Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday
Angela Yvonne Davis, Billie Holiday, Ma Rainey, Bessie SmithINTRODUCTION
Blues Legacies & Black Feminism is an examination of the work of three women artists who played decisive roles in shaping the history of popular music culture in the United States. It is an inquiry into the ways their recorded performances divulge unacknowledged traditions of feminist consciousness in working-class black communities. The connection I attempt to make between blues legacies & black feminism is not without its contradictions & discontinuities; to attempt to impute a feminist consciousness as we define it today to Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, & Billie Holiday would be preposterous, & not very interesting at that. What is most interesting—& provocative—about the bodies of work each of these women left behind is the ways in which hints of feminist attitudes emerge from their music through fissures of patriarchal discourses. While I try to situate their recorded performances, the primary material with which I work, in relation to historical developments of the 1920s, 1930s, & 1940s, I am most concerned with how these women’s performances appear through the prism of the present, & with what these interpretations can tell us about past & present forms of social consciousness...
Angela Y. Davis is the editor of If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance and the author of Angela Davis: An Autobiography; Women, Race, & Class; and Women, Culture, & Politics. She is Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz.