By Risto Lenz
“History is only His Story”
Sun Ra – A Joyful Noise Pt.1
Part of the bitter truth of history in general, and music history in particular, is that historical narratives follow certain patterns of interpretation written by those who have interpretive sovereignty over a certain field. In the case of the blues, these actors were (and still are to a large degree) white, male writers, journalists and people in the record industry. In the two decades following World War II, these people defined for a mainstream audience what was to be understood by serious, genuine blues music – and what was not. In selecting the music that should be promoted as “real” blues music, they (co-)determined how the music sounded like, what its protagonists looked like, and where this musical style supposedly came from – the rugged roads and street corners of America. This time, in which the popularization of folk and blues music reached its peak is often called the folk and blues revival. Its images, sounds and narratives still coin our understanding of blues culture. Although blues music was popularized decades earlier, it was during the middle of the twentieth century when these revivalist narratives reached a worldwide audience. Unfortunately, many of the important social movements of the century – the “second wave” of feminism and the civil rights movement – came too late to noticeably change this white, male perspective on the blues. Consequently, revivalist blues narratives were perpetuated in countless books, LP liner notes, songbooks or films.
These narratives had a certain tendency to prioritize the assumed authenticity of so-called folk blues in favor of the artificiality of what was called commercial blues. The great irony is that folk blues is not, as the name suggests, the beginning of blues history, but a term that did not emerge until the late 1950s. After all, the first blues music to appear on recordings was commercial blues, and the main players in this first phase were female. Singers like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Ida Cox or Memphis Minnie toured America in tent and circus shows and played their music in vaudeville theaters across the country. They were mostly backed by piano accompaniment or whole bands, were often dressed in glamorous outfits and were often paid significantly more than their male counterparts.1 When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, this scene was put to an end after the whole music industry came to a sheer standstill. When the industry had recovered in the 1940s, Chicago became the capitol of the blues, also because the industrial city had lured many job-seeking African Americans from the South via the Illinois Central railroad. The effect on the music was that blues became more urban and amplified, and those musicians – whether male or female – who would adapt to modern swing sound trends would often be the most successful blues artists. This modern trend was also one of the factors why a decade later folk and blues revivalists were seeking inspiration in a bygone time of pre-industrial folk blues that satisfied their hunger for authenticity.
In this process, commercial blues was often given attributes diametrically opposed to those of folk blues. It was described as inauthentic and especially the successful pieces of popular female singers like Bessie Smith or Ma Rainey were used as examples of such. One of the best-known blues scholars of the time, Paul Oliver, described Bessie Smith’s “Empty Bed Blues” as an example of a “pornographic” marketing strategy rather than an authentic expression of sexual desire, which he believed was found in folk blues. Oliver wrote:
It is to the credit of the folk blues that its treatment of sexual themes is frank and uncompromising … but ‘Empty Bed Blues’ was clearly directed at a market seeking a vicarious satisfaction from pornographic recordings. Its rich but unsubtle imagery does not result from a fundamentally innocent expression of libidinous instincts as may be noticed in many folk blues2
A colleague of Oliver’s, influential blues promoter Alan Lomax, called blueswomen like Bessie Smith, Mamie Smith and Memphis Minnie “women of questionable reputation.” In his influential book The Land Where the Blues Began, Lomax makes no effort to hide his distaste for the female representatives of commercial blues who, instead of playing “on the road,” “performed in urban nightclubs” and “relaxed in backstage areas.” Apparently it was not possible for women to perform their blues in public spaces because they were “inevitably exposed to sexual advances of every kind,” “from mild to life-threatening.” In “unprotected areas,” he writes, women like Bessie Smith became “victims of male predatory instincts” and were therefore confined to artificial venues like vaudeville stages and urban nightclubs. Lomax concludes that it was “only women … who flaunted their loose living” that were able to “publicly perform the blues”.3 It is important to emphasize that both Lomax and Oliver have done very important cultural work in blues scholarship, but these views show the bias typical of the time that made it difficult for women to be considered as equal artists.
It is true that women did not have the same access to the public sphere as men did. Women were expected to tend the home and maintain social contacts in the church. In the rural South, where most blueswomen came from, the church exercised a great instance of control and it considered blues as sinful music. That doesn’t mean women were just victims. But it is noticeable that many of the women who aspired to blues careers left their rural regions for urban centers or tried their luck in vaudeville shows. But what Lomax described as artificial locations can also be seen as places of emancipation. It was in these “urban nightclubs” where women could reinvent themselves and express this freedom through their music. These women also chose to be “glamorous,” “savvy” and “glittering” – all attributes that were opposed to their roles as mothers and wives.
As historian Patricia Collins states in “The Sexual Politics of Black Womanhood” (1991), the history of the United States has shown a “fear and fascination” of “female sexuality” that was eventually “projected onto black women.” Collins argues that “the passionless ‘lady’ arose in symbiosis with the primitively sexual slave.”4 A Victorian ideology of moral superiority held black women responsible for being sexually assaulted by white men. African American suffragist Addie Hunton argues that the rape of black women by white men allowed white women to maintain their status as pure and virtuous. Hunton wrote that black women were denied control over their bodies.5 The aftermath of this trauma reached far into the twentieth century. Blues music for women was also a way to cope with this history and empowering themselves as controlling their own bodies. Lomax did not see that what he called “loose living” – namely the sexual confidence of many blueswomen – was born out of this hypersexualization of black female bodies which have branded these women as sexually deviant Others over centuries. It was significant for black women to create personas that were proud of their own sexualities – a pride born out of agony.
It is often forgotten that the basic requirements for a music career, especially in the pre-depression years, differed highly between African-American women and men. Men could move more easily on the road than women and could better move from place to place to build a local reputation as a musician. Men could play street corners and get hired there by bar owners to play in nearby venues. And men could hang out in music bars and wait for a performance opportunity more easily than women could. This mobility of professional and semi-professional bluesmen has led to its own tropes revolving around blues culture. One of these tropes is called the rambler, a figure that is genuinely connected to masculinity. The independent wanderer who changes jobs frequently, spends his money quickly has historically been denied to women. In essence, the female drifter is predominantly labeled “prostitute,” a result of debates surrounding proper bourgeois sexuality and working-class masculinity that deny blueswomen a history of celebrated drifting.
Robert Johnson’s Ramblin’ on my Mind (1936) is considered a classic not only because of its haunting guitar playing and the vivid songwriting but also because Johnson fit the rambler figure so perfectly. The story of the solitary Robert Johnson wandering the streets with his guitar fueled the so-called Crossroads legend, according to which the bluesman set out as a mediocre musician only to return to his home place as the most accomplished of all guitar players. According to the legend, Johnson had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his otherworldly guitar playing.6 Rambling, the story suggests, is something that can take one to the darkest corners, outside of society. The blues singer becomes an outsider and creates his own rules. The myth surrounding Robert Johnson is also a male myth – constructed and passed on by journalists and blues fans alike. It romanticizes rambling as a prototypical American activity, embodying the American promise of rugged individualism: the celebration of free-spirited mobility of the (male) American. As with its European, cosmopolitan counterpart, the flâneur, roaming haphazardly was mainly a distinctly masculine activity. Hence, it did not occur to the revivalists to read the lives of female vaudeville / commercial singers in these very contexts. It is striking how much free spirited mobility it must take to make the dream of being a musician possible for these blueswomen. Ida Cox went to tour with the White and Clark’s Black & Tan Minstrels by the age of fourteen. Memphis Minnie was thirteen when she left her home in Algeirs, Louisiana to become a musician in Memphis’ musical center Beale Street. Ma Rainey was nineteen when she followed the Rabit’s Foot Company and Bessie Smith was eighteen when she joined a traveling troupe called the Stoke troupe. All these women had later careers in major cities but learned their musical skills from an early age on “on the road”. However, these are only the best known among female blues artists. Many remain unknown to us, also because mid-century oral history projects and rediscovery attempts paid too little attention to them.
1 Blues researchers Paul and Beth Garon point out that female singers earned between $150 to $200 per record side while men were paid an average $15 per side. Women earned more because the blues craze was very female-oriented from the beginning and the record companies were always looking for the next Bessie Smith who had landed a million-seller in 1920 with “Crazy Blues”. See Paul and Beth Garon, Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues, DaCapo Press, 1992, 24.
2 Paul Oliver, Bessie Smith, London (1959), 54.
3 Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began, London (1994), 360.
4 Patricia H. Collins, “The Sexual Politics of Black Womanhood.” Patricia H. Collins (Ed.), Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, New York (1991), 232–249.
5 Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching, Cambridge, Mass. (2009), 116.
6 Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta. Robert Johnson and the Invension of the Blues, New York (2005), 220.
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