Angela Davis’s thesis “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism,” is basically that Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, among other flamboyant women blues singers of the 1920’s and 30’s, helped not only to articulate black working-class consciousness but also to shape it. ”Women’s blues,” Davis writes, ”provided a cultural space for community-building among working-class black women … in which the coercions of bourgeois notions of sexual purity and ‘true womanhood’ were absent.” The songs performed by Rainey and Smith, in particular, served as ”historical preparation” for a kind of social protest of which Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording of ”Strange Fruit,” a song that condemned lynching, is a prime example.
Davis informs us that the blues has always been implicitly ”gendered” as male, and that the songs performed by Ma Rainey refused to ”privilege” marriage over nonmarital or extramarital relationships and that most accounts of how Billie Holiday came to perform ”Strange Fruit” have tended to ”foreground” the contributions of white males. Davis however does not give much of any background on the women singers and her failure to say much of anything about her subjects’ personal lives is especially telling in the case of Smith, whose exploitation by a philandering husband might undermine Davis’s image of her as a positive role model for black working-class women.
Davis also skips over another potential ambiguity by ignoring Smith’s and Rainey’s the rhinestone and feather that the performers’ (presumably) black working-class audiences identified with as much as with their songs. Davis chastises those black women’s clubs of the 1920’s whose efforts to uplift their race entailed virtually disowning free-spirited women like Rainey and Smith. But in attempting to recast these singers as working-class heroines Davis is practicing her own brand of social uplift and moral purification.
en400 