List Books » Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday
Authors: Angela Y. Davis
ISBN-13: 9780679771265, ISBN-10: 0679771263
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Date Published: January 1999
Edition: 1 VINTAGE
Jazz, it is widely accepted, is the signal original American contribution to world culture. Angela Davis shows us how the roots of that form in the blues must be viewed not only as a musical tradition but as a life-sustaining vehicle for an alternative black working-class collective memory and social consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American middle-class values. And she explains how the tradition of black women blues singers - represented by Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday - embodies not only an artistic triumph and aesthetic dominance over a hostile popular music industry but an unacknowledged proto-feminist consciousness within working-class black communities. Through a close and riveting analysis of these artists' performances, words, and lives, Davis uncovers the unmistakable assertion and uncompromising celebration of non-middle-class, non-heterosexual social, moral, and sexual values.
In her provocative book, Davis, the well-known sixties radical, professor and author (Women, Culture, and Politics; Women, Race, and Class) finds, in the work of three pivotal artists of the blues and jazz era, "rich terrain for examining a historical feminist consciousness that reflected the lives of working-class black communities." Through her close readings of their lyrics, which she transcribed (and presents as the book's second half), Davis explores the meanings behind the performances of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith. Toppling the prevailing image of the tragic blues woman, she finds that the songs don't portray the desolate and deserted woman; rather, "the most frequent stance assumed by the women in these songs is independence and assertivenessindeed defiancebordering on and sometimes erupting into violence." She also offers ample evidence to dispute claims that women's blues were personal, not political, arguing that their songs created consciousness by naming the issues. Her readings of Billie Holiday's lyrics are less successful, perhaps because it is difficult to capture in words Holiday's subversive renderings of popular love songs. Still, Davis's book should be read by both scholars and music aficionados for its expressive reading of these singers' complex works.
Acknowledgments | ||
Introduction | ||
I Used to be Your Sweet Mama: Ideology, Sexuality, and Domesticity | 3 | |
Mama's Got the Blues: Rivals, Girlfriends, and Advisors | 42 | |
Here Come My Train: Traveling Themes and Women's Blues | 66 | |
Blame It on the Blues: Bessie Smith, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, and the Politics of Blues Protest | 91 | |
Preaching the Blues: Spirituality and Self-consciousness | 120 | |
Up in Harlem Every Saturday Night: Blues and the Black Aesthetic | 138 | |
When a Woman Loves a Man: Social Implications of Billie Holiday's Love Songs | 161 | |
"Strange Fruit": Music and Social Consciousness | 181 | |
Lyrics to Songs Recorded by Gertrude "Ma" Rainey | 199 | |
Lyrics to Songs Recorded by Bessie Smith | 257 | |
Notes | 359 | |
Works Consulted | 393 | |
Index | 407 | |
Permissions Acknowledgments | 423 |