Special Guest Blogger: Memphis Minnie

They called me a pioneer, an icon, a trailblazer for female musicians. It’s terribly flattering, of course, but it also makes me want to laugh until my corsets pop. A pioneer? Good heavens. I was a woman with a guitar and a rent to pay. Pioneering was for chaps with silly beards and maps of places they had no business being. My only map was the one on the back of a Greyhound bus ticket, and the only place I had business being was any stage that would have me.
They like to talk about my humble beginnings. That’s a polite way of saying I was born in a ditch, more or less, in Algiers, Louisiana. My dear old papa was a sharecropper, which is a fancy word for farming someone else’s land for the privilege of not starving to death. Fun times.
I was the eldest of 13 children The first thing I ever got that was truly my own wasn’t a doll or a pretty ribbon. It was a guitar. A beat-up, six-stringed bit of wood with a neck like a bent spoon.
People get terribly misty-eyed about me running away with the circus when I was thirteen. They paint it as a grand, romantic adventure. It wasn't. It was loud, it smelled of elephants and the pay was almost non-existent but I learned a few things. I learned how to sing over a lion's roar, how to sleep on a moving wagon without falling off, and most importantly, how to make a racket that people would actually pay a nickel to hear.
Then came Kansas City Joe McCoy. Bless his cotton socks. Oh, we made a beautiful racket together, didn't we? They called us The Kansas Joe & Memphis Minnie Show. It was a merger, really. I’d write a song, he’d sing it and then we’d go out and charm the socks off a room full of tired factory workers and dubious-looking characters. I wrote 'Bumble Bee' for him. A little tune about being sweet on someone.
They talk about my thumping style, how I played that guitar like it owed me money. B.B. King, a lovely chap, once said I was the best guitarist he’d ever heard. Fine praise from a man who could make an instrument  weep.
But the part that truly tickles me is 'When the Levee Breaks'. I wrote a little ditty about a rather damp and unpleasant experience. A spot of inclement weather, you might say. A flood. Ruined a perfectly good pair of shoes which brings me to the grand finale. The curtain call. My tragic end. Let me assure you, it was nowhere near as dramatic as they make it out to be.
I’d been ill for a while and my body was giving up the ghost long before the ghost was ready to leave. I was in a nursing home in Memphis after a series of strokes and i went from a young, energetic woman who recorded over 200 songs to to a cranky old woman in a bed, and the next thing, I wasn't even that.