Blues Legacies and Black Feminism
Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
From one of this country's most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens. Angela Davis provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture.
The works of Rainey, Smith, and Holiday have been largely misunderstood by critics. Overlooked, Davis shows, has been the way their candor and bravado laid the groundwork for an aesthetic that allowed for the celebration of social, moral, and sexual values outside the constraints imposed by middle-class respectability. Through meticulous transcriptions of all the extant lyrics of Rainey and Smith-published here in their entirety for the first time-Davis demonstrates how the roots of the blues extend beyond a musical tradition to serve as a conciousness-raising vehicle for American social memory. A stunning, indispensable contribution to American history, as boldly insightful as the women Davis praises, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism is a triumph.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her provocative book, Davis, the well-known sixties radical, professor and author (Women, Culture, and Politics; Women, Race, and Class) finds, in the work of three pivotal artists of the blues and jazz era, "rich terrain for examining a historical feminist consciousness that reflected the lives of working-class black communities." Through her close readings of their lyrics, which she transcribed (and presents as the book's second half), Davis explores the meanings behind the performances of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith. Toppling the prevailing image of the tragic blues woman, she finds that the songs don't portray the desolate and deserted woman; rather, "the most frequent stance assumed by the women in these songs is independence and assertiveness--indeed defiance--bordering on and sometimes erupting into violence." She also offers ample evidence to dispute claims that women's blues were personal, not political, arguing that their songs created consciousness by naming the issues. Her readings of Billie Holiday's lyrics are less successful, perhaps because it is difficult to capture in words Holiday's subversive renderings of popular love songs. Still, Davis's book should be read by both scholars and music aficionados for its expressive reading of these singers' complex works. 8 pages of b&w photos.
