Blues legacies and Black feminism: Gertrude ''Ma'' Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday

Activist Angela Davis explores the expressions of protest conveyed by Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, each of whom merits individual attention in collections. An insightful, important look at three women blues singers. INTRODUCTIONBlues Legacies & Black Feminism is an examination of the work of three women artists who played decisive roles in shaping the history of popular music culture in the United States. It is an inquiry into the ways their recorded performances divulge unacknowledged traditions of feminist consciousness in working-class black communities. The connection I attempt to make between blues legacies & black feminism is not without its contradictions & discontinuities; to attempt to impute a feminist consciousness as we define it today to Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, & Billie Holiday would be preposterous, & not very interesting at that. What is most interesting—& provocative—about the bodies of work each of these women left behind is the ways in which hints of feminist attitudes emerge from their music through fissures of patriarchal discourses. While I try to situate their recorded performances, the primary material with which I work, in relation to historical developments of the 1920s, 1930s, & 1940s, I am most concerned with how these women’s performances appear through the prism of the present, & with what these interpretations can tell us about past & present forms of social consciousness...Angela Y. Davis is the editor of If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance and the author of Angela Davis: An Autobiography; Women, Race, & Class; and Women, Culture, & Politics. She is Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. From one of this country's most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial 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 outside the constraints imposed by middle-class respectability. Through meticulous transcriptions of all the 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. Examines how Black female blues singers expressed a working class, feminist perspective.;I used to be your sweet mama : ideology, sexuality, and domesticity -- Mama's got the blues : rivals, girlfriends, and advisors -- Here come my train : traveling themes and women's blues -- Blame it on the blues : Bessie Smith, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, and the politics of blues protest -- Preaching the blues : spirituality and self-consciousness -- Up in Harlem every Saturday night : blues and the Black aesthetic -- When a woman loves a man : social implications of Billie Holiday's love songs -- "Strange fruit" : music and social consciousness -- Lyrics to songs recorded by Gertrude "Ma" Rainey -- Lyrics to songs recorded by Bessie Smith.