When Ida Cox proclaimed “Wild women don’t have the blues,” she could easily have been singing about guitarist Memphis Minnie. It was unusual enough between the 1920s and 1950s for a woman to play lead guitar, front bands, and write most of her own material, but Minnie also drank, dipped snuff, cursed, fought, and led jam sessions with gutsy aplomb. Johnny Shines described her, admiringly, as a “hellcat.” Historians point to her as one of the most important blues stylists of the pre-World War II era.
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Minnie is usually cited as the exception that proves the rule that most of the great blues instrumentalists have been men; she was often touted as the woman who played guitar “like a man.” In 1929 she cut her first records, citified variations on traditional Delta stylings, embellished by her dexterous technique and savvy choices of musical partners. In 1930 she moved from Memphis to Chicago, where she eventually took up electric guitar and laid down sounds as raw and aggressive as those of anyone in her era. She’s also fondly remembered for the sessions she used to lead at clubs like Ruby Gatewood’s Tavern at Lake and Artesian. Her pugnacious nature was never far from the surface. Johnny Shines remembers, “Guitar, pocketknife, pistol, anything she get her hand on, she’d use it.”
The Garons see virtually any utterance of an oppressed people as being a potentially revolutionary act of defiance. In summoning the will to proclaim one’s own selfhood through verbal or musical imagery, they say, the individual stakes a claim to personal and psychic power. “To see blues as a resistant, defiant music of the black working class really takes a perspective and a comprehension that a lot of people don’t bring to it,” says Paul. “The left attempt to see why the blues are not protest songs is one of the most pathetic endeavors that you can ever run across. It’s not as if the blues culture is an emancipated culture. It’s an oppressed culture, and what you will hear from it is songs of oppression, including sexist oppression and all sorts.
