Memphis Minnie and Sister Rosetta Tharpe: The Women the History Books Missed

Memphis Minnie was born Lizzie Douglas in eighteen ninety-seven in Algiers, Louisiana, and grew up in Walls, Mississippi, twelve miles south of Memphis. She began recording for Columbia Records in nineteen twenty-nine. Over the next twenty-five years she recorded more than two hundred sides for Columbia, Decca, Vocalion, and other labels, making her one of the most prolific recording artists of the pre-war blues era, regardless of gender.

She played guitar with a ferocity and technical precision that her male contemporaries noticed and acknowledged. Big Bill Broonzy, in his autobiography, described a guitar contest in Chicago in the early nineteen thirties in which Memphis Minnie performed against him and won. The exact date of that contest is documented in Broonzy's memoir rather than in independently verified records, and blues historians note that some chronologies may conflate contests from different years. What is documented without dispute: Minnie was a better guitar player than most of the men around her, and the men around her knew it. She adopted electric guitar beginning in nineteen forty-one, before many male blues artists made the transition, and used the amplification to drive her sound harder.

She is buried in Memphis. For decades the grave was unmarked. Bonnie Raitt and other musicians eventually funded a headstone.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was born in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, in nineteen fifteen, approximately one hundred miles west of Memphis. She came to national prominence singing gospel music in the nineteen thirties, then crossed into secular blues and popular music in ways that scandalized the gospel world she came from. Her guitar playing, loud, technically complex, rhythmically driven, directly influenced Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard, all of whom have cited her. She developed the technique of playing distorted electric guitar as a lead instrument before rock and roll had a name for what she was doing.

She was largely absent from the canonical histories of rock and roll that were assembled in the nineteen sixties and seventies, because those histories were assembled by men writing about other men. The music she made is still audible in everything that followed it.