Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday by Angela Y. Davis

Blues Legacies and Black Feminism:
Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday
by Angela Y. Davis

Blue Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Davis
Vintage; 1st edition (Jan. 26 1999)
464 pages

With Blues Legacies and Black Feminism long-time political activist, Angela Y. Davis, has written a brilliant analysis of early women's blues. Davis garnered widespread attention for her high-profile battles against civil rights abuses during the 1960s and 70s. In recent decades she has evolved into a formidable leader of the prison abolition movement. Her titles include Are Prisons Obsolete?, Abolition Democracy and The Meaning of Freedom. She is also the author of Women, Race and Class, Women, Race and Culture and a seminal autobiography written in the 70s that deeply influenced me. In Blues Legacies Davis demonstrates the way women's blues embody early feminist values, independent of the middle-class mores of the time. Ultimately, she recovers the integral role played by working class Black women in the development of an American esthetic.

The blues emerged in the decades following emancipation as African Americans found themselves with the autonomy to begin making music as individuals. During slavery they produced their songs collectively (spirituals and work tunes) as they laboured in the fields. With emancipation came two ingredients important to the creation of blues: the freedom to travel and the freedom to choose one's mate. Travel and sexual love soon developed into the genre's dominant themes.

Davis scrutinizes the lyrics of the two most prominent blueswomen of the period, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith. As opposed to the chaste, idealized notions of love that pervaded Euro-American music, the blues of Rainey and Smith anticipated the 1960s and sexual liberation. Songs such as Ma Rainey's Barrel House Blues celebrate women's desire:

Papa likes his sherry, mama likes her port

Papa likes to shimmy, mama likes to sport

Papa likes his bourbon, mama likes her gin

Papa likes his outside women, mama likes her outside men.

Barrel House Blues not only acknowledges the probability of a man's infidelity but assumes that women may engage in love affairs as well.

Blueswomen often sang about domestic violence or lesbianism and other subjects middle class culture considered taboo. They sang tales of love and pain to a community of struggling, self-supporting Black women like themselves. Davis explains how this exchange between listener and speaker (the African call-and-response) foreshadows the workings of support groups -- the gatherings that, decades later, would help middle-class white women form a collective feminist consciousness.

Bessie Smith

Blues Legacies questions the conventional perception of blues heroines as discarded, prostrate victims of love. Excerpts from Ma Rainey's Travellin' Blues and Bessie Smith's humorous Mama's Got the Blues depict women with the wherewithal to abandon town and start life anew elsewhere. These songs often portray women minus strong domestic ties. They suggest a kind of female autonomy that had been virtually unheard of in American society.

It comes as no surprise that the Black church of the period denounced the blues as the devil's music. It is much more distressing, however, to learn that most major figures of the Harlem Renaissance, that flourishing of Black culture in New York during the 1920 and 30s, also belittled women's blues. The Black intelligentsia wished to separate itself as far as possible from the masses, and eagerly embraced the values of white society.

Among the handful of Harlem literati to recognize the importance of the blues were author Zora Neale Hurston, as well as poet Langston Hughes, who derived his own esthetic from the structure of the blues. Not surprisingly, Hughes and Hurston remain the Renaissance's two most enduring figures. Today, the blues appears in the work of contemporary authors, from the high literary style of Toni Morrison in Jazz to the more popular style of Terry McMillan in Waiting To Exhale.

Blues Legacies covers many more topics than I have room to mention here. Davis's prose is at times slightly academic, but never dry. The book also contains an extensive compendium of lyrics to Smith's and Rainey's recorded songs, as well as lovely photographs.

Billie Holiday

Davis wraps up her discussion with a couple of chapters on Billie Holiday, although she is careful not to characterize Lady Day as primarily a blues artist. Davis describes the way the singer managed to imbue seemingly innocuous lyrics with profound meaning. The section powerfully illuminates blueswomen's ability to mould a hostile language to their own artful purposes.

In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Davis credits black, working-class women as prescient in their espousal of feminist values; it highlights their contributions to the creation of Black and American culture. Where earlier book-length studies tended to marginalize women's contributions or simply to render biographical or chronological facts, Davis portrays women's blues as a powerful historical force. She recovers something precious: a missing link between slavery times and today.

An earlier version of this piece appeared in the Montreal Gazette.