Lizzie Douglas AKA Memphis Minnie
June 3, 1897 – August 6, 1973
She was coal black beautiful, they say, with soft black hair she could fix any way she wanted to, and all gold teeth across the front. In joints, on the street, at house parties and fish fries, she picked and sang while chewing Brown Mule tobacco… She swore freely, dipped Copenhagen snuff, shot craps, gambled at cards, and bested Big Bill Broonzy in picking contests. In blues circles, she was rumored, respectfully, to have shot off the arm of a man who tried to mess with her, or she chopped it off with a hatchet…
When she came down with what was diagnosed as meningitis and yellow fever, and the doctors gave up on her, she wrote “Memphis Minnie-jitis Blues,” drank a quart of whiskey her husband brought to the hospital, and just sweated whatever it was out. She drank hard — gin, corn whiskey, potato-and-yeast home-brew, and Wild Irish Rose wine — but lived to be seventy-six.
She held her own from Mississippi to Chicago, right through the Depression, in country blues and urban blues, acoustic and electric… She wrote any number of songs that stirred food, rue, relish, and sex together in roughly equal parts: ‘Keep On Eating’,” “Banana Man Blues,” “Lean Meat Don’t Fry.”
She grew up in rural Mississippi near Memphis, started performing in that city, and moved back there in old age, but where the Minnie came from, nobody knows—she was born Lizzie Douglas… the relatives called her by her childhood name, Kid.
“I’m so glad,” Minnie sings, “that I ain’t nobody’s tool.”… At its roots, the blues isn’t jaded. It’s as pretty as it can be…
“Memphis Minnie’s Blues: A Dirty Mother For You,” Roy Blount, Jr.
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