Ma Rainey Quotes

What can we learn from women like Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday that we may not be able to learn from Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell? If we were beginning to appreciate the blasphemies of fictionalized blues women - especially their outrageous politics of sexuality - and the knowledge that might be gleaned from their lives about the possibilities of transforming gender relations within black communities, perhaps we also could benefit from a look at the artistic contributions of the original blues women.

When you read the words of Langston Hughes you are reading the words of a Black Gay man. When you read the words of Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Angelina Weld Grimké, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, you are reading the words of Black Lesbians. When you listen to the life-affirming voices of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, you are hearing Black Lesbian women. When you see the plays and read the words of Lorraine Hansberry, you are reading the words of a women who loved women deeply.

Somewhere the moon has fallen through a window and broken into thirty pieces of silver.

YA DA DO (Lovie Austin) Every evenin’ ’bout half past four Sweet piano playin’ near my door And turn to raggin’, you never heard such blues before There’s a pretty little thing they play It’s very short, but folks all say “Oh, it’s a-pickin’,” when they start to want to cry for more I don’t know the name, but it’s a pretty little thing, goes Ya da da do, ya da da do Fill you with harmonizing, minor refrain It’s a no-name blues, but’ll take away your pains Ya da da do, ya da da do Everybody loves it, ya da do do do Ya da da do, ya da da do Fill you with harmonizing, minor refrain It’s a no-name blues, but’ll take away your pains Ya da da do, ya da da do Everybody loves it, ya da do do do. YONDER

TOLEDO: Everybody got style. Style ain’t nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end. Everybody got it.

Months after the release of Du Bois’s Darkwater, Mamie Robinson brought out the first recording of the great antiracist art form of the 1920s. “Crazy Blues” became a best seller. Record companies capitalized on the blues craze among Black and White listeners alike. Robinson, “Ma” Rainey, Ida Cox, and Bessie Smith sang about Black women as depressed and happy, as settling down and running around, as hating and loving men, as gullible and manipulative, as sexually free and sexually conforming, as assertive and passive, as migrating and staying, as angels and as “Wild Women.” Blueswomen and their male counterparts embraced African American cultural ways, despised the strategy of trying to persuade Whites that Blacks were okay, and were therefore despised by Talented Tenth assimilationists.

[Josephine Baker, Ma Rainey, and Bessie Smith] must be noted as early sex-positive Black feminists, as their overt sexual self-expression challenged not only the standards of decorum for all women of the time but also the stringent guidance of the Black Church, and the demoralized, subjugated sexual identities of Black people postslavery. Their performance of sexuality owned and controlled by them was a radical act of resistance not only against White supremacy, which at the time did not consider rape an offense against Black women but also against patriarchy's prescription for how a respectable woman ought to conduct herself.

Moreover, the dramatist himself features in ‘Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again’, from 1966’s Blonde on Blonde: Well, Shakespeare, he’s in the alley With his pointed shoes and his bells However, nothing of significant import can be read into this. Shakespeare, dressed much like one of the court jesters from his plays, appears as just yet another persona to join a whole range of cultural and historical names that populate the phantasmagoria of Dylan’s mid-sixties lyrics: Ma Rainey, Einstein, Robin Hood, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and so on. Nonetheless, along with other interview and private comments, it does show that the Bard was on his mind.

Harlemites might ridicule stereotypic bulldaggers or drag queens, but in the twenties especially, bisexuality had a certain cachet in sophisticated circles, and in the world of show biz the rumored lesbianism of such favored entertainers as Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter, and Ethel Waters tended to be ignored as irrelevant.2