Memphis Minnie McCoy-Lawler (born Lizzie Douglas,
June 3, 1897 in Algiers, Louisiana; died August 6, 1973 in Memphis,
Tennessee) was an American Blues guitarist, vocalist, and composer.
Career 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 possibly unique among
female blues artists. A flamboyant character who wore bracelets made of
silver dollars, she was the biggest female blues singer from the early
Depression years through World War II. One of the first 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 giants like 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. She was married three
times, and each husband was an accomplished blues guitarist: Kansas Joe
McCoy (a.k.a. "Kansas Joe") later of the Harlem Hamfats,
Casey Bill
Weldon of the Memphis Jug Band, and Ernest "Little Son Joe" Lawlers.
Paul and Beth Garon's 1992 biography on Memphis Minnie, Woman With
Guitar: Memphis Minnie's Blues, makes no mention of a marriage to
Weldon, but only says that she recorded two sides with him, in November
1935, for Bluebird Records. It does describe the relationships and
marriages to McCoy and Lawlers.
After learning to play guitar and banjo as a child, she ran away from
home at the age of thirteen. She travelled 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 debut 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. In the 1930s she moved to Chicago, Illinois with
Joe. She and McCoy broke up in 1935, and by 1939 she was with
Little Son
Joe Lawlers, with whom she recorded nearly 200 records. In the 1940s she
formed a touring Vaudeville company. From the 1950s on, however, public
interest in her music declined, and in 1957 she and Lawlers returned to
Memphis. Lawlers died in 1961
Career