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Angela Y. Davis

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Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday Paperback – January 26, 1999

by Angela Y. Davis (Author)

4.6 265 ratings

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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.

Print length

464 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage
Publication date

January 26, 1999
Dimensions

5.21 x 0.91 x 7.95 inches
ISBN-10

0679771263
ISBN-13

978-0679771265
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Angela Y. Davis is a political activist, scholar, author, and speaker. She is an outspoken advocate for the oppressed and exploited, writing on Black liberation, prison abolition, the intersections of race, gender, and class, and international solidarity with Palestine. She is the author of several books, including Women, Race, and Class and Are Prisons Obsolete? She is the subject of the acclaimed documentary Free Angela and All Political Prisoners and is distinguished professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; 1st Vintage Books Ed edition (January 26, 1999)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0679771263
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679771265
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.1 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.21 x 0.91 x 7.95 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #109,371 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #16 in Blues Music (Books)
- #27 in R&B & Soul Artist Biographies
- #533 in African American Demographic Studies (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.6 265 ratings

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Angela Y. Davis

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Angela Yvonne Davis is considered to be a distinguished social and political activist of the United States. She has made a huge contribution in the uplifting of the political and social conditions of black in the American society. She was born and brought up in Alabama by her upper middle class parents, who were also in political scene of their times. Davis has studied in New York, Frankfurt and Massachusetts, where she polished her already existing communist ideas in her mind. She started as an associate professor at the University of California in the subject of philosophy and side by side got involved in the Communist Party USA and the Black Panther Party. It was in the 1970s that Davis got in trouble with the law when one of her subject of study, a young black boy who was imprisoned, tried to escape from the jail and was found with a weapon that was claimed to have been given to him by Davis. She tried to flee the law but was caught and put in the jail until all of the charges on her were withdrawn. Davis has been a keynote speaker on the issues of feminism, condition of the prisoners in the jails of United States and the liberation of gays and lesbians at many renowned universities and institutions since that incident.

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4.6 out of 5

265 global ratings

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Jacki Kellum Studios

A Great and Readable Book for Anyone Seeking to Understand the Blues

Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2020

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Angela Davis provides an exceptional overview of the history and cultural significance of the Blues. She also provides copious footnotes. Highly recommended.

8 people found this helpful

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Ashley O'Brien

READ IT!

Reviewed in the United States on March 24, 2014

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this is such a cool book. I loved learning about African American feminism in the context of American History, and more importantly: music. I wish they made such thorough and exciting books for every genre of American music, but this history is unique and definitely worth the read. Bought it for a class and read the entire thing before any assignments were due on it.

4 people found this helpful

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McKenzie Wark

This is a great complement to Davis' writings on the prison industrial complex

Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2018

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This is a great complement to Davis' writings on the prison industrial complex, as it finds an 'aesthetic dimension' (Marcuse) latent in women blues singers of the twenties that articulate Black working class women's experience.

4 people found this helpful

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E.S.M

i enjoyed this book.

Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2013

Verified Purchase

i was writing a paper for a grad class on blues women using Ann Petry's The Street as a main source, and this book came in handy. Davis gives us some really good insight into the worlds of blueswomen. When i get settled, i will reread this so that i can catch everything i may have missed first time around.

2 people found this helpful

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Stephen T. Wishnevsky

very useful book

Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2018

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Interesting and informed view of black women singers by an black woman of great education. I think the best part is actually the 300 song lyrics transcribed in an appendix

4 people found this helpful

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marianne mckone-leonard

A great book!!!

Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2019

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Angela Davis is a wonderful writer and she makes the Blues women and time come alive. Thank you for your book!

4 people found this helpful

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Michele Johnson

Herstory not history

Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2012

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Angela Y. Davis tells the story of women's blues during the 1920s and 1930s. She closely analyses lyrical content and sets the songs of the 'Classic' blues singers within a historical context of feminism. The text is brilliant to read. It is an exciting new (though written in 1999) way of conceptualising the political nature of women's blues.

2 people found this helpful

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Deannie20

Middle of the road read.

Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2021

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The author writes well but it is not an easy read. Much more on par with reading a college textbook. Getting donated to the library.

One person found this helpful

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Antonio Velázquez Ramírez

Entre la música y el feminismo negro

Reviewed in Mexico on June 8, 2021

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Un libro excelente sobre el legado del Blues cantado por mujeres como medio de protesta y liberación en una época marcada por el racismo y los resabios de la presencia de esclavos. Incluye, al final, letras de las canciones que, en algunos casos, compusieron y en otras fueron intérpretes Bessie Smith y Gertrude Ma Rainey. Mi única objeción: el apartado dedicado a Billie Holiday es demasiado escueto para la importancia de Billie en la música.

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leanna2112

!

Reviewed in Germany on June 21, 2019

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The Book is more of a study, than an anecdotal storytelling. I love it

Cliente Amazon

Perfecto

Reviewed in Spain on July 18, 2017

Verified Purchase

Gran libro sobre feminismo y blues hecho por mujeres. El formato y la recepción perfectas. Compraré más libros así. Thumps up!

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TIZIANA JODHAA

LA VITA DI TRE DONNE IMPRESCINDIBILE DAL BLUES

Reviewed in Italy on February 7, 2017

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Il libro è in lingua inglese ed è molto interessante. Tratta della vita di tre grandi cantanti americane (Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday) strettamente connesse con la diffusione del blues e lascia grande spazio ad alcuni dei testi delle loro canzoni, tra i più significativi. L'argomento del libro non è stato molto trattato e merita un approfondimento, inoltre non può mancare nella libreria di chi si interessa di musica blues e non solo...

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therealus

Enrich your listening

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 7, 2015

Verified Purchase

In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Davis directs our attention away from the normal biographical and technical narratives of blues histories and instead focuses on the social issues raised in the songs of three legends of the blues, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, together with their position within the realm of black, and equally importantly feminist, consciousness.

Most of her attention is directed towards Rainey and Smith, and in addition to analysis of the songs there are transcriptions of their lyrics, occupying about half of the book, in themselves an invaluable resource.

Davis identifies the context for the making of the blues as the sudden freedoms experienced by the black population of the US following the Civil War. In particular there was suddenly a release of agency in what former slaves did with their time, and also where they spent it. All of a sudden they were able to go more-or-less where they pleased, the reason why so many blues songs refer to geographical movement.

Aside from the possibility of education, the other change delivered by emancipation was in sexual agency, again the subject of many blues songs, not in the least those of Rainey, Smith and Holiday.

With direct reference to the songs, Davis explores the many facets of the blues in relation to sexuality, noting that conventional ideas of romantic love and family life are all but absent. Instead there are strong expressions of female sexual desire as an end in itself, as well as specific references to physical abuse, prostitution, same-sex relationships – Rainey was well-known to be a lesbian, but songs also refer to male same-sex relationships – and infidelity. On this latter subject there is the occasional reference to imposing the ultimate sanction on a cheating man, a detail having its male equivalent in songs such as Hendrix’s Hey Joe many years later.

Sexual promiscuity was partly aided by geographic promiscuity, and the women studied by Davis were as open to both as were men.

Given that no live recordings exist of Rainey and Smith, the songs we have access to by them were according to the mediation of white record executives, hence probably the rarity of an overt political message. Nevertheless, there are songs which address poverty, inequality, the drudgery of work and the privations of imprisonment. There are also, Davis points out, messages encoded within the lyrics, not to mention the very act of producing a black art form of such high sophistication in itself constituted a very political statement. Moreover, the blues offered a very concrete alternative to the dead hand of the church, which recognised the threat and wasted no time in condemning “the devil’s music”. The threat was the greater for the songs’ frequent utilisation of symbolism from African cultures, and Davis provides several examples where specifically Yoruba symbolism and beliefs are evident.

In the penultimate chapter, the first of two predominantly concentrating on Billie Holiday, Davis articulates a familiar duality: on the one hand regretting Holiday’s apparent inability to gain agency within her relationships with men and the way this is often reflected in her lyrics, talking of unfaithfulness and violence; on the other hand celebrating Holiday’s ability often to subvert a literal interpretation of the lyrics through the inflection of her voice. Notwithstanding the feminist temptation to dismiss Holiday as a gendered equivalent of Uncle Tom, there is ultimately the irresistible urge to embrace Holiday as a sister articulating one reality of being a woman. Furthermore, Davis – and she is not alone here amongst female commentators – dismisses some of the more negative views of Holiday’s life, characterising Motown’s depiction in Lady Sings The Blues as a kind of reverse Disneyfication where everyone lives miserably ever after.

What is incontrovertible, though, is the all-encompassing courage Holiday displayed in performing and recording Strange Fruit. If the expression Career Suicide had been extant in 1939, when the song was recorded, there could have been no better exemplar for it. Hitherto, Holiday’s repertoire had avoided overt social commentary, thereby enabling the critical fraternity to laud her for her pure artistry. Holiday gave as her motivation for adopting the song the experiences of her father, who died due to a war-related sickness which went untreated due to hospital service segregation in the southern states. But the threat of lynchings was still all too real: Davis informs us that there were 150 in the four years following the Wall Street Crash, and gives a macabre description of gothic proportions of a “lynching” in Florida in 1934 which involved extensive pre-death torture.

Fortunately, Holiday’s career survived, and even thrived on, the backwash. Strange Fruit constituted a watershed moment for American popular culture, placing the reality of lynching and racial brutality in general in the public arena. It also broke the previous taboo of mixing fame and commercial success with social consciousness.

The devil, as it were, is in the detail, and while I can’t here emulate that I can say that Davis does an excellent job of getting into, around and underneath the songs of her subjects, and some of their contemporaries, to show that it is fine to treat them at face value, but that there is so much more to be discovered on closer examination. Anybody wishing to enrich their listening would profit from reading this book.

5 people found this helpful

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