📍Beale Street, Memphis, TN 38103, USA
1910 – 1929“I was born Lizzie Douglas in Algiers, Louisiana, in June 1897, the eldest of thirteen children, and when I was a little girl my family moved to Walls, Mississippi, just south of Memphis. For Christmas in 1905 I got my first guitar, and I taught myself to play; by ten I could play the banjo, and by eleven I was playing guitar at parties. My family called me Kid. I didn't care for farm work or church, and in 1910, when I was about thirteen, I ran away from home to live on Beale Street in Memphis, the heart of Black music in the South, full of clubs, theatres, pawnshops and street musicians. I played guitar and sang on the street corners for tips for most of my teenage years, and when I ran out of money, I'd go home to my family's farm for a while, then come back. I could play as well as any man, and better than most, and I wasn't afraid of anyone. My street playing got me noticed, and from 1916 to 1920 I toured the South with the Ringling Brothers Circus. Back in Memphis, I met another guitarist, Kansas Joe McCoy, and in 1929 we started playing together and married. A talent scout heard us playing in front of a barber shop on Beale Street, and Columbia Records named me Memphis Minnie. Our song Bumble Bee was a hit, and in Chicago I became one of the most popular blues singers and guitarists of my time, writing more than two hundred songs, including When the Levee Breaks. Beale Street remembers me as one of its own.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today