Memphis Minnie

Lizzie Douglas, known as Memphis Minnie, was the most commercially successful and musically accomplished female blues guitarist of the pre-war era, and one of the few women who competed on equal terms with male blues musicians in an aggressively male-dominated field. She was a virtuoso guitarist who could play in any style from delicate fingerpicking to hard-driving electric, and she famously defeated Big Bill Broonzy in a blues contest at a Chicago club. Her recording career spanned from 1929 to 1954, producing over 200 sides for Vocalion, Decca, Columbia, Okeh, and other labels. Her compositions 'Bumble Bee,' 'Me and My Chauffeur Blues,' 'Nothing in Rambling,' and 'In My Girlish Days' are blues standards. She was married three times to musicians (Kansas Joe McCoy, Ernest Lawlars 'Little Son Joe'), and her partnerships shaped the sound of Memphis and Chicago blues. She retired to Memphis in the mid-1950s and spent her final years in a nursing home.