She grew up in Walls Mississippi, about 20 miles from Memphis on Route 61, in a time before rural electrification and national media created a mass culture. Listen to your favorite songs from Memphis Minnie. Her recordings were reissued by Chris Strachwitz on Blues Classics in the late sixties, and had a profound influence on several young musicians, particularly the late guitarist JoAnn Kelly, and Maria Muldaur who still sings Minnie’s songs today. Minnie was quick to embrace the latest technologies in order to be heard above the crowds She was one of the first blues players to use a National in 1929, and to play an electric wood body National and various electric guitars in the ’40s and ’50s. CD: $32.41 MP3: $9.49.  The commercial success of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” in 1920, alerted record companies to the existence of black record buyers. She shaped a life very different from the limited possibilities offered to the women of her time. Theatrical, glamorous blues queens dominated the first decade of recorded blues. Genres: Country Blues, Acoustic Chicago Blues, Blues. Two of the judges, John Estes and Richard Jones hoisted the victorious Minnie on their shoulders while Kansas Joe remarked sourly “Put her down. Kansas Joe,and Minnie were guitarists of equal ability, and the interplay of their instruments is like a great conversation: with both of them switching between treble and bass. Their guitar duets span the spectrum of African-American folk and popular music, including spirituals, comic dialogs, and old-time dance pieces, but Memphis Minnie's best work consisted of deep blues like "Moaning the Blues." After Son Joe’s death in 1962 Minnie lived in a nursing home until she died on August 6,1973, at the age of 76. As a child, she was called Kid Douglas and she learned how to play the guitar and banjo. In the same session Son Joe sang “Black Rat Swing”, and sounded so much like Minnie he must have borrowed her chewing tobacco. She was an African American blues musician and singer. Some of Minnie’s best lyrics come from this period, like those in the autobiographical “In My Girlish Days”, (1941)which she played in G in standard tuning. Memphis Minnie (Image credit: Getty). The back-up parts are as interesting as the melody parts, especially on tunes like “When the Levee Breaks”, recorded in 1929, in Spanish tuning capoed to Bb (the third fret) or “Crazy Crying Blues” from 1931, also in Spanish, capoed to C# (the sixth fret). Lizzie Douglas was born on June 3, 1897 in Algiers, Louisiana. Her recorded output is not necessarily the same as her live set. Broonzy and Minnie became good friends, and played together locally and on the road. African, European and Indigenous traditions had begun to coalesce into the blues in the South much earlier than the ’20s, but our perception of history is usually based on recorded history: what gets recorded, written about and incorporated into our accepted common memory. Listen to albums and songs from Memphis Minnie. 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. She and Brown began playing together around 1915 in the resort town of Bedford Mississippi, where tourists could take a ferryboat trip around nearby Lake Cormorant. Minnie and Brown would get aboard and entertain the primarily white pleasure seekers, once debarking at Biggs Arkansas with $119 in tips. As Broonzy tells the story, in his autobiography Big Bill Blues, (Cassell and Co.London 1956) a jury of fellow musicians awarded Minnie the prize of a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of gin for her performance of “Chauffeur Blues” and “Looking the World Over”. The traveling musician was often a lonely stranger, an outsider who might not know the local situation, and musicians often teamed up. In 1907 a blues musician played in all kinds of places: house parties, barrel houses, work camps, traveling shows. 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. There were traveling shows of all kinds, from lowdown to grand, but they all included comedy, dancers and musicians of every type from jug bands to elegant pianists. She was born Lizzie Douglas in Algiers, LA. Her recordings with Son Joe are in duet style, with piano, bass or drums added on some sessions. Record companies are remarkably mono-thematic about marketing, and Minnie, like many other blues musicians, played jazz and swing tunes as well, although there are only hints of this in her 200 recorded sides. Join Napster and access full-length songs on your phone, computer or home audio device. Minnie’s fantastically vituperative vocal delivery on some songs may be due in part to having a cheek full of Copenhagen. Hoodoo Lady. They mixed blues with pop tunes, her favorite cover being “What Makes You Do Me Like You Do Do Do”. Memphis Minnie recorded over 100 songs, most of which she had written herself. Minnie used the name both publicly and privately, although her family still called her Kid. 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