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| 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).
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).
