Black Music Sunday is a weekly collection highlighting all issues Black music, with over 250 tales overlaying 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.
Up to now, when the music style “blues” and its musicians have been written about, mentioned, and analyzed by music critics and students, the dialog normally 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 girls who through 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 stunned 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 famous:
In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Davis, controversial activist, writer, and professor extensively identified for her revolutionary politics, argues in opposition to some typical 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 typically expressed by the Black center class and white society in widespread music of the period, blues lyrics based on 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 Five” on June 5, 2020, discussing Vacation’s “Strange Fruit” and Abel Meeropol’s authorship:
I’ve featured a cross part of blueswomen right here through the years, most notably Massive Mama Thornton, Ma Rainey, and others, like Memphis Minnie.
Girls’s Historical past Month appears like the proper time to discover them once more and maybe make an introduction of their music to newcomers. It’s additionally a terrific day to carry again reminiscences for his or her followers. I’m delighted to report that there are actually some glorious documentaries, and clips accessible on YouTube, and through 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 “Lady Sings the Blues,” starring Diana Ross).
This can be a brief Bessie Smith clip from the movie, containing her solely display screen look.
The documentary contains Ethel Waters, whose title is never talked about when lists are drawn up noting “blues women.” The John F. Kennedy Heart for the Performing Arts notes:
Often called “Sweet Mama Stringbean” for her slender determine, Ethel Waters may sing the blues past examine. Her mushy, refined voice, theatrical model, and signature shimmy captivated Black and white audiences alike.
Waters grew up within the chaotic distress of a Philadelphia slum. “No one raised me,” she recalled. “I just 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 Home 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 (be aware: content material warning):
Singer and actress Ethel Waters had a particularly troublesome childhood. The truth is, she opened her autobiography His Eye Is on the Sparrow with these phrases: “I was never a child. I never was coddled, or liked, or understood by my family. I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider…. Nobody brought me up.” She was conceived in violence and raised in violence. She had a minimal training at greatest, dropping out of college early to go to work as a maid. However regardless of her inauspicious beginnings, Ethel Waters made historical past, garnering many laurels and plenty of “firsts.” She was the primary black girl to seem on radio (on April 21, 1922); the primary black girl to star on her personal on the Palace Theater in New York (in 1925); the primary black girl 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 girl to star on Broadway in a dramatic play (additionally in 1939). She is remembered as a lot for her superb appearing as for her expressive singing—and much more for her spirit.
When Waters’s mom, Louise Anderson, a quiet, spiritual lady, 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 residing with, however lastly settled on her father’s title.
Due to the way through which Waters was conceived, her mom discovered it onerous to simply accept the kid, so the little lady was despatched went to dwell along with her grandmother, Sally Anderson, the girl whom Waters would actually consider as her mom, and her two aunts, Vi and Ching. Sally Anderson, a home employee, moved incessantly to seek out employment and was hardly ever at residence; Waters’s aunts normally ignored her, however what consideration they paid her was most frequently bodily abusive. Waters was exceptionally vibrant and loved near-perfect recall; when she was capable of attend college, she loved studying. Largely, although, she grew up on the road.
Right here’s Waters singing the blues within the movie:
Waters sings a blues about “colorism” within the Black group in “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue” (written by Fat 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 gentle
Want I may fade, cannot make the grade
Nothing however darkish days in sight
Right here’s the tune:
Venture Muse has a evaluate 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 People their most enduring authentic tune: the blues. Wild Girls Do not Have the Blues tells the story of their careers from the early years in touring vaudeville and minstrel reveals to extra glamorous instances as recording artists and actresses within the Twenties and Nineteen Thirties. Their music, although initially carried out on the Theatre Homeowners Reserving Affiliation (TOBA) circuit for African-American audiences, finally captivated the nation because the blues craze started within the Twenties.
Wild Girls 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 Value reveal the origins of the blues phenomenon and its non-public impression on the African-American artists who gave it life. Up to date blues singer, Koko Taylor, tells how these early musicians spoke to her expertise as an African-American girl 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.
Take a look at the trailer:
California Newsreel notes:
[T]he story of Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, Ida Cox, and different pioneering blues girls from early within the century are dropped at life in Wild Girls 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’ll discover out extra concerning 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 “Lady Sings the Blues,” which starred Diana Ross, Billy Dee Williams, and Richard Pryor, capturing the story of the nice Billie Vacation. A lot of the controversy sparked by the movie has swirled round the truth that Ross did not win an Oscar for her efficiency.
Movie critic Roger Ebert began out a skeptic however posted:
My first response after I realized that Diana Ross had been solid to play Billie Vacation was a fast and easy one: I didn’t suppose she may do it. I knew she may sing, though not in addition to Billie Vacation and definitely not in the identical method, 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 perhaps the casting made some form of industrial sense. In any case, Sal Mineo performed Gene Krupa.
All of these ideas have been worn out of my thoughts inside the first three or 4 minutes of “Lady 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. When you’ve got by no means seen it, right here’s the total movie, and in case you have, I hope you take pleasure in watching it once more.
Be a part of me within the feedback part beneath and please publish your favourite blueswomen!
