. . . . Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billy Holiday (1998) by Angela Davis.
The moment we entered into her thesis, there was all kinds of self-kicking going on. It was so obvious. Prior to abolition African American music was primarily a communal expression, done in the fields, in worship, at funerals. It was also primarily spiritual.
After abolition, African Americans needed a whole new musical discourse. They had to make it up because never before had there been opportunity in these lands for them to make music that wasn't communal, that wasn't about the lament of the condition and the yearning for that condition to have passed away, leaving them free to do as other people did.
For Black women in particular, there was and could be no tradition that was about love, about sex, about romance, about what she wanted for herself, for Black women didn't have choice until after abolition -- and certainly wouldn't be allowed to sing about wanting to marry and raise her own children herself while cooking, cleaning, digging, and having her children go on master's credit side of the ledger and sold off any old time. So post abolition Black women had to invent a gendered, individual, popular musical expression for themselves.
This was particularly necessary for Black women who would have preferred women as their sexual partners.
And thus, here we come to the Blues, performed by a solo singer, with a single instrument, the guitar, played by herself. Of course these women couldn't afford more complicated set-ups, but this they could.
Of course a man got the credit as "inventor of the Blues"*, Robert Johnson, with a powerful legendary tale of meeting the devil at the crossroads as to how he did it to boot.
Why haven't we read this book before?
* Musicologists of course, know better. They all know there were a slew of performers.
2 comments:
Recall this book was published at the end of the 90's. Davis had been working on it, of course, for a long time previous. This book provides a lot original research and critical thinking about these figures and the milieu out of which they emerged -- none of which we saw in academia yet. The Blues were of no importance to anyone then, other than few musicologists -- who weren't academics, such as Bob Palmer -- and other music people. And the women, and their own sexual - gender concerns most definitely not part of that either. Even the historians who were beginning to grapple with the social and cultural issues of this most significant portion of the US population who came out of generations of enslaved labor and what that meant for them -- were few and far between -- and the pushback was terrific, and still is. It wasn't yet even recognized that even hetero white women in all walks of life have experience that is not the same as the hetero white male in those walks of life, much less what it is for African American women. And the music industry then as now, has always been extremely sexually abusive and exploitive of women, and most of all, of Black women.
ETA: When Angela Davis was in an academic faculty position -- how many Black academics in prestigious, non-HBC were there? Very, very few. How many of those were women? Even fewer to none. Generally women weren't on faculties period, outside of the Literature depts. Since then too, academia has instituted many varieties of new programs of study that didn't exist then either.
These matters just didn't matter, much less had their existence recognized back in those days.
Which is why the reichlicans are shyte crazy now and pushing back against all this with everything they can devise, most of all with lavishly funded academic programs and think tanks to push their crazy ignorant agendas in everything from economics to history. Recall Truss and all those tories taking a wrecking ball to the UK's economy came out of neoliberal programs pushing that multiply disproven trickle down theory and that of the British Nationalist party -- i.e. the same as here; neo fascism / white xtian nationalist authoritarianism.
Shyte, white males both here and the UK are still screaming that slavery in the Americas had nothing to do with funding capitalism and the industrialism that took off. That began already when the first academic study came from a Trinidadian scholar, Eric Williams, at Oxford IN !938!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/23/eighty-years-late-groundbreaking-work-on-slave-economy-is-finally-published-in-uk
The jerkwaddies on Charlie Stross's blog repeated word for word everything that was thrown at that scholar in 1938 -- moreover his work wasn't allowed to be published:
https://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/economics/history/paper113/harley113.pdf
Nevertheless this is the accepted historical narrative now, among reputable, respectable academics and scholars, despite the screamers. So they are putting every bit of their own networks up against this since it doesn't center brilliant, superior white MEN -- BRITISH or AMERICAN WHITE MEN -- making industrialization happen because the rest of the world is too stupid to do it. And here we are, with their industrialization, capitalist outlook, burning down our one and only planet. They do get the credit for that, by golly.
Here's another work (2020) that goes quite into how work in the Blues was going even by the 1960's -- when Davis came up, after all. She was doing pioneering work.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/annye-c-anderson/brother-robert/
[ " The blues queens of the 1920s toured far and wide and sold millions of records. Their ‘empress’, Bessie Smith, appeared on Broadway and in movies. After her death in 1937, a memorial concert was held at Carnegie Hall. But Smith’s country cousins – ‘walking musicians’ – were lucky if they got recorded at all. ‘They were the offside,’ the Mississippi talent scout H.C. Speir said. ‘They never was known ... to anybody.’
By the time record companies got round to transferring their scratchy 78 rpm discs to LP, those old musicians had all but vanished. It wasn’t until folk music aficionados started touring the country in search of old records that a handful of them – Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt – were ‘rediscovered’. They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified blues in Detroit and Chicago, were repackaged and resold in the 1960s as the ‘Real Folk Blues’.
When Columbia Records released King of the Delta Blues Singers – a collection of tracks by Robert Johnson – in 1961, it was the first time in decades that more than a handful of people had access to more than a handful of songs by any country bluesman. Bob Dylan got an acetate from his producer, John Hammond, and played it for his mentor, Dave Van Ronk. (‘He didn’t think Johnson was very original,’ Dylan reported. ‘I knew what he meant, but I thought just the opposite.’) Brian Jones played the album for Keith Richards, who thought he was listening to two guitarists. (‘It took me a long time to realise he was actually doing it all by himself,’ Richards said.) The Rolling Stones used Johnson’s songs to convey melancholy and stasis (‘Love in Vain’ on Let It Bleed) as well as virility (‘Stop Breaking Down’ on Exile on Main Street). Led Zeppelin borrowed from Johnson several times before releasing their euphoric version of ‘Travelling Riverside Blues’. With Cream, Eric Clapton transformed ‘Cross Road Blues’ into a portentous rocker, then turned the song into his calling card, giving his box set the title Crossroads and starting the Crossroads Centre – a rehab centre on Antigua. .... ]
--- LRB, Vol. 44 No. 19 · 6 October 2022
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