Queen of Country Blues 1929-1937

Minnie was born Lizzie Douglas in 1897 in Algiers LA. Her her was a sharecropper. Around 1904 the family moved to Walls, Mississippi, 15 miles from Memphis. Lizzie was given a guitar at Christmas 1905. By 1910 she was already running off to Memphis and a few years later joined a Ringling Brothers show. It seems she quickly learned the tricks of her trade and was able to best male guitar players. Soon she was good enough to play lead guitar site Charley Patton's former partner, Willie Brown. Willie Moore, who also played with Brown, remembered, When she's playin' with us, she played lead all the time . . . She'd do all the singin. Moore considered her the better musician: Wasn't nothin' he could teach her . . . Everything Willie Brown could play, she could play, and then she could play some thing he couldn't play, This duo/trio played together for five or six years, travelling far and wide with tent shows. By the mid-1920s, she decided to try her luck in Memphis once more. There she may have formed a relationship with guitarist Will Weldon. The evidence is tenuous but it's possible that the Weldon helped her with her guitar playing, as did Frank Stokes and Furry Lewis. She's reputed to have had a number of liaisons during the Twenties. Sunnyland Slim stated, I met Minnie ... around '25, '27, in there ... Memphis Slim's daddy was really in love with her...' It was about this time that Minnie took up with Joe McCoy. Johnny Shines told Paul Garon, I met Minnie the first time in 1928 or 1929. She and Joe and (his brother) Charlie was all in Memphis. They knew this fellow that kind of ran something like an open house and they were just there playing and people buying booze ... for 'em. He remembered that Minnie sang Bumble Bee, one of the songs she sang on their debut in June 1929. The career that followed was phenomenal. She continued into the 1950s and as late as 1958 played a memorial concert for Bill Broonzy. She died in 1973.