FR-1 Liner notes

"I'm Going Back Home"
Memphis Minnie and Joe Johnson vcl. duet acc. by Memphis Minnie, gtr.
Memphis, 26 May 1930
Victor 23352

"She Wouldn't Give Me None"
Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy vcl. duet acc. by own gtrs.
Memphis, 20 February 1930
Vocalion 1576

I could pull the book off a shelf―This Remarkable Continent: An Atlas of United States and Canadian Society and Cultures; a bit of a mouthful, no?—thumb through the pages, and show you the map myself. However, the tome's pages are not gilded and thus, put us at risk for paper cuts. Such wounds would produce tiny droplets of blood and blemish the map, rendering it unreadable. So I shall describe it for you … Four states are shown, clockwise from the top: Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. The map features a multitude of tiny dots, each one the hometown of recorded blues performers born between 1890 and 1920. The dots are concentrated on a north-south line along the Mississippi River with the majority on its eastern bank. This line has two termini: Memphis and New Orleans.

This is crucial in understanding Memphis Minnie's importance. She is represented by one of the tiny dots on this map; she was born Lizzie Douglas Lawlers in Algiers, Louisiana, a town that sits at the mouth of the Mississippi across from New Orleans' former slave docks. In her teens, Minnie ran away north to Memphis, where she was eventually discovered by Columbia Records in 1929. Thus, she resided on the north and south poles of the axis on which the prewar blues world rotated. She played a significant role in how fast that world rotated, in how the blues advanced and transitioned; similarly, she was magnetic in attraction. As much as her contemporaries, Minnie dramatized inner dreams and despair in such a way that personal expression became universal; later, she was present when prewar blues plugged in and went electric.

Minnie recorded over 200 sides for labels like Columbia, Vocalion, Decca, Okeh, and Bluebird—labels that issued "race records," releases made by black artists and sold to black consumers. Her glory here on earth makes talk of ascension standard. Consider a well-appreciated photo of her from either 1929 or 1930. She is standing next to a seated Kansas Joe McCoy, her first of three husbands and duet partners. She is wearing a florid, drop-waisted day dress with straightened, flapper hair. The photo's poor quality plays a trick on the eye: Minnie looks like she is not touching the floor, like she is beginning to ascend into heaven. Like her left hand will slide off the right shoulder of McCoy and fall gently to her side, and as she slowly rises, her expressionless countenance will turn to one of pure rapture, at which point McCoy will exit the building where the photograph was taken to look heavenward, squint at the sun, and then despair when he's delivered no final glimpse of her.