In Search of Memphis, Mississippi

The fourth in a series of stories that explore towns across America that share the same name as our own.

by

Unlike the many places we’ve found that share the moniker of Memphis, the Mississippi village that goes by that name doesn’t exist, strictly speaking. No, it’s not from a dream or a novel. On paper, it has legally existed, and to this day, if one trawls the internet, the exact coordinates are sure to pop up. A mapping app will even give you directions there, marking each mile on U.S. Highway 61 and every subsequent turn, until even the all-knowing app must give up. “Prepare to park your car near Delta View Road,” says the automated attendant. “You will need to walk to your destination from there.” Staring at the kudzu-covered trees before me, imagining the ticks and chiggers that await, I decide to pass.

Though the coordinates are out there in the overgrowth, the developer’s dream that was fixed on them for many years has been left to the crickets. Still, only a stone’s throw from there, toward the sunset, another Memphis namesake awaits the explorer, even sporting a historical marker by the road. And that other Memphis in the Magnolia State may well be immortal, as long as music lives in our hearts.

It’s a study in contrasts: one with its provenance in great wealth, yet oddly insubstantial; the other born of flesh and blood in utter poverty, yet able to live on whenever a needle drops into the groove.

To be sure, the “village” in the kudzu was real enough to earn a dateline in The Commercial Appeal, for a time. “MEMPHIS, Miss.,” was where staff reporter Russell Fly filed from on July 5, 1981. “Memphis, and sister city Newport,” he wrote, “are two of Mississippi’s smallest towns. In fact, if it hadn’t been for an act of the legislature this year, the two DeSoto County cities would have lost their charters.”

A state representative from Southaven, it turns out, successfully lowered the minimum number of inhabitants required to qualify for municipal status under the Mississippi State Code, just so Memphis and Newport could continue to be recognized. “Saved By Legislative Chivalry,” shouts the headline, with wry accuracy. But no fair maiden was saved by this noble act; rather, it was the investment of a Texas billionaire, one Nelson Bunker Hunt, whose father founded the Placid Oil Company on reserves from the East Texas Field, discovered in 1930.

The chivalrous action on Hunt’s behalf helped preserve his dream of new sister cities taking root in the Mississippi Delta. Newport was to be an industrial hub, while neighboring Memphis would host the homes of the workers. By 1973, soon after Hunt discovered and developed oil fields in Libya, the 10,000 acres he’d bought in DeSoto County were transformed into “municipalities” by petitions of incorporation, and Memphis, Mississippi, was born.

After a time, though, Hunt’s fortunes took a downturn. He and his brothers were charged “with manipulating and attempting to manipulate the prices of silver futures contracts and silver bullion during 1979 and 1980” by the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In 1994, Placid Oil was bought by the Occidental Petroleum Corp. at a fraction of its former value. The village of Memphis, with a smattering of scattered residents, was recognized by the state for another ten years. Then it became part of nearby Walls, a bustling metropolis in comparison, with roughly 1,500 people.

Ironically, just as the village of Memphis was born in 1973, another Memphis was laid to rest only four miles away. Yet it was the latter that may well prove to enjoy a kind of immortality. To understand why, one has to delve into the last years of the nineteenth century in Walls, Mississippi, where one “Kid” Douglas was raised.

Some accounts have Kid being born in Algiers, Louisiana, before the Douglases moved to Walls. Others dispute that, but all agree that Kid grew up there in DeSoto County, never quite taking to the hard-scrabble farming life. At eight years old, Kid received a guitar, and the rest is blues history. The youngster took to the instrument with a passion and, after choosing the life of a runaway at age 13, came to be recognized as one of the nation’s greatest singers, guitarists, and songwriters. By then, of course, the name “Kid Douglas” was abandoned — the world knew her as Memphis Minnie.

While our geographical quest has yielded one youngster bearing the name of our city, near Memphis, New York, none have owned the name “Memphis” like Memphis Minnie. She came by it honestly, working Beale Street as an entertainer through her teens (and rubbing shoulders with W.C. Handy) before joining the Ringling Brothers Circus for a time at age 17. As World War I came to a close, she toured the country, building on her innate talent. In Paul and Beth Garon’s biography of her, Woman with Guitar, one man recalls that even then, she was “a showman all the way. She’d stand up out of that chair, she’d take that guitar and put it all ’cross her head and everywhere.”

“I flagged a train, didn’t have a dime

Trying to run away from that home of mine

I didn’t know no better. Oh boy!

In my girlish days.”

— “Kid” Douglas

Even more impressive than such grandstanding was her command of her instrument, her voice, and the burgeoning musical genre that had only recently been dubbed “the blues.” One contemporary tells the Garons that “she could make the guitar talk, say: ‘Fare thee well.’” Such skills served her well, and Beale Street continued to be her center of gravity. One early liason was with the famed Willie Brown, a colleague of blues innovator Charlie Patton, later name-checked in Robert Johnson’s lyrics, who was based on the Bedford Plantation, not far from Walls. For several years, Minnie settled there too. Playing with Brown, the Memphis Jug Band, and others, Minnie was always the one who played lead guitar. And, hearing her records from not long after, one can imagine that her powerful voice also dominated the rooms she played.

Sometime in the 1920s, Minnie connected with another Mississippian by the name of Joe McCoy, aka Kansas City Joe, and together they found even greater success, eventually marrying in 1930. As they played for dimes in a Beale Street barber shop, a scout from Columbia Records chanced to hear them, and they traveled to New York City to record for the label in 1929. Minnie’s sister, Daisy, told the Garons that a Columbia A&R man, overseeing the sessions, dubbed her “Memphis Minnie” at the time.

While Joe sang on the first two songs to be released that year, “That Will Be Alright” and “When the Levee Breaks,” Minnie was the co-writer and lead guitarist on both. By the end of the year, records featuring her singing (from the same initial recording session) were released by Columbia as well, followed by the 1930 release of “Bumble Bee,” which she also sang. That composition, according to the Garons, “became one of the best-known songs of the period.” Though most records sold poorly during those depressed times, her reputation grew.

Decades later, of course, “When the Levee Breaks,” one of many songs from that time about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, would be interpreted by Led Zeppelin. But beyond that direct connection, Minnie would forge the way for rock-and-roll itself by adopting a new innovation: the electric guitar.

Despite the Great Depression, Minnie made a living with her music through the 1930s, and did not falter when she and Joe McCoy went their separate ways in 1935. By then, they had relocated to Chicago, where they recorded many sides for Vocalion, and as she continued living there on her own, the city led to her early embrace of an experimental instrument that guitar makers had been refining through the 1930s.

It’s often associated with the blues stars that came after her. Robert Gordon’s biography, Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters, quotes the man who became synonymous with electric blues on how the Windy City’s noisier venues demanded a change in sound: An acoustic guitar “wouldn’t carry there, not in a liquor club,” says Muddy. No doubt Minnie was responding to the same dynamic. On record, one can hear her playing electric guitar as early as the May 1941 recording session that yielded “In My Girlish Days” and her biggest hit ever, “Me and My Chauffeur Blues.” In the latter, with a few deft lines, she captures all of the independence she found in running away from Walls. Clearly, as in many of her songs, she was the boss.

“Well, I must buy him

Well, I must buy him

A brand-new V8

A brand-new V8 Ford

Then he won’t need no passengers

I will be his ’lone.”

So this boss bought herself a new guitar. By the time Langston Hughes wrote about seeing Minnie in late 1942, for the Chicago Defender, she was obviously well-acquainted with the instrument, before Muddy Waters had even moved north from Mississippi:

“Midnight. The electric guitar is very loud, science having magnified all its softness away. Memphis Minnie sings through a microphone and her voice — hard and strong anyhow for a little woman’s — is made harder and stronger by scientific sound. The singing, the electric guitar, and the drums are so hard and so loud, amplified as they are by General Electric on top of the icebox, that sometimes the voice, the words, and melody get lost under sheer noise, leaving only the rhythm to come through clear …

“Memphis Minnie’s feet in her high-heeled shoes keep time to the music of her electric guitar. Her thin legs move like musical pistons. She is a slender, light-brown woman who looks like an old-maid school teacher, with a sly sense of humor. She wears glasses that fail to hide her bright bird-like eyes. She dresses neatly and sits straight in her chair perched on top of the refrigerator where the beer is kept. … Then Minnie smiles. Her gold teeth flash for a split second. Her earrings tremble. Her left hand with dark red nails moves up and down the strings of the guitar’s neck. Her right hand with the dice ring on it picks out the tune, throbs out the rhythm, beats out the blues.”

That driving, electric sound is in keeping with contemporaries’ impressions of Minnie as a tough, gun-toting, tobacco-chewing maverick, fiercely independent. Such qualities must have served her well as a peripatetic blues musician who even managed her own vaudeville troupe for a time. The bluesman Homesick James recalls in the Garons’ book, “Chicago, then back down South, Chicago, then back down there; Mississippi, all the way through. That woman, she used to go.”

Even as she continued to visit the South, playing Saturday-night fish fries and house parties, trips to Walls became less frequent. Much of her family had relocated to Brunswick, Tennessee, and other relatives moved to Cordova or Memphis. During one of her many returns to the Bluff City, Minnie met a new musical partner, Ernest Lawlars, aka “Little Son Joe,” a gifted guitarist in his own right, and they were married in 1939. They lived primarily in Chicago’s South Side through the 1940s and most of the ’50s, and it proved to be the most prolific and creative period of their careers.

Throughout this time, Minnie’s countrified past informed many of her compositions, and she’s often classed as a country blues singer in spite of her embrace of the “scientific sound.” Songs like “Plymouth Rock Blues” (about a variety of chicken), “Frankie Jean (That Trottin’ Fool)” (about her father’s mule), “What’s the Matter with the Mill?” (about waiting to grind her corn), “Sylvester and His Mule Rules,” “Digging My Potatoes,” and “Down Home Girl” sat side by side with songs evoking the chauffeurs, alleyways, and “fashion-plate daddies” of the city. Like Memphis itself, she embodied the tension between the rural and the urban all her life.

Today, visiting her grave at the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church outside of Walls, you can see the land she ran away from at 13 and kept within her as a landscape of the mind. A blistering sun drops down into the dusty furrows of the table-flat Delta; kick up a cloud of dust and watch it drift and settle onto Horn Lake, across the field, as shadows lengthen over the emptiness. It’s ironic that she alone, of all the Douglases, made this her final resting place, after carrying the name of the Bluff City around the world with her for so long. To the rest of her kin, the immortal music she performed and recorded was apparently not a matter of great import.

Recently, with a phone call to Cordova, I caught up with the administrator of the Memphis Minnie estate, her nephew Leotha “Lee” Wilson, son of Minnie’s late sister Daisy. Born in 1940, he describes what it was like to have the legendary Memphis Minnie as his aunt.

“The family was aware that she was a musical performer in Chicago,” he tells me, but he never saw or heard her records while growing up. “I know my mom used to go up there quite often to Chicago, to see her. And she came down here to Memphis I guess a couple of times. So the family wasn’t really around her a lot, except for my mom. My mom was really the only one that kept up with her.”

He mainly got to know Minnie after she and Little Son Joe fell on ill health in the late 1950s and moved in with Leotha and his parents. By then, their music and their life in Chicago was a thing of the past.

“They were very sick,” he tells me. “That’s why they left Chicago, because they were so sick they couldn’t work. They couldn’t perform, so they were selling their guitars and amps. Selling everything they had to survive. So I guess, rather than let them starve to death, they moved to Memphis and she stayed up here until she passed.”

Did the family gather around her to hear her tales of travel and celebrity? “She was there in the house, she and her husband, and of course I talked to them, you know, but I didn’t really talk to them about their careers, or anything about them performing or anything like that, really,” Leotha tells me. Even playing for family members was out of the question by then. For one thing, there simply were no instruments around. “I guess nobody else was interested in trying to get into music,” he reflects.

She performed one last time in 1959, at a memorial for her friend, Big Bill Broonzy, then suffered a stroke in 1960. Little Son Joe died the next year and was buried at the New Hope cemetery. After another stroke, Minnie lingered on until 1973, then was laid to rest beside him. Nowadays, because celebrities like Bonnie Raitt and others contributed to the cause, Minnie’s gravestone, with its fulsome praise for her achievements, far outshines her husband’s, but they make for a lovely pair. And beside the road, a few feet away, stands a marker from the Mississippi Blues Trail, with photographs and an overview of her heyday.

Four miles to the southeast lies another Memphis, a legal conceit on paper, a billionaire’s vision that foundered on his own grasping overreach. But here at New Hope, with the sun sinking low, we find a more lasting monument: the name and the sound of Memphis, engraved in stone and on 78 rpm records for all the ages. Memphis Minnie, Mississippi.

With thanks to Brigitte Billeaudeaux, University of Memphis Special Collections Librarian/Archivist, and John Doyle of the Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum, for research assistance.