Davis, Angela Y.

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

Vintage (New York)

1998

OUR SYNOPSIS: Angela Y. Davis explores the musical careers of Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, and Gertrude “Ma” Rainey as lenses for understanding working-class Black feminism. She demonstrates that their music articulated working-class Black women’s experiences of romantic love shaped by their post-emancipation historical context. They strike a tone of empowerment, of overcoming systemic social and economic structural inequities. Davis groups her analyses of Smith and Rainey’s music together as showcasing blues origins. She then shifts to Holiday’s recordings, in a later period and in greater relation to jazz, arguing Holiday communicated a sense of radical possibility for social change.

BIG QUESTIONS:

What makes representations of love in music a particularly insightful topic for understanding human experiences?
How can we differentiate self-expression and social commentary as expressed in music?

FEATURE QUOTES:

“There are important historical reasons that romanticized images of marriage—and the permanency in personal relationships implied by this social institution—are absent from women’s blues. Normative representations of marriage as the defining goal of women’s lives blatantly contradicted black social realities during the half-century following emancipation. A poor black woman of the era who found herself deserted or rejected by a male lover was not merely experiencing private troubles; she also was caught in a complex web of historical circumstances.” (18)
“The blues idiom requires absolute honesty in the portrayal of black life. It is an idiom that does not recognize taboos: whatever figures into the larger picture of working-class African American realities—however morally repugnant it may be to the dominant culture or to the black bourgeoisie—is an appropriate subject of blues discourse.” (107)

PRIMARY SOURCES:

Billie Holiday, “Giants of Jazz - 3 LP (1938-46),” Internet Archive.

BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:

The Billie Holiday portions of the book.