Woman with Guitar. Paul Garon
Introduction to the New Edition
2. Woman with Guitar: The Rise of Memphis Minnie
6. “I Drink Anywhere I Please”
8. To Make Heard the Interior Voice
Locations of Memphis Minnie Nightclub Performances
A Discography of Memphis Minnie
Titles of LPs and CDs that Appear in the Discography
INTRODUCTION
TO THE NEW EDITION
When you write a biographical study of someone, you become the object of outpourings of collegiality. On numerous occasions, when they found new information on Memphis Minnie, fellow researchers passed along their discoveries to us. Without their help, this book could not have taken its current expanded shape.
The basic content of the book remains the same, but there have been many additions. We have added many more names and dates for Minnie’s nightclub and theater appearances; many new photos, including a previously unknown photo of Minnie; and new (and corrected) vital statistics about Minnie’s place of birth and early childhood.
We have brought the discography up to date, listing all the Memphis Minnie CDs (and LPs) that have been issued since the first discography went to press in 1992. We have included a selection of Minnie’s appearance on compilation CDs that also feature other artists, as well. Because Minnie’s CDs have become so numerous, we have supplied a separate CD/LP title list at the end of the discography.
FOREWORD
The iconic status now accorded Memphis Minnie as a feminist symbol and female potentate in a man’s world is nothing new to the corps of devotees that had already developed by the time Woman with Guitar was first published in 1992. But she is far more widely recognized as a heroine now than when she was known mainly among hardcore blues collectors and among musicians and audiences who knew of her during her performing years. I would argue that much of this new adulation can be traced back to Woman with Guitar. While the number of people who actually read the book and took up her cause may have been only a few thousand, Paul and Beth Garon’s treatise became exponentially important to a more general readership and music-buying audience, especially as the digital age progressed. Woman with Guitar served as a source point for reviewers (of the book and of her CDs), for liner note writers of the many CD compilations that have since appeared, and ultimately for the half a million hits that a Google search for the name Memphis Minnie will now yield on the Internet. And the analytical discussions in the book have also opened more minds to probe what lies beneath the lyrics Minnie sang, to try to interpret and appreciate her songs (and indeed blues songs in general) in the contexts of creativity, imagination and poetic freedom. In the majesty and passion of her art, the blues could be a pathway to the heart or an incantation of desire. It could be a weapon in the war against race and gender prejudice, it could be a claim to free will. It could imbue the mundane with magic, it could conjoin the real with the surreal.
The same digital information network that has propelled awareness of Memphis Minnie’s music and her story from Woman with Guitar has also opened a window, limited as it may be—to print sources of the past that once seemed all but lost to us, to the world of Minnie’s heyday as a performer. When Woman with Guitar was first published, Google, amazon.com, allmusic.com, ancestry. com, Facebook and Youtube did not exist. Today ample material on blues is accessible through such Internet resources and books, specialist blues magazines, and newspaper archives.
Yet it is still true, as the authors note in chapter 1, that, considering Minnie’s significance in blues, “surprisingly little documentation exists for so extensive a career.” In a survey of vintage newspapers and magazines undertaken to contribute new material for this edition of Women with Guitar, I did find her records advertised in numerous periodicals, as well as club appearances publicized primarily in the Chicago Defender. But despite her obvious popularity as a recording artist and live entertainer, there was little coverage of Minnie