 Blues
Legacies and Black Feminism : Gertrude 'Ma' Rainey, Bessie Smith,
and Billie Holiday by Angela Y. Davis
The female
blues singers of the 1920s, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, and
Bessie Smith, not only invented a musical genre, but they also
became models of how African American women could become economically
independent in a culture that had not previously allowed it. Both
Smith and Rainey composed, arranged, and managed their own road
bands. Angela Y. Davis's study emphasizes the impact that these
singers, and later Billie Holiday, had on the poor and working-class
communities from which they came. The artists addressed radical
subjects such as physical and economic abuse, race relations,
and female sexual power, including lesbianism. Ma Rainey was well
known as a lover of women as well as men, and her song "Prove
It on Me" describes a butch woman who dresses like a man
and dates women. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism places
the fluid sexuality of these women within a larger context of
African American artists' attempts to subvert and recreate America.
(Amazon.com)
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