Blues Legacies and Black Feminism

Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday

Author: Angela Yvonne Davis
ISBN: 0679771263

From one of this country's most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens. Angela Davis 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. The works of Rainey, Smith, and Holiday have been largely misunderstood by critics. Overlooked, Davis shows, has been the way their candor and bravado laid the groundwork for an aesthetic that allowed for the celebration of social, moral, and sexual values outside the constraints imposed by middle-class respectability. Through meticulous transcriptions of all the extant lyrics of Rainey and Smith--published here in their entirety for the first time--Davis demonstrates how the roots of the blues extend

Publisher: Vintage
Publish Date: 1999

Subjects: Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies, Social Science / Women's Studies

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Black Resource Center (Location: 1B)