Black Music Sunday is a weekly sequence highlighting all issues Black music, with over 250 stories protecting performers, genres, historical past, and extra, every that includes its personal vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll discover some acquainted tunes and maybe an introduction to one thing new.
Previously, when the music style “blues” and its musicians have been written about, mentioned, and analyzed by music critics and students, the dialog often referenced nice “bluesmen.” Blueswomen have been hardly ever a part of the dialog.
Nonetheless, in recent times, extra consideration is being paid to the foundational ladies who by way of their efforts not solely modified the blues but in addition have been key gamers in what would change into rhythm and blues and rock and roll. Groundbreaking feminist scholarship has been key within the un-erasure of their historical past. One such contribution got here from a supply that many blues aficionados have been shocked by—political activist and scholar Angela Davis. In 1998, she printed “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday.”
The Blues Basis noted:
In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Davis, controversial activist, writer, and professor extensively recognized for her revolutionary politics, argues towards some standard views of girls and their songs within the blues. The lyrics sung by Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Vacation, offered within the greater than 200 transcriptions on this guide, embodied energy, social consciousness, and feminist energy in Davis’ evaluation. And, in distinction to the idealized social mores usually expressed by the Black center class and white society in in style music of the period, blues lyrics in response to Davis manifested “provocative and pervasive sexual-including homosexual-imagery,” incorporating responses to violence, infidelity and misogyny.
Give a hearken to Davis on SFJAZZ’s “Fridays at 5” on June 5, 2020, discussing Vacation’s “Unusual Fruit” and Abel Meeropol’s authorship:
I’ve featured a cross part of blueswomen right here through the years, most notably Big Mama Thornton, Ma Rainey, and others, like Memphis Minnie.
Women’s History Month seems like the suitable time to discover them once more and maybe make an introduction of their music to newcomers. It’s additionally an excellent day to deliver again recollections for his or her followers. I’m delighted to report that there at the moment are some wonderful documentaries, and clips obtainable on YouTube, and by way of your native PBS stations, which I counsel you watch. Listed below are a number of:
“The Ladies Sing the Blues” is a 1989 documentary directed by Tom Lenz (to not be confused with the 1972 function movie “Woman Sings the Blues,” starring Diana Ross).
It is a quick Bessie Smith clip from the movie, containing her solely display screen look.
The documentary consists of Ethel Waters, whose title is never talked about when lists are drawn up noting “blues ladies.” The John F. Kennedy Middle for the Performing Arts notes:
Often called “Candy Mama Stringbean” for her slender determine, Ethel Waters may sing the blues past evaluate. Her tender, refined voice, theatrical fashion, and signature shimmy captivated Black and white audiences alike.
Waters grew up within the chaotic distress of a Philadelphia slum. “Nobody raised me,” she recalled. “I simply ran wild.” Waters gladly put all of it behind her to tour on the vaudeville circuit. She ended up in New York Metropolis, acting on the phases of each the Lincoln and Lafayette Theatres.
In 1919, she grew to become one of many first Black artists employed by Black Swan Information. The industrial success of two 1921 recordings—“Down Residence Blues” and “Oh, Daddy”—landed Waters a touring gig with Fletcher Henderson and the Black Swan Troubadours.
Musicologist Robin Armstrong contributed a extra in-depth biography of Waters for Musician Information (word: content material warning):
Singer and actress Ethel Waters had a particularly troublesome childhood. In actual fact, she opened her autobiography His Eye Is on the Sparrow with these phrases: “I used to be by no means a baby. I by no means was coddled, or preferred, or understood by my household. I by no means felt I belonged. I used to be at all times an outsider…. No one introduced me up.” She was conceived in violence and raised in violence. She had a minimal training at greatest, dropping out of faculty early to go to work as a maid. However regardless of her inauspicious beginnings, Ethel Waters made historical past, garnering many laurels and lots of “firsts.” She was the primary black lady to seem on radio (on April 21, 1922); the primary black lady to star on her personal on the Palace Theater in New York (in 1925); the primary black lady to star in a industrial community radio present (in 1933); the primary singer to introduce 50 songs that grew to become hits (in 1933); the primary black singer to seem on tv (in 1939); and the primary black lady to star on Broadway in a dramatic play (additionally in 1939). She is remembered as a lot for her effective performing as for her expressive singing—and much more for her spirit.
When Waters’s mom, Louise Anderson, a quiet, non secular woman, was in her early teenagers, an area boy named John Waters raped her at knifepoint. Shortly after Waters was born, Anderson married Norman Howard, a railroad employee. Waters glided by the title Howard for a number of years and used a number of different names, relying on whom she was dwelling with, however lastly settled on her father’s title.
Due to the style by which Waters was conceived, her mom discovered it arduous to simply accept the kid, so the little woman was despatched went to stay along with her grandmother, Sally Anderson, the lady whom Waters would actually consider as her mom, and her two aunts, Vi and Ching. Sally Anderson, a home employee, moved ceaselessly to seek out employment and was hardly ever at residence; Waters’s aunts often ignored her, however what consideration they paid her was most frequently bodily abusive. Waters was exceptionally shiny and loved near-perfect recall; when she was in a position to attend college, she loved studying. Principally, although, she grew up on the road.
Right here’s Waters singing the blues within the movie:
Waters sings a blues about “colorism” in the Black community in “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue” (written by Fats Waller and Andy Razaf).
Out on the street, shufflin’ ft
{Couples} passin’ two by two
Whereas right here am I, left excessive and dry
Black, and ‘trigger I am black I am blue
Browns and yellers, all have fellers
Gents want them mild
Want I may fade, cannot make the grade
Nothing however darkish days in sight
Right here’s the track:
Undertaking Muse has a evaluation of Carol Doyle Van Valkenburgh’s and Christine DaIl’s 1989 hour-long documentary “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues”:
Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Mamie Smith and Ida Cox, all AfricanAmerican singers within the early twentieth century, gave Individuals their most enduring authentic track: the blues. Wild Ladies Do not Have the Blues tells the story of their careers from the early years in touring vaudeville and minstrel reveals to extra glamorous occasions as recording artists and actresses within the Twenties and Nineteen Thirties. Their music, although initially carried out on the Theatre House owners Reserving Affiliation (TOBA) circuit for African-American audiences, finally captivated the nation because the blues craze started within the Twenties.
Wild Ladies Do not Have the Blues is basically an oral historical past of girls blues singers within the early twentieth century. Interviews with former blues entertainers Ida Goodson, Mae Barnes, Doll Thomas, Blue Lu Barker, Danny Barker, and Sammy Worth reveal the origins of the blues phenomenon and its personal affect on the African-American artists who gave it life. Modern blues singer, Koko Taylor, tells how these early musicians spoke to her expertise as an African-American lady and impressed her personal want to sing blues. Interspersed with these interviews are black and white pictures, movie clips, and early sound recordings of the extra well-known artists.
Try the trailer:
California Newsreel notes:
[T]he story of Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, Ida Cox, and different pioneering blues ladies from early within the century are delivered to life in Wild Ladies Do not Have the Blues.
The Exploress Podcast, hosted by Kate Armstrong, takes us to New York Metropolis within the Twenties:
Exploress mentions within the video notes:
On this final episode of Season 4, we will discover out extra in regards to the Black feminine entertainers who lit up the phases of Twenties America: who they have been, the (many) struggles they confronted, and all of the methods they completely slayed. We’ll meet blues singers like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Mamie Smith, in addition to dancers like Josephine Baker. (Content material warning: temporary dialogue of lynching).
Final however not least is the 1972 function movie “Woman Sings the Blues,” which starred Diana Ross, Billy Dee Williams, and Richard Pryor, capturing the story of the good Billie Vacation. A lot of the controversy sparked by the movie has swirled round the truth that Ross failed to win an Oscar for her efficiency.
Movie critic Roger Ebert began out a skeptic but posted:
My first response after I discovered that Diana Ross had been forged to play Billie Vacation was a fast and easy one: I didn’t assume she may do it. I knew she may sing, though not in addition to Billie Vacation and definitely not in the identical approach, however I couldn’t think about Diana Ross reaching the emotional highs and lows of one of many extra excessive public lives of our time. However the film was financed by Motown, and Diana Ross was Motown’s most cherished property, so possibly the casting made some sort of industrial sense. In spite of everything, Sal Mineo performed Gene Krupa.
All of these ideas have been worn out of my thoughts throughout the first three or 4 minutes of “Woman Sings the Blues”, and I used to be left with a sense of full confidence in a dramatic efficiency. This was one of many nice performances of 1972.
I’ll freely admit that I used to be as skeptical as Ebert—till I noticed the movie. If in case you have by no means seen it, right here’s the complete movie, and you probably have, I hope you get pleasure from watching it once more.
Be part of me within the feedback part under and please publish your favourite blueswomen!
