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Review by Pat H. Broeske
Black women were the first to record the blues. That's fitting, considering the premise of this provocative study by the African American educator, writer and political activist Angela Y. Davis. According to Davis, whose defiant spirit left an angry imprint amid the social upheaval of the '70s, the collective consciousness of the black working-class women of the '20s was summoned up by that era's uninhibited, assertive blues queens.
Musically, the regal status of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey (billed as the "Mother of the Blues") and Bessie Smith (a.k.a. "The Empress") is not disputed. But social historians and music critics alike have long questioned the messages inherent in their music, wondering for instance if many of the wronged women they sang about were merely doormats for their philandering, battering men. Not so, maintains Davis, who confronts dissenting voices head-on. To Davis, when Bessie Smith sang "Yes, Indeed He Do," about a "sweet daddy" who sometimes physically knocks his woman down, claiming it's just "a little love lick," her presentation was rife with sarcasm. As for the moving sincerity that marks both Smith and Billie Holiday's renditions of "Tain't Nobody's Bizness If I Do," about a woman who so loves her man that she willingly endures his beatings, Davis points out that in the '20s and '30s the topic was taboo among middle-class white women. By contrast, Smith and other blueswomen allowed their audiences at least to acknowledge their demons.
Social issues further reflected the black feminist consciousness, as evidenced by songs like "Washwoman's Blues" and "Chain Gang Blues." Then there is "Strange Fruit" -- which was performed by the usually tame Holiday. Known for her soulful and jazzy renditions of Tin Pan Alley standards, Holiday first performed "Strange Fruit" at an interracial Greenwich Village nightclub in 1939. Hauntingly poetic, the song tells of trees that "bear a strange fruit/Blood on the leaves, blood at the root/Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees . . ." The singer used to call the anti-lynching anthem her own "personal protest" against racism. Author Davis calls it a profound "intersection of music and social consciousness." She may be right. Though her book includes the lyrics to more than 250 of Rainey and Smith's songs, none is quite so affecting -- and unsettling -- as those of "Strange Fruit."
Pat H. Broeske is a biographer who recently co-authored "Down at the End of Lonely Street: The Life and Death of Elvis Presley" (Dutton).
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