Ask anyone to name the first female blues guitarist and you’ll probably be told it was Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Or maybe Big Mama Thornton. Memphis Minnie came before both of them.

The most popular and prolific blueswoman outside the vaudeville tradition, she earned the respect of critics, the support of record-buying fans, and the unqualified praise of the blues artists she worked with throughout her long career.

Born in Tennessee way back in 1897 (though she always claimed she was born in New Orleans and raised there in Algiers), Lizzie Douglas was the eldest of 13 siblings.

She picked up her first guitar when she was eight after her parents moved to Mississippi, and then to Tennessee, and she ran away from home at the age of 13 and moved to the thriving blues scene in Beale Street, Memphis, playing her guitar on street corners and earning her nickname of Memphis Minnie.

She soon made a name for herself with her guitar playing and was invited to tour the South with Ringling Brothers Circus, returning to Memphis afterwards to build on her growing reputation, supporting herself with sex work on the side.

In person she presented as feminine and ladylike, with a penchant for fancy dresses and jewellery, but had a reputation – earned on the mean streets of Memphis – for being as tough as they come, chewing tobacco and using her sharp tongue, fists, knives and guns to deal with any unwanted attention.

Her recording career began in 1929 – the year of the Great Depression – after she went to New York with her second husband, a blues musician called Kansas Joe McCoy.

A talent scout from Columbia Records spotted her playing for dimes in front of a barbershop and she would go on to record more than 200 songs over the course of a career that lasted into the 1960s.

Her early recordings were duets with her husband, including her signature song Bumble Bee and their first release When The Levee Breaks, and they moved to Chicago to cash in on the popularity of the blues as musicians were migrating there from the Southern states, though they toured mostly in the South.

A few years later Minnie won a “cutting contest” against Big Bill Broonzy, who was astounded by her guitar playing – she could “pick a guitar and sing as good as any man I’ve ever heard”, he said – singing what would become her biggest hit, Me And My Chauffeur Blues, and another called Looking The World Over.

She died in 1973 and the inscription on the back of her gravestone, in the Mississippi Delta where she began playing, reads: “The hundreds of sides Minnie recorded are the perfect material to teach us about the blues.

“For the blues are at once general, and particular, speaking for millions, but in a highly singular, individual voice. Listening to Minnie’s songs we hear her fantasies, her dreams, her desires, but we will hear them as if they were our own.”