Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  So Big Bill knew what he was up against when it came to a cutting contest with Memphis Minnie. But the challenge had been made, so he had to do his best to face up to it. At 1:30 a.m., one of the judges, Tampa Red, called Big Bill to the stand. He was expected to go first. It was a good crowd—when they caught sight of Big Bill, they cheered for ten minutes before he even started his first song. Then he got into it: He played one of his best numbers, one of his signature tunes, a song called “Just a Dream.” Then he followed up with “Make My Getaway.” After that, he was done. He had taken his best shot; now it was Memphis Minnie’s turn.

  Tampa Red called out for Memphis Minnie to come up and play her two selections. A hush settled over the audience as she began. The first song she played was “Me and My Chauffeur Blues,” a rollicking number that chugs along steadily like a car on a sunny Saturday afternoon drive. It was the perfect song to get a rise out of the crowd; the lyrics are wittily bawdy (in the song, she sings of wanting her chauffeur to “drive me downtown”) with just a hint of violence (she also sings of shooting her chauffeur down if he drives any other girls). After she finished, Big Bill reported later, the crowd cheered for twenty minutes. Memphis Minnie’s second song was another winner: “Looking the World Over.” With its cries of “whoo-hoo!” and the affable guitar solo at the song’s center, it was another crowd pleaser.

  People connected to Memphis Minnie’s blues because, although her music was rooted in her own life, her concerns and experiences were so broad and universal that her songs became about everything. Indeed, on her song “Looking the World Over,” she even makes the boast that she’s seen everything “but the bottom of the sea.” In a way, Memphis Minnie was everybody, only a little bit bolder, a little bit stronger, and a little bit sexier than everybody else. Her lyrics documented a personal history and people’s history that you couldn’t find in school books. “When the Levee Breaks” was based on the famous flood that hit Mississippi two years before the tune was recorded; “Frankie Jean (That Trottin’ Fool),” a song about a horse, was based on a mule Minnie had as a kid; “He’s in the Ring” and “Joe Louis Strut’ were her tributes to the heavyweight champ; and “Ma Rainey” was her elegy to the pioneering blueswoman.

  So Memphis Minnie won the contest, just as Big Bill had feared and kind of expected from the start. She was a bard of the people, and the people responded. Two of the judges, Estes and Jones, went over to Minnie, picked her up and carried her around on their shoulders. But Big Bill ended up with at least some of the winnings. As the crowd celebrated, Big Bill grabbed the whiskey and drank it. It was his birthday, after all.

  Now, it should be said that at least some of this tale could be apocryphal. Big Bill’s memory, according to many blues experts, wasn’t always accurate, and he was known to take artistic license with the telling of his tales. But other blues musicians who were contemporaries of Memphis Minnie testify to her prowess at cutting contests. James Watt, a singer with the group the Blues Rockers, recalls Minnie going toe to toe with the great Muddy Waters. Said Watt, “They used to have these contests, the one who win the contest, they would get the fifth of whiskey. And Memphis Minnie would tell Muddy, ‘I’m getting this fifth of whiskey.’ She’d get it every time, though. She would get it every time. Muddy just couldn’t do nothing with Memphis, no, uh-uh, not back then… I saw her beat ten different artists one night.”

  Female vocalists such as Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday helped create and perfect the blues. But Memphis Minnie helped women take full possession of the form. Vocalists—wrongly—are often seen as mere interpreters, and not true creators. Oftentimes, it’s true, they are not songwriters, but artists who find new art in the work of others. Instrumentalists—guitarists, pianists, horn players, and the like—are seen by some as true creators because they carry tools in their hands and use them to beat ideas and inspiration into new forms. Memphis Minnie was one of the tool carriers. She was a creator any way you looked at it. She proved, if anybody doubted it, that women could sing songs and play them, too.

  Although she began her musical life playing an acoustic guitar, later in her career she also employed an electric guitar, becoming a pioneer with that instrument as well. Her performances, judging from the reports of those who saw them, seem to have been precursors to the guitar heroics of the rock & roll era. Sadly, there are no known recordings of Memphis Minnie on electric guitar, and we are left to wonder just what her guitar, charged with lightning and played with abandon, might have sounded like.

  In the 1950s, Memphis Minnie began a slow decline. In 1960, she suffered her first stroke and, after residing in Chicago for thirty years, moved back to Memphis to live with her sister Daisy. In 1961, her third husband, Son Joe (with whom she recorded “Me and My Chauffeur Blues,” among other songs), died, and his passing so upset Minnie that she suffered another stroke and had to move into a nursing home. In her final days she was very poor and was forced to sell her guitar and accept welfare and contributions from a local church. When she was in her mid-seventies, a small blues magazine appealed to the public for charity: “Everyone enjoys her music, but real appreciation should be shown by way of small gifts or just letters to cheer her. We just can’t forget the poor woman because she can’t perform anymore, so please help.”

  Memphis Minnie isn’t a name that most of today’s rock, rap, and pop fans know; the ripples of her fame, in the twenty-first century, have barely moved beyond the circle of the blues. Because of the health problems she experienced in her sixties, she was unable to hit the road or reenter the recording studio for any significant amount of time to take advantage of the blues boom of the 1960s, when many of her colleagues were rediscovered by the music industry and the general public. So, as many of the men Memphis Minnie had bested in cutting contests reentered the spotlight, and as some of the blues musicians she had played with toured Europe accompanied by the screams of delighted audiences, Minnie remained shuttered away, mostly forgotten, in the shadows of her nursing home.

  If a musician isn’t heard, does she make a sound? We all have childhood experiences, before the age of five or six perhaps, that have been entirely forgotten. Those episodes, however, forgotten or not, may still form the basis for our personalities, for our choices and predilections, for our failures and our successes. More than a few people have spent more than a few dollars in therapy trying to remember things they had forgotten but that still rule their lives. Memphis Minnie is kind of a formative musical memory. Whether remembered or not, her impact is, and will be, felt. Her lifestyle and her guitar playing have entered the bloodstream of American popular music. Led Zeppelin turned her song “When the Levee Breaks” into a hard-driving rock song; Lucinda Williams rerecorded “Nothing’ in Rambling” and “Me and My Chauffeur Blues,” and any number of female rockers owe her a debt, whether they know it or not. Other musicians may be enjoying the whiskey of success. But Memphis Minnie is still the champion.

  RECOMMENDED LISTENING:

  Memphis Minnie, Queen of the Blues (Columbia, 1997). Includes such classic tracks as “When the Levee Breaks.”

  Memphis Minnie, The Essential (Classic Blues, 2001). Featured numbers include “Ma Rainey” and “In My Girlish Days.”

  Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Precious Memories (Savoy, 1997). A great album by the fabled singer/guitarist and mistress of gospel and blues.

  Various Artists, The Roots of Rap: Classic Recordings From the 1920s and ‘30s (Yazoo, 1996). Interesting compilation that includes a Memphis Minnie talking-blues hit, “Frankie Jean (That Trottin’ Fool).”

  HAPPY NEW YEAR! WITH MEMPHIS MINNIE By Langston Hughes [From the Chicago Defender, January 9, 1943]

  Memphis Minnie sits on top of the icebox at the 230 Club in Chicago and beats out blues on an electric guitar. A little dung-colored drummer who chews gum in tempo accompanies her, as the year’s end—1942— flickers to nothing, and goes out like a melted candle.

  Midnight. The electric guitar is very loud, science
having magnified all its softness away. Memphis Minnie sings through a microphone and her voice-hard and strong anyhow for a little woman’s—is made harder and stronger by scientific sound. The singing, the electric guitar, and the drums are so hard and so loud, amplified as they are by General Electric on top of the icebox, that sometimes the voice, the words, and the melody get lost under their noise, leaving only the rhythm to come through clear. The rhythm fills the 230 Club with a deep and dusky heartbeat that overrides all modern amplification. The rhythm is as old as Memphis Minnie’s most remote ancestor.

  Memphis Minnie’s feet in her high-heeled shoes keep time to the music of her electric guitar. Her thin legs move like musical pistons. She is a slender, light-brown woman who looks like an old-maid school teacher with a sly sense of humor. She wears glasses that fail to hide her bright bird-like eyes. She dresses neatly and sits straight in her chair perched on top of the refrigerator where the beer is kept. Before she plays, she cocks her head on one side like a bird, glances from her place on the box to the crowded bar below, frowns quizzically, and looks more than ever like a colored lady teacher in a neat Southern school about to say, “Children, the lesson is on page fourteen today, paragraph two,”

  But Memphis Minnie says nothing of the sort. Instead, she grabs the microphone and yells, “Hey, now!” Then she hits a few deep chords at random, leans forward ever so slightly over her guitar, bows her head, and begins to beat out a good old steady downhome rhythm on the strings—a rhythm so contagious that often it makes the crowd holler out loud.

  Then Minnie smiles. Her gold teeth flash for a split second. Her earrings tremble. Her left hand with dark red nails moves up and down the strings of the guitar’s neck. Her right hand with the dice ring on it picks out the tune, throbs out the rhythm, beats out the blues.

  Then, through the smoke and racket of the noisy Chicago bar float Louisiana bayous, muddy old swamps, Mississippi dust and sun, cotton fields, lonesome roads, train whistles in the night, mosquitoes at dawn, and the Rural Free Delivery that never brings the right letter. All these things cry through the strings on Memphis Minnie’s electric guitar, amplified to machine proportions—a musical version of electric welders plus a rolling mill.

  Big rough old Delta cities float in the smoke, too. Also border cities, Northern cities, Relief, W.P.A., Muscle Shoals, the jukes. “Has Anybody Seen My Pigmeat on the Line,” “C.C. Rider,” St. Louis, Antoine Street, Willow Run, folks on the move who leave and don’t care. The hand with the dice ring picks out music like this. Music with so much in it folks remember that sometimes it makes them holler out loud.

  It was last year, 1941, that the war broke out, wasn’t it? Before that there wasn’t no defense work much. And the President hadn’t told the factory bosses that they had to hire colored. Before that, it was W.P.A. and Relief. It was 1939 and 1935 and 1932 and 1928 and years that you don’t remember when your clothes got shabby and the insurance lapsed. Now, it’s 1942—and different.

  Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy, 1929

  Folks have jobs, Money’s circulating again. Relatives are in the army with big insurance if they die.

  Memphis Minnie, at year’s end, picks up those nuances and tunes them into the strings of her guitar, weaves them into runs and trills and deep steady chords that come through the amplifiers like Negro heartbeats mixed with iron and steel. The way Memphis Minnie swings, it sometimes makes folks snap their fingers, women get up and move their bodies, men holler, “Yes!” When they do, Minnie smiles.

  But the men who run the place—they are not Negroes—never smile. They never snap their fingers, clap their hands, or move in time to the music. They just stand at the licker [sic] counter and ring up sales on the cash register. At this year’s end, the sales are better than they used to be. But Memphis Minnie’s music is harder than the coins that roll across the counter. Does that mean she understands? Or is it just science that makes the guitar strings so hard and so loud?

  BIG BILL AND STUDS: A FRIENDSHIP FOR THE AGES BY STUDS TERKEL AND JEFF SCHEFTEL

  Jeff Scheftel recently interviewed Studs Terkel about his old friend Big Bill Broonzy. Studs Terkel is a legend in his own right. A Pulitzer-prize winning author, popular radio and TV show host, and raconteur extraordinaire, he roamed the back streets of Chicago and sought out music that touched his soul. Studs, who befriended and championed numerous musicians, says Big Bill Broonzy was the greatest country-blues singer of all time.

  I heard Big Bill Broonzy one day when I used to buy records, ten cents apiece, in the Black Belt of Chicago. I’d stop off there on my way to work to Chicago Law School on the streetcar. In the black community you heard music coming from inside the doors and I never heard such music in my life. There were blues, country blues, Big Bill, Tampa Red, Memphis Minnie, Roosevelt Sykes, and more, but Big Bill had a special voice and a guitar that was even more special. A virtuoso if ever there was one.

  Big Bill was a mentor to Muddy Waters. He was the teacher. Bill was one of the earliest bluesmen to arrive from the South. He came from Mississippi and Arkansas, where he was a sharecropper at the age of eight. When other young singers came along to Chicago, he would see they didn’t get cheated on their contracts. He served as a father figure for a lot of them: Muddy Waters, Memphis Minnie, Sonny Boy Williamson, Roosevelt Sykes, and you could name many others.

  I played Big Bill on my radio program, and then I was part of a group that traveled together for a while when the folk music revival was beginning.

  We had this program called “I Come for to Sing,” which was also the name of an old ballad. We would tour colleges. We performed all over the Midwest at any college that would have us. Big Bill would sing the country blues, mostly his own, but some of his buddies’ too. Bill had no shortage of great songs—he wrote hundreds. Win Stracke, who sang bass, would sing American frontier songs, and Larry Lane offered up Elizabethan ballads. They’d perform about the same things, three different epics of mankind; it might be fickle love, and so the Elizabethan singer would do “Greensleeves,” and Win would sing “The Frozen Martyr,” a summer song about an old martyr and a mighty faithful love. And Big Bill would sing “Willie Mae” to tremendous applause. I was the narrator and general cheerleader.

  In 1948, four of us were in an old jalopy going through an almost desolate Indiana town headed for Purdue University. It’d been about ten days we’d been traveling those roads. And they weren’t the freeways we’re used to now. We were three white guys and a black guy. Bill and Win were about six feet two, six feet three each. Win looked like a biker. Larry was short, but I was the shortest. And so we’re two hours early and reach Lafayette, a blue collar town near Purdue. We’re hungry and we see this big tavern. It’s a warm day, and the doors are open, and we see these great liverwurst-sausage sandwiches with onions. So Win says, “Let’s the four of us go in there and get some of that liverwurst and onions and a shot and a beer.” And Bill says, “Why don’t you three go in and get me the stuff and bring it out to me.” Of course, Win and I go, “No, four or nothing.” Bill goes, “Well, okay, if you insist.” As soon as we hit that door and they saw Bill’s black face: Bang! Dead silence. And they stare at us, and you could sense hostility that you could cut with a knife, and we’re walking toward the bar and we’re like Gary Cooper in High Noon: these three white guys and a black guy. And Win’s talking, “We’d love those liver and onions and sausage sandwiches and of course a beer and a shot.” The bartender is very genial and says, “Well, I’ll serve three of ya,” and Win says, “How dare you?” Meantime, I’m thinking, These guys are gonna kill us. And I’m leaning in, all five feet six of me, and I say, “How dare you,” and all of a sudden Bill starts to chuckle very softly. “I’ll go outside,” he says, and so all four of us shuffle out to beat it.

  But the important thing is Bill’s chuckle. And I found out often when you hear a black person describe a moment of humiliation, he chuckles, because it’s a safety valve. It’s like the blues lyric: �
��laughin’ to keep from cryin’.” So that was it, laughing to keep from raging, you’d say today. I once asked Bill why is it that that laugh comes at a moment of humiliation, and he said, “Without laughter we wouldn’t last. Laughter is remedy.” Oh, he had a certain kind of wisdom about him. He died before the civil rights movement came into being, and that’s the tragedy. He’d have been lionized and recognized as Bill the Great Artist.

  We often appeared as a group with Memphis Minnie and Roosevelt Sykes. We even played at a jazz club in Chicago, the Blue Note. On dark nights the owner of the Blue Note, Frank Holzfiend, would have these great artists there: Billie Holiday, the Louis Armstrong Quintet, Duke Ellington with a small group. We’d be there, and he’d feature us, and we developed a cult following, the four of us. And that’s where the country blues was heard. The first time country blues was heard in a big-time jazz place was Monday nights when we did “I Come for to Sing.”

  Big Bill Broonzy

  Bill had been to Europe a number of times. He was there with Alan Lomax. Bill had quite a stature as a blues artist in England—one that grew beyond the confines of Chicago. It was the first time Brits ever heard blues, sung by a blues artist. Bill introduced Muddy Waters to England, persuaded English audiences to like Muddy because they didn’t like the electric guitar in the beginning.