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Like most forms of popular music,
African-American blues lyrics talk about love.
Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday
Love of Black people, love of
freedom from domestic terrorism.
I have absolutely no musical talent
whatsoever. I sat for piano lessons when I was a preteen. I would go
to the home of this older Black woman on the Southside of Chicago,
not far from my home. I did learn that every good boy does fine
always (EGBDF), but I wouldn’t be able to point to an E or G on
the piano. Or for that matter, any musical instrument. I wouldn’t
be able to tell the difference between an E or a G.
As a listener, I’ve long
appreciated the power of music, however.
In my grandparents’ home, I
was exposed to almost all genres of music, except the blues. I
listened to 78 rpm recordings of Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathias, Tony
Bennett, Harry Belafonte, and Nate King Cole. Of course, Cole was
also on television as were Andy Williams and Judy Garland. Aside from
my Beatles LP, I had LPs of Jimmy Hendrix, Odetta, and Leonard
Bernstein’s recording of Bolero.
Then when my mother re-married my
father, a Baptist, I was eleven years old, and I listened to the
Mighty Clouds of Joy, the Soul Stirrers, and The Five Blind Boys. All
day on Sundays, my very Catholic grandmother listened to a Black
radio station featuring some of the most influential Black churches
with their choirs and pastors, mostly all male. A cacophony of
patriarchal outpouring on those Sundays.
All this music and yet no one
mentioned Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, or Billie
Holiday. No one played or sang the blues. But it didn’t matter.
The blues was always there when another
“perhaps-you-forgot-to-pay-your-bill-notice” was opened,
read, and I hear the laugh. Someone, grandfather or mother, would
always laugh. The blues wrapped around Christmas little Christmas
trinkets from the basement at Goldblatt’s Department store. The
blues hovered around when my grandparents sat in the window during
the evenings, staring out. Behind them, at the kitchen table, I sat
eating white slices of bread covered in sugar.
No one sang it! Didn’t have
to!
That Blues
Legacies and Black Feminism (1998)
by historian and activist Angela Y. Davis would be overlooked by the
academic world as well as by music critics is understandable in a
country where Blacks, in the 21st Century, must remind its citizens
that Black lives matter, too. And her subject matter: Ladies singing
the blues! In a country where that movement for social justice and
the fulfillment of democracy is denounced as not suitable as a
valuable subject for study. Anti-Black sentiment discredits anything
produced by Black people that represents a fundamental cry from the
belly of this country’s practice of white supremacist violence.
And yet the blues is complex and has
often been misunderstood while, too, all-pervasive in our culture.
Some would argue that the blues represents the state of our culture
today in light of the January 6, 2021 Insurrection at the Capitol in
Washington D. C.
“The blues,” writes
Davis, “rose to become the most prominent secular genre in
early twentieth-century black American music.” And yet, it was
often characterized as “the Devil’s music” in
opposition to the spirituals or later gospel, that is, “God’s
music.” I’m reminded of those scenes in Alice Walker’s
The Color Purple when
the women characters, divided between those who sing the blues such
as Shug Avery, and those who sing in the nearby community church are
far from a collective of abused victims of violence. To make matters
worse and appear more opaque, often male ministers, as Davis notes,
saw themselves pitted in battle for the souls of the community
against Black women, like a Rainey and Smith, singers about sexual
love but also about patriarchal violence.
Celie observes Shug reaching for
another cigarette…
“Start hum a little tune.”
“What that song? I ast. Sound
low and down dirty to me. Like what the preacher tell you it's sin to
hear. Not to mention sing.”
“She hum a little more.
Something come to me, she say. Something I made up. Something you
help scratch out my head.”
In
particular, these women sang about freedom from “domestic
violence.” And by “domestic violence,” they meant
violence committed against them by the
male at home as well as the collective
of male supremacy in American society.
The blues women were often, as a
result of their opposition to violence, free of “domestic
orthodoxy,” as they were almost never wives, Davis argues, or
mothers. “The women who sang the blues did not typically affirm
female resignation and powerlessness, nor did they accept the
relegation of women to private and interior spaces.” Instead,
Davis continues, blues women “found ways to express themselves
that were at variance with the prevailing standards of femininity.”
Blues, for these women, was a way to
speak on “violence against women” at home and in the US.
The long-time cover-up of “private” violence, that is,
unofficial state-sanctioned violence against women at home, as in,
women could expect to be hit or slapped, begins to come under
scrutiny, Davis writes. For, as far as these blues women were
concerned, this “cover-up would no longer be tolerated.”
The blues women name that violence, call it out! “The
feminists’ defiant notion that “the personal is
political,” becomes a mantra, like that of today’s “Black
lives matter”! Forms of resistance to private and public
domestic violence are also called on to inform the listener.
In turn, “blues music performs
a magical-or aesthetic-exorcism of the blues, those things that lead
to unhappiness and despair.”
Davis points out that the blues of a
Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith “may be interpreted precisely as
historical preparation for political protests.” More than a
“complaint” against domestic violence and a call to
resistance and the pursuit of freedom, their songs, writes Davis,
“begin to articulate a consciousness that takes into account
social conditions of class exploitation, racism, and male dominance
as seen through the lenses of the complex emotional responses of
black female subjects.”
White supremacy didn’t just
show up in the expression of male power at the Capitol on January 6,
2021. As I see it, two months later with the threat of even more
domestic violence, its notorious feature is that it, too, like the
blues, is pervasive in American culture. It’s been the blues,
all along, challenging the notion of white supremacy.
Abel Meeropol, a Jewish American,
adopts the two children, Robert and Michael Rosenberg, children of
the executed “spies”, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. This is
1953. Earlier, in 1937, Meeropol wrote an anti-lynching poem “Bitter
Fruit,” published in The
Masses.
Billie Holiday sang the song, now
called “Strange Fruit.”
In the 1940s, while Judy Garland
sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” Billie Holiday is
establishing “Strange Fruit,” as the central song in her
repertoire.
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves, blood at the
root
Black bodies swinging in the
Southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the
poplar trees
Though no stage
blues singer, Ida B. Wells’ campaign against lynching protests
as loudly as possible, pointing to hanging bodies of Black people in
a country sworn to pursue democratic ideas. Lynching, she wrote in
Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, was a means for white America “to get rid of Negroes who were
acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and
‘keep the nigger down.’”
Today, we are witnessing an interest
in the ladies who sang the blues. During the COVID-19 pandemic and
after a year in which the world witnessed the murders of so many
Black men and women by callus police and good ole’ boy
vigilantes, Viola Davis brings Ma Rainey, in Ma
Rainey’s Black Bottom
to life as Andra Day seems to inhabit the spirit of Billie Holiday
in
The United States vs. Billie Holiday. I’d
like to think that maybe there is an interest in combating the
continuing threat of white supremacy in American culture.
Maybe the blues should, once again,
become our banner, our sword. Our path to a freedom contingent on a
love of justice and compassion.
Black people, writes Davis,
“fiercely” challenged “the cultural oppression
implied” in “the spoken English language.” It was
no different with Billie Holiday, writes Davis, who “did the
same with the words and concepts of the songs imposed upon her,
insinuating that battle into every musical phrase and making that
battle the lyrical and dramatic core of her performances.”
Holiday was truly singing of her
love for Black people, of her understanding of Black suffering in the
US. Of resistance to domestic violence and abuse. In the music, Davis
concurs, “her phrasing, her timing, the timbre of her voice,
the social roots of pain and despair in women’s emotional lives
are given a lyrical legibility” with Holiday at the mic.
Meeropol’s song became what Holiday called her “personal
protest” against racism; for “‘Strange Fruit’
evoked, Davis notes, the horrors of lynching at a time when black
people were still passionately calling for allies in the campaign to
eradicate this murderous and terroristic manifestation of racism.”
When Holiday placed the song at the
center of her repertoire, she meant for America to take note of her
protest, and of the Black musical traditions’ role in
protesting injustice. Blacks were often subjected to violence in
their homes and communities while awaiting government intervention in
the form of Constitutional amendments. The song, Davis notes, “bore
witness” to Black people having no safe place, except in the
blues, where they could object and offer protest - even during an era
of lynching when the injustice seems relentless.
In Florida, 1934, the mob had
fingers and toes, parts of what was once Claude Neal. He was “freely
exhibited on the street corners…” He has been tortured,
forced to consume his own penis and then his testicles. He endured
the slicing of his sides and stomach, and the burning of his flesh
with red hot irons, until, hours later, the mob decided just to kill
him. Davis further records how “Neal’s body was tied to a
rope on the rear of an automobile and dragged over the highway to the
Connidy home. Here, a mob estimated to number somewhere between 3,000
and 7,000 people from eleven southern states, was excitedly awaiting
his arrival.”
Neal was finally hanged from a tress
“on the northeast corner of the courthouse square.”
“Here is a strange and bitter
crop,” the Lady sang!
Here is home-grown American domestic
violence!
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