DJ Spooky

Saturday Jun. 1 2019 7:00 PM Memphis Minnie: In Search of the Hoodoo Lady A FREE TRIBUTE CONCERT CELEBRATING BLUES LEGEND MEMPHIS MINNIE https://www.artsbrookfield.com Tickets: FREE The 2019 edition of the New York Guitar Festival celebrates 20 years of live concerts, panels, and workshops that span the huge range of the guitar. And it celebrates one of the instrument’s pivotal but overlooked figures: Memphis Minnie. “Memphis Minnie was an incredible force during one of the most trying times for a black woman to be a performer in popular music in America,” says Amythyst Kiah, the singer/songwriter/guitarist who will be part of the tribute concert. Minnie began her career in 1929, recording the song “When The Levee Breaks” with her husband Joe McCoy, known as Kansas Joe. That song would go on to great fame when Led Zeppelin recorded it in 1971. She was an early exponent of the Delta blues style – an urgent, passionate guitarist. But she was also a formative influence on the electric blues sound associated with Chicago, and her career in the 1930s and 1940s – both solo and with her later husband, Lil Son Joe – produced hit songs like “Bumble Bee” and “Me and My Chauffeur Blues,” which have also gone on to long and productive musical lives. Memphis Minnie died (yes, in Memphis) in 1973, largely forgotten by a music world that had moved on to rock & roll, soul, and funk – all of which would be hard to imagine without that electric blues sound she helped shape. But guitarists in the know were aware of her importance – Bonnie Raitt paid for her headstone. On June 1, several generations of musicians (not all of them guitarists) gather at Brookfield Place to celebrate Minnie’s music and her enduring legacy. Multiple Grammy winner Fantastic Negrito, Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid, the elemental live performer Toshi Reagon, and Rachael Price from Lake Street Dive are just some of the musicians who will perform their own interpretations of the timeless sounds of Memphis Minnie.