Long Time Leaving (40 page)

Then I remembered something George said that day.

George, not a great one for being interviewed, had wound up giving me, not Tammy, a ride. Which wasn't at all what he had in mind. But he was brought up in the country—he may be crazy, but he isn't rude.

And I had asked him: how did he manage to get that magically sad quality into his voice, whereby
every
sounded sort of like
elvery,
and so on?

And here, after a moment, was George's reply:

“I just put myself in the place of the old boy in the song.”

I savored those words. And then: a flash of inspiration. Not only a great country music song title, but the last two lines of the chorus. See if you can't hear old George singing it:

S
he was coal black beautiful, they say, with soft black hair she could fix any way she wanted to, and all gold teeth across the front. In joints, on the street, at house parties and fish fries, she picked and sang while chewing Brown Mule tobacco and sitting in such a way as to show off her pretty underpants. She swore freely, dipped Copenhagen snuff, shot craps, gambled at cards, and bested Big Bill Broonzy in picking contests. In blues circles, she was rumored, respectfully, to have shot off the arm of a man who tried to mess with her, or she chopped it off with a hatchet. (“Some say shot, some say cut.”) Her song “I Don't “Want That Junk Outa You” applied to one and all, but she was openhanded with money, home-cooked meals, and mentoring, and people held her in high regard. “When she came down with what was diagnosed as meningitis and yellow fever, and the doctors gave up on her, she wrote “Memphis Minnie-jitis Blues,” drank a quart of whiskey her husband brought to the hospital, and just sweated whatever it was out. She drank hard—gin, corn whiskey, potato-and-yeast homebrew, and “Wild Irish Rose wine—but lived to be seventy-six.

Among the more than a hundred songs she wrote and recorded indelibly herself is “What's the Matter with the Mill,” which has been covered (sometimes as “Can't Get No Grindin’ ”) by everybody from Muddy “Waters to Bob “Wills and His Texas Playboys. Others of her songs have been recorded by Milton Brown and His Brownies, Big Mama Thornton, Clifton Chenier, Bonnie Raitt, Jefferson Airplane, and Led Zeppelin. Rock and roll owes a good deal to the influence her music had on Chuck Berry.

As well as we know anything about the great early blues musicians, we know those things about Memphis Minnie.

“We also know she began to perform for people before 1910, before she reached her teens, and was still cutting records in 1959. She held her own from Mississippi to Chicago, right through the Depression, in country blues and urban blues, acoustic and electric. She performed, composed, and life partnered with at least two considerable blues guitarists (Kansas Joe McCoy and Little Son Joe Lawlars), always played lead herself, and partook of considerable sexual action (some of it for money) with other fellows, though maybe not after she got good and
committed with Little Son Joe. She wrote any number of songs that stirred food, rue, relish, and sex together in roughly equal parts: “Keep On Eatin,” “Banana Man Blues,” “Lean Meat Don't Fry.” She wound up getting along on welfare with the help of devoted protégés and relatives. The relatives called her by her childhood name, Kid.

In 1973, the year she died, the readers of
Blues Unlimited
magazine voted her the greatest female vocalist, ahead of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. “She was about the best thing goin’,” said Bukka White, “in the woman line.”

And yet she's not an icon. Bessie Smith is as vivid as Mickey Mouse or Marilyn Monroe, but Memphis Minnie is her own person, not ours. She grew up in rural Mississippi near Memphis, started performing in that city, and moved back there in old age, but where the
Minnie
came from, nobody knows—she was born Lizzie Douglas and first performed as Kid Douglas. We do have several engaging photographs of her in her lengthy prime, but she never appeared on film, she wasn't taken up by trendy patrons, and by the time anyone took much interest in interviewing her, she'd had two strokes and couldn't talk much.

The only biography of her,
Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie's Blues,
by Paul and Beth Garon, available in paperback, is one of the goofiest damn books I have ever read. It's valuable for its discography, for its attentive transcription of twenty-four Memphis Minnie lyrics, for having gathered and scrutinized such information and anecdotes about her as have survived, and for reminding us how starkly racist and sexist was the America she made her way in. Among the book's cogent points is that Minnie's image is indistinct because she flourished not in the so-called classic blues mode, a female vocalist fronting a male band, onstage, like Smith and Rainey, but rather in the self-accompanied, small-venue country and later Chicago blues, generally the purview of males, from Charley Patton to Broonzy and Waters.

However. Only 87 of the book's 255 pages (not counting discography and index) are devoted to Memphis Minnie's life, and even that part is marred by repetitive stylistic tics (like “it is noteworthy that,” before something is noted); whiffs of inadvertent condescension (“There is considerable evidence that Minnie was acutely aware of the unusual aspects of the life she chose to live”); fan-clubbish exclamations (“How else to explain the fact that everyone in Memphis in those days called her Aunt Minnie!”); and dime-store-academic jargon like “characterologi-cal principle” (a reference to her toughness).

In the rest of the book, the authors first set forth their critical
method: a vaporous mishmash of transmutational femino-Marxist “paranoiac-critical” Franco-Freudian-surrealistic theory. Then they provide interpretations of the lyrics. These interpretations, by and large, are either numbingly obvious and verbose (“So many of Minnie's songs deal with food or cooking that we would be justified in calling it one of the most significant and strategically important registers through which the meaning of her songs is transmitted”) or wildly far-fetched and belabored.

The Garons describe the “paranoiac-critical” approach, or “vehicle,” as “the imposing of a systematically deranged ‘delusion’ on to a hostile, ‘realistic’ frame.” Apparently this is meant to describe both Minnie's music and the authors’ approach to it. I am tempted to say that once you put
delusion
and
realistic
in quote marks, everything is up for grabs. But, if I may be excused for lapsing into italics as the Garons do occasionally when they seem to be losing track of Memphis Minnie entirely,
I am not necessarily opposed to everything's being up for grabs,
as long as we don't lose track of Memphis Minnie. “The paranoiac-critical method,” the Garons go on, “will often seize on a single ‘exterior’ manifestation to ‘explain’ or interpret aspects of life commonly thought to be separate from (or internal to) the manifestation itself. The confusion between internal and external is itself the clarity of the explanation.”

Well now. Clarification through confusion of inside and out is by no means something I reject out of hand. It has long been my contention, after all, that the quintessential Southern joke is about the old boy who, when asked whether he believed in infant baptism, said, “Believe in it? Hell, I've
seen it done.”
Have you ever made one of those Möbius strips, by taking a narrow slip of paper, giving it a single twist (thereby evoking Isaiah Berlin's phrase “the crooked timber of humanity”), and gluing its ends together? Presto: one surface, inner and outer the same. Another example of this sort of thing is the Bellamy Brothers’ “If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me?” And perhaps Robert E. Lee's “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” Many things that a hastily judgmental person might dismiss as self-contradictory can be appreciated only if considered subjectively and objectively at once. How can country music songs so often be weepy and yet sportive? Well, they're maudlin-wry. By the same token, fifties rock and roll is crazy-keen. Southern white religion: evangelical-discriminatory. Faulkner: dipsomaniacal-formal. The women of Tennessee Williams: delirious-constrictive. And the thinking of André Breton, as best I can make it out on brief acquaintance: psychoanalytical.
Psycho as in screw loose. It's lively, that thinking (in a systematically deranged sort of way), but does it have anything to do with the woman who wrote “I'm Talking 'Bout You #2”?

“Paranoiac-critical” is a term coined by Salvador Dalí, with an eye toward “the total discrediting of reality,” while hanging out with Breton and other French surrealists. In “Man, You Won't Give Me No Money,” Minnie sings: “You won't buy me no clothes to wear. “Want to take me over in France, and know I ain't got no business over there.” I'm not convinced that the Garons have got any either. I would describe their critical approach as giddy-stodgy. (I can't help noting, even though it is not noteworthy, that Garon was the middle name of Elvis's stillborn twin.)

“We view the blues as a totally authentic medium,” the Garons assert, which is big (in the old days, we might even have said “mighty white”) of them, but they also declare, “For us, the product of the artist and critic is not only the work of criticism but the work of art itself.” Minnie had no patter, didn't even introduce her songs, so the Garons feel the need to jump up onstage with her. In the first half of a sentence, they'll make sense enough: “First, we can see Minnie's songs as the eruption of the female and female desire into the typically male country discourse.” Then, in the second half, they will proceed to horn in on Minnie's act: “and we hope our entire book will function as an illumination of this mode of intervention, just as we see it as a structurally similar example of disruption itself.” They use the words
us
and
we
so often and obtrusively that this reader's fascination began, unwillingly, to drift away from Memphis Minnie toward the dynamics of the Garon-Garon relationship. Since Paul Garon's liner notes to the Columbia CD
Hoodoo Lady 1933-1937,
which is one of the best samples of Minnie's work, are straightforward and well written (he is also the author of a book about Peetie Wheatstraw, which I should have read but haven't), I am evilly tempted to ascribe the biography's hystero-theoretical quotient to Beth Garon. But that might just be because I am testosteronic-detached. Let
me say in my behalf, however, that when the authors attempt to make it “clear that women hear the blues in ways that men do not,” by citing the difference between what “the male author of this work always assumed” about a cited lyric and what “the female author assumed,” the female's assumption seems, to me, simply the more perceptive.

Tous les deux,
at any rate, the Garons have heaped upon the supremely no-nonsense Memphis Minnie, of all people, a load of flummery. They present us with an enormous wad of tulle and bubble wrap and tell us there's a wildcat in there. As they perceive it, their agenda is radically political: “A new reading, a new hearing, a new understanding transforms the consciousness of the listener/poet, and it is the politicized consciousness that is most capable of accomplishing the revolutionary project of changing the world.”

Well, maybe ditsy-stuffy interaction with the blues
will
render people less bourgeois and the world less phallocentric, and not a moment too soon. But surely one of the striking things about Minnie's lyrics is that they are so untendentious. It may be, as the Garons assert, that Minnie is engaging in tongue-in-cheek mimicry of “men's fetishization of penis size” when she dwells upon certain images. I would rather say that when it comes to stingers, bananas, rats caught by her kitty, butcher knives that slice a person's ham “from the fat on down,” and other examples of “something that I need,” she has a lot of good edgy fun with them. As she does with a female metaphor, so to speak, in “Socket Blues”:

She certainly voices hard-earned plaints about the fickleness of men, but she also sings of getting caught fooling around herself. And “I've been treated wrong, / But that's all right, I believe I'll get along.” Minnie can moan with authority, in “Moaning the Blues” and “Crazy Crying Blues,” but to me the voice of Bessie Smith is more affecting, in part because it carries a richer sense of heartbreak and of injustice more profound.

Minnie's voice is penetrating in a different way. It's insistent, without being nagging, and sharp, acrid almost, without being shrill. Minnie can
wrap her herself around a good insult song—hers is the first recording of a transparently euphemistic number called in various male versions “Dirty Mother for You” (Washboard Sam) or “Mother Fuyer” (B. B. King):