. 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 Broonzy and 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.
After learning to play guitar and banjo as a child, she ran away from home at the age of thirteen. She traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, playing guitar in nightclubs and on the street as Lizzie “Kid” Douglas. The next year, she joined the Ringling Brothers circus.
Her marriage and recording début came in 1929, to and with Kansas Joe McCoy, when a Columbia Records talent scout heard them playing in a Beale Street barbershop in their distinctive ‘Memphis style,’ and their song “Bumble Bee” became a hit.
