Ladies Sing the Blues

One of the great experiences of my time in the graduate program in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research was a class I took with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall on representations of race and gender in American culture. One of the key things to come out of that class was the essay "Peter Williams's Black Humor," which was published in the New Art Examiner (November/December 2001). The following essay from that class was published in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, but the link to it no longer works. 

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A fabulist or one of the more flatulent members of the so-called rock-critical establishment might write something to the effect that the blues was born at the crossroads between West Hell and Diddy-Wah-Diddy. A more down-to-earth genealogy is contained in Zora Neale Hurston’s work from the Federal Writers’ Project in Florida. Collected in the volume Go Gator and Muddy the Water, this research into the folklore of the Deep South offers an essential introduction for listening to the music performed by Black women between the two World Wars.

In the title essay, Hurston writes:

Folklore is the boiled-down juice of human living. It does not belong to any special time, place, nor people. No country is so primitive that it has no folklore, and no country has yet become so civilized that no folklore is being made within its boundaries.

Comparing the folk legends, stories and tunes collected in Go Gator with the recordings of blues, jazz and pop artists, such as Memphis Minnie, Victoria Spivey and Ethel Waters, shows how the tropes—i.e., the boiled-down juices—that registered the pains and pleasures of Black life in the South made their way out of highly segregated communities into the mainstream of American culture. In the process, grassroots traditions in the public domain were transformed into copyrighted commercial products, with anonymous work songs, such as “Mule on the Mount,” serving as precursors, in terms of themes, structure and rhythm, for such chart-toppers as Ethel Waters’ “Am I Blue?” of 1929.

The topology of the female blues singer comprises a cultural geography that extends from small-town fairs, tent shows and juke joints to urban vaudeville, cabaret and Broadway revues. Once the music moved off the plantation and out of the bayous and swamps, a process of professionalization ensued. The folk tunes Hurston collected in “The Jacksonville Recordings” are identified as to genre and regional origin only. The compositions of the professional recordings are credited to specific composers. In the cottage industry of the early blues many singer-songwriters can be found, including Ma Rainey, Memphis Minnie and Victoria Spivey. In the more popular genres, as exemplified by Ethel Waters, the division of labor of the culture industry was strictly maintained, with performers and composers serving distinct functions in the production process.

Memphis Minnie is probably closest to the purist’s definition of a country blues singer. She was born in Louisiana in 1897 and came up the Mississippi River to Chicago where she lived until her death in 1973. She typically accompanied herself on a National Steel guitar and performed with the likes of Big Bill Broonzy and Bukka White. By contrast, Victoria Spivey’s work shows more of a jazz influence, especially in terms of its instrumentation, often featuring the classic New Orleans ensemble that includes banjo, tuba, cornet and clarinet that prevailed before Coleman Hawkins established the saxophone as a legitimate jazz instrument. Both singers share an earthiness in terms of suggestive lyrics and naturalistic performance styles, which was not unusual in what were then known as “race” records.

As a “cross-over” artist, Waters’ performances are more refined than either Memphis Minnie’s or Spivey’s in several respects. Among the telling differences is a vocal technique that includes the smooth rolling vibrato of traditional European singing. Another is the use of standard popular music compositions that reflect her access to a broader audience. And another is the presence of large-orchestra accompaniments of well-known leaders such as the Dorsey Brothers and Duke Ellington.

Regardless of the aesthetic hierarchies one may erect, Black women performers of the era may all be gathered under the appellation that Harlem Renaissance philosopher and poet Alain Locke identified in 1925 as “The New Negro.” Moving beyond reactive concepts of race-pride and race-consciousness, The New Negro for Locke “wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and shortcomings.” In keeping with Locke’s prescription, the bawdy narratives of Black female singers—and the raucous rhythms and tonalities of brothels, saloons, and other social spaces previously hidden from so-called polite society—became openly traded cultural commodities.

From the anonymity of Southern Negro folklore evolved a legion of cultural producers who are still known to us, whose expressions, cathartic and otherwise, established a recognized place in our cultural history. Their emergence constituted an important moment in America in which as Hurston writes in her essay “Art and Such”: “The Negro’s poetical flow of language, his thinking in images and figures, was called to the attention of the outside world.”