Angela Davis presents an articulately expressed text explaining the importance of women blues singers in developing an Afrocentric feminist epistemology that privileges the contributions of black women to blues music and black women’s activism. Indeed, Davis interprets the lyrics of many blues compositions by Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday to offer evidence of this Afrocentric feminist epistemology that highlights the experiences of black women. Davis argues that the songs and lived experiences of these blues women emphasizes their sexual being and female sexuality, contains coded and explicit references to racial and economic oppression, celebrates the Southern and folk cultures of African Americans, and subverts bourgeois black attempts from the church or the middle-class to keep sexuality in the closet or the valorization of working-class black women. Davis also places the lives of these black women in a larger historical and social context to include Harlem, slavery, West African cultural retentions, the Great Migration, the conventions of white popular music, and white censorship of black music. She makes it quite clear that these three aforementioned blues women’s songs contain the lyrical content that represented a protest consciousness and politicized affirmations of working-class black women.
Part of Davis’s purpose of writing a book on the black feminism in blues singers is, like many feminist scholars, to challenge traditional narratives. In the case of blues, it is often thought of today as a masculine genre with a male guitarist. The truth is that the earliest, popular blues artists were women vocalists of the 1920s, particularly Bessie Smith, who was the “Empress of the Blues.” Ma Rainey was closer to the folk, or country blues, while Billie Holiday was a jazz singer Davis sees as coming from the blues tradition. Furthermore, she uses the notion of the aesthetic dimension to approach the lyrical content of artists such as Billie Holiday to support her argument for Billie’s feminist ethos, despite her song’s surface appearance supporting masochism. This, along with other sections of her text, is where her argument begins to fall into mostly conjecture and assumptions about how black audiences possibly interpreted the work of these singers. For instance, she claims that Billie’s ability to turn rather poor material into wonderful jazz songs meant that she invited audiences to interpret the lyrics in multiple ways, including race. However, there is no absolute evidence whatsoever that audiences listening to Billie Holiday sing torch songs, Tin Pan Alley or any other material were thinking the song was about racism or sexism in society. Thus, her performance of “You Let Me Down” does not mean that black listeners read into it the fact that white racist society “let us down” (170). To say so without any evidence from Black listeners is an assumption, though plausible, that Davis cannot support. She also claims that Holiday’s “songs were subversive in that they offered special and privileged insights to black people about the dominant culture” (171). She goes on to state that the rising black middle class was able to hear through Billie Holiday a note of warning for them to proceed with caution or lose their moorings and become culturally disorientated, without offering any shred of evidence (172). These broad generalizations and assumptions about how black audiences may have interpreted Billie Holiday’s music lack any evidence beyond Davis’s wishful thinking.
The earlier chapters of the text focusing on Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith are on much firmer ground. Since these earlier blues women were performing songs stemming from the black musical world and because the lyrics of many songs explicitly state or emphasize the themes Davis identifies with a black feminist ethos, her claims about Rainey and Smith become more believable. The numerous references to hoodoo and Southern black folklore, for instance, and lend credence to Davis’s comparison of Bessie Smith and Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston. Smith’s inclusion of numerous hoodoo allusions in her songs and the themes of disillusionment with the North appealed to working-class blacks while Hurston conducted ethnographic research and participated in the writing down of African American folk culture. Therefore, future generations may rethink Bessie Smith’s role in the Harlem Renaissance and African-American feminist history, particularly because during the time the intellectual elite of black males, such as Alain Locke, were opposed to blues and jazz as “high” art. Indeed, they saw anything that was not in accordance with developments in classical Western music as inferior art. These male writers and critics were also no fans of Hurston, whose legacy and role in the Harlem Renaissance has only recently been recognized.
Ultimately, Davis offers an interesting analysis of three great African-American women singers. Although not exactly activists in the traditional sense, at least two of them contributed to black feminism by undermining male control of the body, valorizing the lives of working-class black women, exerting sexual agency and openness to homosexuality, and fomenting a consciousness that subverted bourgeois and dominant cultural attitudes toward black womanhood. Though the section on Billie Holiday lacks sufficient evidence to make it convincing, Davis’s new perspective on Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey honors their central role as affirming black women of the 1920s. Her reevaluation of blues singers changes the history of blues music as not only a music of downtrodden men, but a genre born from an African American cultural milieu that includes social protest, resistance, and many women whose public sexuality, mobility, and pride cultivated an atmosphere conducive for the Civil Rights Movement. Thus, Davis refutes the assumptions of Oliver and Charters about apolitical blues. These women were writing songs about convict leasing, chain gangs, the 1927 Mississippi flood, and many other events directly relevant to the communities they performed for.
Also, if you don't already know, I have a long list of my favorite blues song which can be found here.
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