BLUES LEGACIES AND BLACK FEMINISM: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday

Davis, Angela Y.

ISBN 10: 067945005X / ISBN 13: 9780679450054

Published by Pantheon Books, New York, 1998

About this Item

Signed by Angela Davis on the half-title. A brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens. The civil rights icon provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture. Octavo. Light bump to the spine heel; else fine in a fine dust jacket. Seller Inventory # 76719

Bibliographic Details

Title: BLUES LEGACIES AND BLACK FEMINISM: Gertrude ...

Publisher: Pantheon Books, New York

Publication Date: 1998

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: First Edition.

About this title

Synopsis:

Examines the lives and art of Black women blues singers and argues that they expressed a Black, working class, feminist perspective

Review:

The female blues singers of the 1920s, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, and Bessie Smith, not only invented a musical genre, but they also became models of how African American women could become economically independent in a culture that had not previously allowed it. Both Smith and Rainey composed, arranged, and managed their own road bands. Angela Y. Davis's study emphasizes the impact that these singers, and later Billie Holiday, had on the poor and working-class communities from which they came. The artists addressed radical subjects such as physical and economic abuse, race relations, and female sexual power, including lesbianism. Ma Rainey was well known as a lover of women as well as men, and her song "Prove It on Me" describes a butch woman who dresses like a man and dates women. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism places the fluid sexuality of these women within a larger context of African American artists' attempts to subvert and recreate America.