Long before Bob Dylan shocked the folk world by going electric, the pioneering musician known as Memphis Minnie (born Lizzie Douglas) turned the blues scene upside down when she started playing electric guitar in the early ’40s. Minnie’s groundbreaking performances even predated the first electric recordings released by Muddy Waters. Unfortunately, while you most definitely know Minnie’s music, it’s possible you’ve never heard her name.
Minnie, who started playing guitar as a young girl and ran away from home at the age of 13, was already a master at her craft by the time she was discovered by a talent scout alongside her then-husband, Wilbur Joe McCoy, in a Memphis barbershop in 1929.
Before long, the pair was brought to Columbia Records studio in New York to record their first songs. (That’s when “Lizzie Douglas” was rebranded “Memphis Minnie,” while McCoy took the stage name “Kansas Joe.”)
One of those songs was “When the Levee Breaks,” co-written by the couple about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which destroyed Minnie’s home.
“When the Levee Breaks” was a modest hit for Minnie and Joe. In 1971, however, Led Zeppelin turned the song into one of their most beloved tracks of all time when they released a cover of the song on the band’s untitled fourth album.
In the book When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin, author Mick Wall praised “When the Levee Breaks” as a “hypnotic, blues rock mantra,” while music critic Robert Christgau called it the triumph of the album, with a “symphonic crescendo” that went beyond anything the band had done before.
What did Memphis Minnie think about Led Zeppelin’s cover of “When the Levee Breaks”?
Sadly, we’ll never know if Minnie ever heard Led Zeppelin’s beloved cover of her song. It’s not certain if she ever heard or benefited from Jefferson Airplane’s version of her song “Me and My Chauffeur Blues,” either. After suffering a stroke, Minnie was confined to a wheelchair for the final years of her life in a Memphis nursing home. She died in 1973 at the age of 76.
It’s a shame that Minnie was never filmed playing the electric guitar, as her name has largely been overshadowed in music history by her male contemporaries. However, one review, written by acclaimed author Langston Hughes and published in the Chicago Defender, immortalizes what it was like to see Minnie perform at Chicago’s 230 Club in 1943.
“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,” Hughes wrote.
“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 the melody get lost under sheer noise, leaving only the rhythm to come through clear.”
“The rhythm fills the 230 Club with a deep and dusky heartbeat that overrides all modern amplification,” he added. “The rhythm is as old as Memphis Minnie’s most remote ancestor.”
Minnie’s competitors couldn’t help but acknowledge her talent, even if they were clearly intimidated.
“She was a great girl, but she was a woman,” Muddy Waters once said about Minnie, according to the Worcester Phoenix. “You know, in this business, I don’t know how you is in your business, you can be a little evil when…[laughs]. Yeah, you know, when a woman’s out there doing the job, you’re doing the job she’s doing, it could get a little evil sometimes.”
Nearly a century after Minnie recorded her first song, she’s still not a household name…but her legacy lives on.
Related: Iconic Singer-Songwriter, Who Paved the Way for Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, Vanished Without a Trace 52 Years Ago
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