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" Memphis Minnie to be honored. "
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By Norm Shaw
Memphis Minnie will be honored at the third annual Beale Street Blues Society Mess Around and Jug Band Festival, April 27 at B.B. King's Blues Club on Beale. Joyce Cobb, Brenda Patterson, DiAnne Price and Sandy Carroll are scheduled to perform, according to Blues Society first vice president Dennis Brooks. Other performers at the Mess Around are expected to be added, Brooks said. This year's show begins at 3 p.m. and will continue until midnight. Admission is $10. Each year, the Beale Street Blues Society selects a performer to honor. Brooks said Memphis Minnie was a natural choice. "If you surveyed female blues singers, most would say that Minnie is their favorite," Brooks says. "She had a great influence on so many people." Memphis Minnie was born Lizzie Douglas in 1896. At a young age, she married Casey Bill Weldon of the Memphis Jug Band. She made her first records in the late 1920s with her second husband, Joe McCoy. In 1930, she recorded the blues classic "Bumble Bee," which brought her great success but led to the end of her marriage to McCoy. She remarried to Ernest "Little Son Joe" Lawlar and recorded a string of popular songs, helping establish the Chicago blues sound. Following World War II, she and Lawlar helped such performers as Muddy Waters, Little Walter and more get their careers started in Chicago. She left Chicago and music after Lawlar died in 1957. She lived out her life in a convalescent home, only being rediscovered at the end of her life. She died in 1973. There are plans to dedicate a "note" on Beale Street for Minnie, Brooks says. Details still need to be ironed out, but the note likely will be placed on the east end of Beale. "This event just keeps growing," Brooks says. "We're making some headway on sponsors, so the show should just keep getting better." For more information, call the Beale Street Blues Society hot line at 527-4585.
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