Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday

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Description

From one of this country’s most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three a very powerful black women blues singers through a feminist lens. Angela Davis provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture.

The works of Rainey, Smith, and Holiday have been largely misunderstood by critics. Overlooked, Davis shows, has been the way their candor and bravado laid the groundwork for an aesthetic that allowed for the celebration of social, moral, and sexual values out of doors the constraints imposed by middle-class respectability. Through meticulous transcriptions of the entire extant lyrics of Rainey and Smith—published here in their entirety for the first time—Davis demonstrates how the roots of the blues extend beyond a musical tradition to serve as a conciousness-raising vehicle for American social memory. A stunning, indispensable contribution to American history, as boldly insightful as the women Davis praises, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism is a triumph.
The female blues singers of the 1920s, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, and Bessie Smith, not only invented a musical genre, but they also became models of how African American women could turn out to be economically independent in a culture that had not in the past allowed it. Both Smith and Rainey composed, arranged, and managed their own road bands. Angela Y. Davis’s study emphasizes the have an effect on that these singers, and later Billie Holiday, had on the poor and working-class communities from which they came. The artists addressed radical subjects such as physical and economic abuse, race relations, and female sexual power, including lesbianism. Ma Rainey was once well referred to as a lover of women in addition to men, and her song “Prove It on Me” describes a butch woman who dresses like a man and dates women. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism places the fluid sexuality of these women within a larger context of African American artists’ attempts to subvert and recreate The united states.

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