I may have been the last person— other than her murderer—to talk to Selby Minner before her murder on Monday, June 9. She and I planned to meet that day, but when we talked by phone around 4:30 p.m., we were both tired and decided to wait until another day.
At her jam session at her Down Home Blues Club in Rentiesville a day earlier, she told me she’d be devoting all her time from that moment to getting ready for her Dusk to Dawn Blues Festival coming up over the Labor Day weekend.
She was happy I’d be devoting my time to our joint project—writing a screenplay about her life with Blues Legend D.C. Minner. Although he received probably every blues award possible, she told me I was the first person to suggest his life should be portrayed in a movie. Before I started, we needed to sign an option agreement—the reason we’d intended to meet Monday.
I met Selby for the first time a few months ago at a board meeting of the Eufaula Area Arts Council. She was wearing a Blues Festival tee shirt, and I told her since moving to this area, I’d wanted to go to the festival, but hesitated to go alone. She then identified herself as the festival founder and told me to be a volunteer helper and I wouldn’t be alone.
I immediately knew this was a woman who could become a best friend. Some time later I was happy to invite her to speak on the history of the blues at a Friends of the Eufaula Memorial Library meeting. She accepted and before our conversation concluded, we’d made a date to have dinner together on the VFW steak night.
At that dinner she invited me to come to her Sunday jam sessions, and I’ve tried not to miss any since then. We’ve shared many long conversations about her being a 27-year-old, 5’2” white woman marrying a 41-year-old, 6’ tall Black man in 1976 when such a marriage was scandalous.
Then I read the book LaNelda Hughes wrote about him—Mama Said This Boy Is Gonna Be Somebody, and I told her I would have married him too. My parents would have thrown fits also, just as hers did.
“I thought once they knew him, they’d come around,” she said, “probably within three years. But it took ten years.”
When they did come around, they planned trips around Selby’s and D.C.’s touring schedules.
D.C.’s family and the town of Rentiesville accepted Selby immediately, and her white face shone brightly on the front row of the church choir. During this time she learned all about D.C.’s spending three years studying Yogamande’s Autobiography of a Yoga, which helped him refine his beliefs. And also about the sev-en months and sixteen days he gave up speaking and communicated by writing notes on a clipboard.
“I think he’d intended to go speechless for a year,” Selby said, “but he stopped because he was neglecting his responsibilities to his children.”
D.C. had a son Tony and a daughter Sheila by his wife Doris, who was seven years older than he and had a son Bo Bo before she married him. They divorced in 1965, and she died of a stroke in 1968.
He toured as a musician for ten years and met Selby in 1971 when she was also touring with Jim Donovan. His grandmother told him when he met the true love of his life, he’d know it. And he did.
“I didn’t realize it, but he was watching me for a long time,” Selby said. “He came to my gigs just to watch me—never letting me know.”
Once he did, their romance evolved quickly. “Even Jim Donovan said we were meant for each other,” Selby said.
They went on the road until 1988, when they returned to Rentiesville. “We knew not to go to the South,” Selby said, “and we didn’t have to worry about housing because we were selfcontained.”
Asking for a picture of their bus was on my list of information I needed from Selby— that I now will never get. She assured me that D.C. always kept their transportation in top working order, knowing the difficulties they might have if stopped for problems.
Back in Rentiesville, they missed seeing the other musicians they’d seen on the road, so they invited them to their first Dusk to Dawn Blues Festival in 1991. Seven bands played and 750 people attended. Every year since then, the event has grown and had as many as 5,000 people and 30 bands drawn to a town of 85 regular residents.
They also became active in the Blues in School program from 1970 to 2006, helping young people in alternate schools.
“Most of those students thought they were different and didn’t belong,” Selby said. “D.C. would say, ‘Look at us. I’m Black, she’s white, how different can you be? Change the way you look at yourself, and choose the life you want. That’s what we did.’” Selby and D.C. continued working with young people even after he lost both kidneys and had a heart attack. “He called it ‘doing a Doppelganger,’” Selby said. “He’d pull himself out of bed and inspire those kids. They loved him.”
After D.C.’s death at age 73 in 2008, Selby continued working with students, managing the Festival and Oklahoma Blues Hall of Fame, and inviting musicians for the Sunday blues jam session.
She did these because she loved them all, but also in memory of the husband she loved. The question is: will these things continue now that she’s gone? And will the inspiring story of the Minner’s lives together ever be made into a movie? I hope so, and I hope to be the one to write it.
If she and I had not both been so tired on the dreadful Monday of her death, I’d already have her signature on an option agreement to make that happen.
I will never forget the stories she told me, the passion she poured into her work, and the way she always looked forward, not back. As the old blues saying goes: Don’t look back—you’re not going that way.
