Black Music Sunday: Sisters sure could sing some blues

Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 250 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new. 

In the past, when the music genre “blues” and its musicians have been written about, discussed, and analyzed by music critics and scholars, the conversation usually referenced great “bluesmen.” Blueswomen were rarely part of the conversation.

However, in recent years, more attention is being paid to the foundational women who via their efforts not only changed the blues but also were key players in what would become rhythm and blues and rock and roll. Groundbreaking feminist scholarship has been key in the un-erasure of their history. One such contribution came from a source that many blues aficionados were surprised by—political activist and scholar Angela Davis. In 1998, she published “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday.”

The Blues Foundation noted:

In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Davis, controversial activist, author, and professor widely known for her revolutionary politics, argues against some conventional views of women and their songs in the blues. The lyrics sung by Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, presented in the more than 200 transcriptions in this book, embodied strength, social consciousness, and feminist power in Davis’ analysis. And, in contrast to the idealized social mores often expressed by the Black middle class and white society in popular music of the era, blues lyrics according to Davis manifested “provocative and pervasive sexual-including homosexual-imagery,” incorporating responses to violence, infidelity and misogyny.

Give a listen to Davis on SFJAZZ's “Fridays at Five” on June 5, 2020, discussing Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and Abel Meeropol’s authorship:

I’ve featured a cross section of blueswomen here over the years, most notably Big Mama Thornton, Ma Rainey, and others, like Memphis Minnie.

Women’s History Month feels like the right time to explore them again and perhaps make an introduction of their music to newcomers. It’s also a great day to bring back memories for their fans. I’m delighted to report that there are now some excellent documentaries, and clips available on YouTube, and via your local PBS stations, which I suggest you watch. Here are several:

 “The Ladies Sing the Blues” is a 1989 documentary directed by Tom Lenz (not to be confused with the 1972 feature film “Lady Sings the Blues,” starring Diana Ross).

This is a short Bessie Smith clip from the film, containing her only screen appearance.

The documentary includes Ethel Waters, whose name is rarely mentioned when lists are drawn up noting “blues women.” The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts notes:

Known as “Sweet Mama Stringbean” for her slender figure, Ethel Waters could sing the blues beyond compare. Her soft, refined voice, theatrical style, and signature shimmy captivated Black and white audiences alike.

Waters grew up in the chaotic misery of a Philadelphia slum. “No one raised me,” she recalled. “I just ran wild.” Waters gladly put it all behind her to tour on the vaudeville circuit. She ended up in New York City, performing on the stages of both the Lincoln and Lafayette Theatres.

In 1919, she became one of the first Black artists hired by Black Swan Records. The commercial 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 more in-depth biography of Waters for Musician Guide (note: content warning):

Singer and actress Ethel Waters had an extremely difficult childhood. In fact, she opened her autobiography His Eye Is on the Sparrow with these words: "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 education at best, dropping out of school early to go to work as a maid. But despite her inauspicious beginnings, Ethel Waters made history, garnering many laurels and many "firsts." She was the first black woman to appear on radio (on April 21, 1922); the first black woman to star on her own at the Palace Theater in New York (in 1925); the first black woman to star in a commercial network radio show (in 1933); the first singer to introduce 50 songs that became hits (in 1933); the first black singer to appear on television (in 1939); and the first black woman to star on Broadway in a dramatic play (also in 1939). She is remembered as much for her fine acting as for her expressive singing—and even more for her spirit.

When Waters's mother, Louise Anderson, a quiet, religious girl, was in her early teens, a local boy named John Waters raped her at knifepoint. Shortly after Waters was born, Anderson married Norman Howard, a railroad worker. Waters went by the name Howard for a few years and used several other names, depending on whom she was living with, but finally settled on her father's name.

Because of the manner in which Waters was conceived, her mother found it hard to accept the child, so the little girl was sent went to live with her grandmother, Sally Anderson, the woman whom Waters would really think of as her mother, and her two aunts, Vi and Ching. Sally Anderson, a domestic worker, moved frequently to find employment and was rarely at home; Waters's aunts usually ignored her, but what attention they paid her was most often physically abusive. Waters was exceptionally bright and enjoyed near-perfect recall; when she was able to attend school, she enjoyed learning. Mostly, though, she grew up on the street.

Here’s Waters singing the blues in the film:

Waters sings a blues about “colorism” in the Black community in “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue” (written by Fats Waller and Andy Razaf).

Opening lyric:

Out in the street, shufflin' feet
Couples passin' two by two
While here am I, left high and dry
Black, and 'cause I'm black I'm blue
Browns and yellers, all have fellers
Gentlemen prefer them light
Wish I could fade, can't make the grade
Nothing but dark days in sight

Here’s the song:

Project Muse has a review 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 in the early twentieth century, gave Americans their most enduring original song: the blues. Wild Women Don't Have the Blues tells the story of their careers from the early years in traveling vaudeville and minstrel shows to more glamorous times as recording artists and actresses in the 1920s and 1930s. Their music, though originally performed on the Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA) circuit for African-American audiences, eventually captivated the nation as the blues craze began in the 1920s.

Wild Women Don't Have the Blues is largely an oral history of women blues singers in the early twentieth century. Interviews with former blues entertainers Ida Goodson, Mae Barnes, Doll Thomas, Blue Lu Barker, Danny Barker, and Sammy Price reveal the origins of the blues phenomenon and its private impact on the African-American artists who gave it life. Contemporary blues singer, Koko Taylor, tells how these early musicians spoke to her experience as an African-American woman and inspired her own desire to sing blues. Interspersed with these interviews are black and white photographs, film clips, and early sound recordings of the more famous artists.

Check out the trailer:

California Newsreel notes:

[T]he story of Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, Ida Cox, and other pioneering blues women from early in the century are brought to life in Wild Women Don't Have the Blues.

The Exploress Podcast, hosted by Kate Armstrong, takes us to New York City in the 1920s:

Exploress mentions in the video notes:

In this last episode of Season 4, we're going to find out more about the Black female entertainers who lit up the stages of 1920s America: who they were, the (many) struggles they faced, and all the ways they absolutely slayed. We'll meet blues singers like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Mamie Smith, as well as dancers like Josephine Baker. (Content warning: brief discussion of lynching).

Last but not least is the 1972 feature film “Lady Sings the Blues,” which starred Diana Ross, Billy Dee Williams, and Richard Pryor, capturing the story of the great Billie Holiday. Much of the controversy sparked by the film has swirled around the fact that Ross failed to win an Oscar for her performance.

Film critic Roger Ebert started out a skeptic but posted:

My first reaction when I learned that Diana Ross had been cast to play Billie Holiday was a quick and simple one: I didn’t think she could do it. I knew she could sing, although not as well as Billie Holiday and certainly not in the same way, but I couldn’t imagine Diana Ross reaching the emotional highs and lows of one of the more extreme public lives of our time. But the movie was financed by Motown, and Diana Ross was Motown’s most cherished property, so maybe the casting made some kind of commercial sense. After all, Sal Mineo played Gene Krupa.

All of those thoughts were wiped out of my mind within the first three or four minutes of “Lady Sings the Blues”, and I was left with a feeling of complete confidence in a dramatic performance. This was one of the great performances of 1972.

I will freely admit that I was as skeptical as Ebert—until I saw the film. If you have never seen it, here’s the full film, and if you have, I hope you enjoy watching it again.

Join me in the comments section below and please post your favorite blueswomen!