Blues Legacies and Black Feminism

Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday

Browse Return to Previous Page       Related Subjects African American Studies All Subjects Feminist theory/Women's studies

by Angela Y. Davis

Random House, Inc

Due/Published February 1999, 464 pages, paper

ISBN 0679771263

New in paper! (S99)

Toni Morrison has called this book, "a complete revelation to me and a serious re-education."

Newsday has said of it, "Extraordinary . . . Davis has given voice to a complex feminist history that might otherwise have eluded history."

Davis, author of Women, Race, and Class and Women, Culture, and Politics gives us an analysis of the blues. She provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of the Rainey, Smith, and Holiday as the articulation of a black, working-class feminist consciousness at odds with mainstream American culture.

Davis says that women's blues have been largely misunderstood by critics, that the way their candor and bravado laid the groundwork for an aesthetic that broke through the constraints of middle-class respectability. She presents transcriptions of all the extant lyrics of Rainey and Smith--published in their entirely for the first time--and demonstrates how the blues extend beyond a musical tradition to reveal an alternative to mainstream American values.

Review

If nothing else Davis's transcription of Rainey's, Smith's, and Holiday's words is alone an important contribution to music history, and ultimately the cultural history of the black working-class. Davis's decision to print the words that these artists sang reflects her focus on how their performances reflected a protofeminist consciousness within working-class black communities. Her close and nuanced analysis of the artists' works produces an interpretation that views the forging of a black working-class legacy of feminism emerging "from their music through fissures of patriarchal discourses." The overtly sexual nature of many blues songs makes it a natural site for the articulation of sexuality and gender, often challenging middle-class norms. Furthermore, Davis argues that Rainey, Smith, and Holiday "constructed seemingly antagonistic relationships as noncontradictory oppositions," Davis continues, "A female narrator in a woman's blues song who represents herself as entirely subservient to male desire might simultaneously express autonomous desire and a refusal to allow her mistreating lover to drive her to psychic despair." Finally, Davis's extraordinary work amplifies the tradition of Black feminism, exposing multiple strands in its development. Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz, writes, 'When ladies sang the blues, they also elaborated an aesthetics of resistance. By taking their lives and words so seriously, Angela Davis liberates the true voices of three of the most remarkable women in modern American history. This is a stunning contribution to our understanding of the dialectics of gender, race, and class."