Jazz, it is widely accepted, is the signal original American contribution to world culture. Angela Davis shows us how the roots of that form in the blues must be viewed not only as a musical tradition but as a life-sustaining vehicle for an alternative black working-class collective memory and social consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American middle-class values. And she explains how the tradition of black women blues singers - represented by Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday - embodies not only an artistic triumph and aesthetic dominance over a hostile popular music industry but an unacknowledged proto-feminist consciousness within working-class black communities. Through a close and riveting analysis of these artists' performances, words, and lives, Davis uncovers the unmistakable assertion and uncompromising celebration of non-middle-class, non-heterosexual social, moral, and sexual values.
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 beyond a musical tradition to serve as a conciousness-raising vehicle for American social memory. A stunning, indispensable contribution to American history, as boldly insightful as the women Davis praises, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism is a triumph.
