 |
| Wanted a fresh angle. As a tribute to hers. |
“Earlier, purely acoustic methods of recording had limited sensitivity and frequency range. Mid-frequency range notes could be recorded, but very low and very high frequencies could not. Instruments such as the violin were difficult to transfer to disc.”
While the limitations of acoustic recording are tangential to the immediate subject, discussions of music from the 1920s should start by admitting the obvious: the sound on the recordings is shit, poor enough to make already dated music sound almost foreign. Richard Crawford’s America’s Musical Life: A History goes into more and better detail on the instruments and vocal ranges that dissolved into aural mush (though not the abridged version; of which, I wouldn't buy it), but acoustic recording turned some sounds tinny while flattening out everything else. As such, as you listen to just about anything recorded during that decade, cut it at least some slack and understand you’re hearing none of these artists at their best, never mind as they were. That applies everyone, even Ma Rainey.
Gertude “Ma” Rainey (nee Pridgett) sits astride at least half a dozen cross-currents of popular music from the 1920s: she came up on the “minstrel” side of vaudeville; she recorded prolifically just as the phonograph outstripped sheet music as the primary vehicle for sharing music; she brought one of the earliest iterations of blues to white audiences and did it while collaborating with pioneers of another famous black genre, jazz; finally, she embodied “jazz age” lewdness, and proudly, singing songs that tore up a handful of taboos:
“In her songs, she and other black women sleep around for revenge, drink and party all night and generally live lives that ‘transgressed these ideas of white middle class female respectability.’”
This was during prohibition, mind, though I just read the other day that Prohibition only outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcohol, not the consumption of it…so one could drink. Even a black woman. Songs that heavily hinted at (and possibly referenced a 1925 “orgy” with members of her chorus), however, broke taboos that it took the world seven or eight decades to catch up to (the most infamous song was 1928’s “Prove It on Me,” which came very late in her career).
Ma Rainey didn’t blaze her trail alone by any means - she befriended and mentored Bessie Smith, another 1920s blues artist who ultimately out-stripped her, at least commercially (and the rumors around those two...) - and there are a couple ways to condense her legacy. From a primer for 2020’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in The Guardian:
“Rainey – pioneering as a blues singer, businesswoman and liberated bisexual – grew up in the Jim Crow south in the late 19th century.”
From a site called “Biography” that also sought to contextualize the movie adapted from August Wilson’s play (which, full disclosure, I have not seen):
“She also captivated audiences with her stage presence, featuring flashy clothes, wigs and jewelry, a row of gold-capped teeth and an energetic singing and dancing style that sparked a short-lived dance craze called the ‘Black Bottom’ after one of her songs, and which was later used as the title of Wilson’s play.”
My favorite phrase came out of that same feature:
“She quickly became one of the music’s earliest and most influential interpreters…”
Now, to start at the beginning.
Born in 1886 (or 1882), Ma Rainey got into performing early, starting in a vaudeville act called the Alabama Fun Makers with Will “Pa” Rainey, the man she would marry in 1904 and the inspiration for calling herself "Ma." By 1906, the couple moved on to a larger and more popular act called the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, which connected them to the budding performance and touring circuits of the time. Her Wikipedia page notes their specific roles in the troupe, “Black Face Song and Dance Comedians, Jubilee Singers [and] Cake Walkers.” Those parts sit like toxic wax in modern ears, but that was show business back then.
Rainey claims to have first heard proper blues music as far back as 1902, but “blues” encompassed a larger set of cultural phenomena starting from the 1860s going forward. Despite that early exposure, it’s unlikely Ma Rainey would have started as a strictly “blues” performer. A source called Blackpast (from 2010) talks about what audiences would have seen:
“The Rainey performances were more than just concerts, as they included drama and comedy routines as well. This pattern of incorporating various styles of entertainment were typical of early blues performers and other African American musicians of the time.”
That takes the story to around 1916, the time of Raineys’ divorce, which leaves a seven-year gap between then and 1923, when Ma Rainey recorded for the first time. She would have graduated to proper “blues singer” by then, but that style almost certainly doesn’t match what just about anyone from even the late 1920s forward would think of when hearing “the blues.” Wikipedia’s entry on the blues classes Ma Rainey among the “urban blues” artists, people who sang a more complex form of the genre; the Biography post linked to above (for my money, the best read of all the sources) leans heavily into her connection and interpretation of the “rural blues”: at which point, this becomes a case of does it matter, and just listen to the songs. That said, this reference to W.C. Handy (the self-proclaimed “Father of Blues”) and his specific spin on genre caught my eye:
“…his compositions can be described as a fusion of blues with ragtime and jazz, a merger facilitated using the Cuban habanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime.”
For what it’s worth - and this is after listening to a truly unusual amount of popular songs from 1900-1920 - that sentence best describes what I hear in Ma Rainey’s music. More importantly, that was “the blues” for the first half, if not most of, the 1920s: Black women dominated the genre, with Rainey, Smith and Lucille Bogan counting (counted?) as The Big 3.
By the time she recorded, Rainey had a large enough reputation to get picked up by Paramount Records, one of the (literally) several labels trafficking in “race records.” Her earliest hits included “Bad Luck Blues,” “Bo-Weevil Blues” and “Moonshine Blues.” While in New Orleans, she met with some big names of the era - e.g., Joe “King” Oliver, Sidney Bechet, and Pops Foster - and, by 1924, she was recording “See See Rider Blues” with Louis Armstrong before he became a household name (other hits from the same year: “Jelly Bean Blues” and “Countin’ the Blues”). Paramount started promoting Ma Rainey as “Mother of the Blues,” the “Songbird of the South,” the “Gold-Neck Woman of the Blues,” and the “Paramount Wildcat.” As mightily as you have to strain to make those pitches work when you listen to those recordings, it’s the manifest lack of discomfort in the promotions - particularly “Paramount Wildcat” - that should speak loudest. Whatever straight people thought of it, Paramount knew they had a performer they could sell in Rainey and, by and large, as she was.
Another fun, fascinating detail from the era comes with the circuit performers like Ma Rainey would have played at the time: the Theater Owners Booking Association, aka, TOBA. Established by a comedian named Sherman H. Dudley, starting circa 1909, the operation had blossomed into a 20-venue network for Black performers to tour as professional artists…if not always comfortably. The performers reworked the acronym to “Tough of Black Artists” (which Rainey sharpened to “Tough on Black Asses”), and for good reason:
“T.O.B.A. paid less and generally had worse touring arrangements, which the performers had to pay for themselves, than the white vaudeville counterpart.”
The Biography piece shares some more notes on what can only be called exploitation of black artists, but that’s a feature of the music industry just about anytime the “industry” side gets ahead of the “music” (aka, artistry) side. Black artists, having less leverage in American society writ large, reliably had the taller hill to climb. Even within those constraints, Ma Rainey could pull in as much as $350 per week in her prime - if for her band, but that’s in the context of a median income of $37.05 in 1928 (and Bessie Smith doubled that, apparently) - and she had enough freedom of movement to relocate to Chicago, Illinois for a time. Ma Rainey had a hey-day, bought a tour bus with her name on it, etc. Odd, scarring details aside (e.g., segregated venues, restaurants and lodging, etc.), the music business hustle doesn’t sound so different in the 1920s than it does in the 1960s, 1990s, or now: exploitive, exhausting and, for most, with low returns.
For those wondering, August Wilson set Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in a single day’s recording session in 1927. Her career didn’t last much after that: Paramount terminated her contract in 1928, in fact, and largely because her version of the blues had “fallen out of fashion.” It wouldn’t have mattered if they kept her on, either, because both the record industry and most of the vaudeville as a whole collapsed not too far into the Great Depression. Radio would come to dominate an era with hyper-limited disposable income...
By 1935, Ma Rainey returned to her hometown, Columbus, Georgia, where she ran three venues, the Lyric, the Airdome, and the Liberty Theater. She kept that going until 1939, when she died of a heart attack.
Most of what I read about Ma Rainey repeated across sources - which tells me there’s not a ton of material available. As much as anything else, I wonder what she could have sounded like if, in the words of one note I read, she didn’t have to “sing around center tones, perhaps in order to project her voice more easily to the back of a room.” More importantly, Ma Rainey comes in as one of the first artists “The Man” had to channel/exploit, because he could neither control nor suppress it. I wouldn't say "it begins" at this point, but she came early in a line of artists who shared the same trait.
About the Sampler
I won’t make this exhaustive - not least because, 1) I’ve covered several of the songs above, but also, 2) because I struggle to sit through an hour of this stuff myself. The song I most want to flag is “Shave ‘Em Dry Blues,” and that’s for the blues guitar work she/they called in; something I haven’t mentioned, but should have, it’s estimated Ma Rainey wrote around 1/3 of her own music. Some other later numbers - e.g., “Runaway Blues,” “Black Eye Blues” and “Black Cat Hoot Owl Blues” - show where Ma Rainey might have gone had she had the time/freedom to break from what I called, accurately or not, the W.C. Handy sound with which she started.
To stick up for that sound before signing off, I’d hold up “Toad Frog Blues,” “Goodbye, Daddy Blues,” and “Booze and Blues” to defend it.
While the limitations of acoustic recording are tangential to the immediate subject, discussions of music from the 1920s should start by admitting the obvious: the sound on the recordings is shit, poor enough to make already dated music sound almost foreign. Richard Crawford’s America’s Musical Life: A History goes into more and better detail on the instruments and vocal ranges that dissolved into aural mush (though not the abridged version; of which, I wouldn't buy it), but acoustic recording turned some sounds tinny while flattening out everything else. As such, as you listen to just about anything recorded during that decade, cut it at least some slack and understand you’re hearing none of these artists at their best, never mind as they were. That applies everyone, even Ma Rainey.
Gertude “Ma” Rainey (nee Pridgett) sits astride at least half a dozen cross-currents of popular music from the 1920s: she came up on the “minstrel” side of vaudeville; she recorded prolifically just as the phonograph outstripped sheet music as the primary vehicle for sharing music; she brought one of the earliest iterations of blues to white audiences and did it while collaborating with pioneers of another famous black genre, jazz; finally, she embodied “jazz age” lewdness, and proudly, singing songs that tore up a handful of taboos:
“In her songs, she and other black women sleep around for revenge, drink and party all night and generally live lives that ‘transgressed these ideas of white middle class female respectability.’”
This was during prohibition, mind, though I just read the other day that Prohibition only outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcohol, not the consumption of it…so one could drink. Even a black woman. Songs that heavily hinted at (and possibly referenced a 1925 “orgy” with members of her chorus), however, broke taboos that it took the world seven or eight decades to catch up to (the most infamous song was 1928’s “Prove It on Me,” which came very late in her career).
Ma Rainey didn’t blaze her trail alone by any means - she befriended and mentored Bessie Smith, another 1920s blues artist who ultimately out-stripped her, at least commercially (and the rumors around those two...) - and there are a couple ways to condense her legacy. From a primer for 2020’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in The Guardian:
“Rainey – pioneering as a blues singer, businesswoman and liberated bisexual – grew up in the Jim Crow south in the late 19th century.”
From a site called “Biography” that also sought to contextualize the movie adapted from August Wilson’s play (which, full disclosure, I have not seen):
“She also captivated audiences with her stage presence, featuring flashy clothes, wigs and jewelry, a row of gold-capped teeth and an energetic singing and dancing style that sparked a short-lived dance craze called the ‘Black Bottom’ after one of her songs, and which was later used as the title of Wilson’s play.”
My favorite phrase came out of that same feature:
“She quickly became one of the music’s earliest and most influential interpreters…”
Now, to start at the beginning.
Born in 1886 (or 1882), Ma Rainey got into performing early, starting in a vaudeville act called the Alabama Fun Makers with Will “Pa” Rainey, the man she would marry in 1904 and the inspiration for calling herself "Ma." By 1906, the couple moved on to a larger and more popular act called the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, which connected them to the budding performance and touring circuits of the time. Her Wikipedia page notes their specific roles in the troupe, “Black Face Song and Dance Comedians, Jubilee Singers [and] Cake Walkers.” Those parts sit like toxic wax in modern ears, but that was show business back then.
Rainey claims to have first heard proper blues music as far back as 1902, but “blues” encompassed a larger set of cultural phenomena starting from the 1860s going forward. Despite that early exposure, it’s unlikely Ma Rainey would have started as a strictly “blues” performer. A source called Blackpast (from 2010) talks about what audiences would have seen:
“The Rainey performances were more than just concerts, as they included drama and comedy routines as well. This pattern of incorporating various styles of entertainment were typical of early blues performers and other African American musicians of the time.”
That takes the story to around 1916, the time of Raineys’ divorce, which leaves a seven-year gap between then and 1923, when Ma Rainey recorded for the first time. She would have graduated to proper “blues singer” by then, but that style almost certainly doesn’t match what just about anyone from even the late 1920s forward would think of when hearing “the blues.” Wikipedia’s entry on the blues classes Ma Rainey among the “urban blues” artists, people who sang a more complex form of the genre; the Biography post linked to above (for my money, the best read of all the sources) leans heavily into her connection and interpretation of the “rural blues”: at which point, this becomes a case of does it matter, and just listen to the songs. That said, this reference to W.C. Handy (the self-proclaimed “Father of Blues”) and his specific spin on genre caught my eye:
“…his compositions can be described as a fusion of blues with ragtime and jazz, a merger facilitated using the Cuban habanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime.”
For what it’s worth - and this is after listening to a truly unusual amount of popular songs from 1900-1920 - that sentence best describes what I hear in Ma Rainey’s music. More importantly, that was “the blues” for the first half, if not most of, the 1920s: Black women dominated the genre, with Rainey, Smith and Lucille Bogan counting (counted?) as The Big 3.
By the time she recorded, Rainey had a large enough reputation to get picked up by Paramount Records, one of the (literally) several labels trafficking in “race records.” Her earliest hits included “Bad Luck Blues,” “Bo-Weevil Blues” and “Moonshine Blues.” While in New Orleans, she met with some big names of the era - e.g., Joe “King” Oliver, Sidney Bechet, and Pops Foster - and, by 1924, she was recording “See See Rider Blues” with Louis Armstrong before he became a household name (other hits from the same year: “Jelly Bean Blues” and “Countin’ the Blues”). Paramount started promoting Ma Rainey as “Mother of the Blues,” the “Songbird of the South,” the “Gold-Neck Woman of the Blues,” and the “Paramount Wildcat.” As mightily as you have to strain to make those pitches work when you listen to those recordings, it’s the manifest lack of discomfort in the promotions - particularly “Paramount Wildcat” - that should speak loudest. Whatever straight people thought of it, Paramount knew they had a performer they could sell in Rainey and, by and large, as she was.
Another fun, fascinating detail from the era comes with the circuit performers like Ma Rainey would have played at the time: the Theater Owners Booking Association, aka, TOBA. Established by a comedian named Sherman H. Dudley, starting circa 1909, the operation had blossomed into a 20-venue network for Black performers to tour as professional artists…if not always comfortably. The performers reworked the acronym to “Tough of Black Artists” (which Rainey sharpened to “Tough on Black Asses”), and for good reason:
“T.O.B.A. paid less and generally had worse touring arrangements, which the performers had to pay for themselves, than the white vaudeville counterpart.”
The Biography piece shares some more notes on what can only be called exploitation of black artists, but that’s a feature of the music industry just about anytime the “industry” side gets ahead of the “music” (aka, artistry) side. Black artists, having less leverage in American society writ large, reliably had the taller hill to climb. Even within those constraints, Ma Rainey could pull in as much as $350 per week in her prime - if for her band, but that’s in the context of a median income of $37.05 in 1928 (and Bessie Smith doubled that, apparently) - and she had enough freedom of movement to relocate to Chicago, Illinois for a time. Ma Rainey had a hey-day, bought a tour bus with her name on it, etc. Odd, scarring details aside (e.g., segregated venues, restaurants and lodging, etc.), the music business hustle doesn’t sound so different in the 1920s than it does in the 1960s, 1990s, or now: exploitive, exhausting and, for most, with low returns.
For those wondering, August Wilson set Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in a single day’s recording session in 1927. Her career didn’t last much after that: Paramount terminated her contract in 1928, in fact, and largely because her version of the blues had “fallen out of fashion.” It wouldn’t have mattered if they kept her on, either, because both the record industry and most of the vaudeville as a whole collapsed not too far into the Great Depression. Radio would come to dominate an era with hyper-limited disposable income...
By 1935, Ma Rainey returned to her hometown, Columbus, Georgia, where she ran three venues, the Lyric, the Airdome, and the Liberty Theater. She kept that going until 1939, when she died of a heart attack.
Most of what I read about Ma Rainey repeated across sources - which tells me there’s not a ton of material available. As much as anything else, I wonder what she could have sounded like if, in the words of one note I read, she didn’t have to “sing around center tones, perhaps in order to project her voice more easily to the back of a room.” More importantly, Ma Rainey comes in as one of the first artists “The Man” had to channel/exploit, because he could neither control nor suppress it. I wouldn't say "it begins" at this point, but she came early in a line of artists who shared the same trait.
About the Sampler
I won’t make this exhaustive - not least because, 1) I’ve covered several of the songs above, but also, 2) because I struggle to sit through an hour of this stuff myself. The song I most want to flag is “Shave ‘Em Dry Blues,” and that’s for the blues guitar work she/they called in; something I haven’t mentioned, but should have, it’s estimated Ma Rainey wrote around 1/3 of her own music. Some other later numbers - e.g., “Runaway Blues,” “Black Eye Blues” and “Black Cat Hoot Owl Blues” - show where Ma Rainey might have gone had she had the time/freedom to break from what I called, accurately or not, the W.C. Handy sound with which she started.
To stick up for that sound before signing off, I’d hold up “Toad Frog Blues,” “Goodbye, Daddy Blues,” and “Booze and Blues” to defend it.
No comments:
Post a Comment