Blues Women: First Civil Rights Workers

Blues Women: The First Civil Rights Workers ©2014 Joan Cartwright, M.A. 1

Blues Women: The First Civil Rights Workers

©2014 Joan Cartwright, M.A.

Presented at the 99th ASALH Convention

September 25, 2014

Paper Session: From the Civil War to Civil Rights

The Peabody Hotel, Memphis, TN


Contents

Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... 3

Literature Review ......................................................................................................................... 3

Voice Work .................................................................................................................................... 6

Blues Women: The First Civil Rights Workers ......................................................................... 7

Contemporary Voices ................................................................................................................. 15

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 16

References ..................................................................................................................................... 26


Abstract

Black singers in the United States emerged from Spirituals and Blues to develop Jazz.

Their free-spirited songs delivered messages of liberation, signaling to Africans in America that

they could be free. On the continent, the African voice inspired instrumentalists. Vocalese was a

dialogue between vocalists and instrumentalists. Each person had an individual sound and

instrumentalists imitated the voice’s cries, growls, moans, slurs, whispers, shouts, and wails.

Blues was the element of the American subculture created by enslaved Africans, singing European

music. Considered crude by classical listeners, Blues liberated singers from precise pitch and

calculated rhythms of European music. This paper discusses how and why Blues women were the

first civil rights workers because their lives and songs symbolized liberty in its rawest form by

tapping into the human spirit.

Literature Review

Blues were popularized by a handful of women, who were virtually unknown, nationally,

until Mamie Smith’s recording of Crazy Blues in 1920 (Obrecht, 2013). Minstrelsy produced

Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, who was born in Columbus, GA, on April 26, 1886, and lived until

December 22, 1939. From the age of 4, she traveled with her parents, singing and dancing with

them in minstrel shows and vaudeville. Known as The Mother of the Blues, Rainey was a

spokesperson for black people and a hero to them. She recorded hundreds of songs like Weepin’

Woman Blues, Broken Soul Blues, and Runaway Blues, on Paramount Records, putting that

recording company on the map. The most popular Blues singers established a rapport and rhetoric

with the crowd, winning them over like erudite politicians. Rainey took Bessie Smith under her

wing and the Blues tradition developed as one followed another (Cartwright, 2008, p. 9).


Angela Davis regarded Blues women as pre-feminists. Although “the first female anti-

slavery society was formed by Black women in 1832 in Salem Massachusetts” (Davis, 1983, p.

34), it was a Quaker minister Lucretia Mott that broke the silence endured by white women for

far too long, when she spoke out as one of four women invited to attend the founding convention

of the American Anti-Slavery Society, in 1833 (Ibid., p. 37). Mott’s Philadelphia home was the

site of an Underground Railroad station. “As they worked within the abolitionist movement,

white women learned about the nature of human oppression and . . . learned important lessons

about their own subjugation. . . . [and] exclusion from the political arena” (Ibid., p. 39).

Davis explored the lyrics of Blues singers “as examples of at least one nontraditional way

in which Black women negotiated and . . . articulated their socially constructed realities”

(Purnell, 2001, p. 262). For Europeans, music was an object of enjoyment and entertainment or

used to implement worship. So, music escaped the cultural genocide planned for slaves at the

onset of their captivity. As a result, music served as an aesthetic tool for community resistance,

which encouraged and nurtured a political community of active struggle for freedom (Davis,

1999). Davis (1999) asserted that art contains sociopolitical meanings that quicken social

progress, influence our emotions and knowledge, and propel us toward involvement in organized

movements seeking to effect radical social change.

In her book, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith,

and Billie Holiday, Davis (1999) examined “blues . . . for their rhetorical significance, deeming

them worthy of critique” (Purnell, 2001, p. 262). She acknowledged Marx and Engles’

observation that art is “a form of social consciousness [that awakens] . . . those affected by it to .

. . transform their oppressive environments” (Davis, 1999). Also, Davis recognize that the

“slaveocracy failed to grasp the social function of music in all aspects of life in West African


society” (Davis, 1999), an idea that is congruent with the belief that had European slavers

understood the depth of culture to aggravate the agression of Africans, they would never have

instituted slavery at all. Herein lies the obsession with assassinating as many present-day

musicians and rappers as possible, whether physically, psychologically, psychedelically, or

otherwise.

Kalamu ya Salaam (1995) researched the social and aesthetic significance of African

American music. He found that music best communicates the reality of our existence better than

words. The most profound and serious moral lessons are articulated by the speaker’s talk-singing

style of orature (ya Salaam, 1995), which is enhanced by melodic blues accompaniment, featuring

minor chords with flatted thirds. Since African women were more apt to be applauded on

Southern stages than African men, music became the language spoken even with those who

disregarded the context of the Blues (ya Salaam, 1995), namely, liberated Africans and Euro-

Americans.

Furthermore, Blues could not have been “slave music [since] . . . Blues musicians, roaming

from town to town with guitar[s] . . . could not have existed prior to Emancipation because our

people did not enjoy freedom of movement during slavery” (ya Salaam, 1995, p. 30). Therefore,

the Blues was a musical genre of people who were prepared for and headed toward liberation.

The Blues women were the sirens of freedom, heretofore, thought of as only reachable after death,

according to the spiritualists, whose music remained in the realm of religion. Blues music, known

by religionists as Devil Music, “is a black cultural art form, blues is a ‘living archive,’ a form of

‘recollection’ that provides a ‘coded history of black injury’ resulting from historically entrenched

power relations.


The blues provides vital aural testimony of black social history in the United States in the

first half of the twentieth century” (Garabedian, 2006, p. 98). In his classes, Garabedian (2006),

alludes to the power of the Blues to convey defiance, dissimulation, and resistance. Like many

scholars, he noted that the Blues contains a code that enabled singers to “speak differently to their

friends, co-workers, parents, employers, and teachers” (Garabedian, 2006, p. 104) the same way

his students do. He encouraged his students to recognize the coded lyrics in Blues that are also

found in contemporary popular music like Hip Hop or Rap that are actually political with

overtones of protest. He concluded that “blues lyrical testimony documents the spectrum of

agency exercised by African Americans, through critical periods of struggle and solidarity in

twentieth-century US history” (Garabedian, 2006, p. 105).

Voice Work

The forced silence of women has been a subject of concern long before the age of the

suffragette. “The power of voice is a common theme in African American literature and

criticism. Enmeshed in a world of enforced silence, African American authors saw voice as a

source of personal and political agency” (Obourn, 2012, p.239). As in most women’s fiction

and feminist literature, in particular, the ability to communicate for African American writers

heralds “a search for identity and an affirmation of individual selfhood” (Obourn, 2012, p. 239).

Historically, women were “constructed as women by silencing their access to public

speech [with] a ‘split’ in voice: a ‘father tongue’ that speaks in the language of public discourse

and social power versus a ‘mother tongue’ that is interlocutionary, conversational, and that

‘expects an answer’” (Obourn, 2012, p.239). Speaking out is not an easy task and “political

freedom, including the freedom of speech, has [not] insured a person of social ability to voice

one’s sense of identity” (Obourn, 2012, p.239).


Voice work entails the manner in which an idea is politically and socially said or

understood. Voice work potentially alters “the ways in which speaking and hearing can function.

It is a term for theorizing a set of political tools that often function beyond our individual

control” (Obourn, 2012, p.239). Therefore, vocalists can be said to hold a power outside of the

realm of instrumentalists and even orators in that the musical accompaniment provides a

foundation for their rhetoric. Thus, Blues women stood on top of the pile of entertainers, often

seen as harmless by the producers and town councils that hosted minstrel shows.

Relationally, the minstrel mask worked for whites because it symbolized African

Americans as happy and fun loving. Rhetorically, the minstrel mask worked for blacks, allowing

the minstrels to patronize an audience of oppressors, while they complained about their low

social status, without fear of being arrested and tortured. However, this process did not extricate

them from the horror of their masked existence, and it functioned as a misused symbol

(Cartwright, 2009). Cultural politician Houston Baker contended that our experience of pleasure

and pain is individual, and the realm of the word is miniscule compared to the space of

wordlessness in which we exist, therefore, the minstrel mask symbolized the ritualistic repression

of the Africans' sexuality, play, id satisfaction, castration anxiety and humanity. "Its mastery,”

Houston avowed, “constituted a primary move in Afro-American discursive modernism"

(Cartwright, 2009, p. 32). The mask, then, was the precursor to African American literature,

politics, and open debate, and the Blues women grew adept at sporting it.

Blues Women: The First Civil Rights Workers

Blues women were the first civil rights workers because their songs symbolized liberty in

its rawest form by tapping into the human spirit. Blues women spoke to and for black people,

providing them an open door to emotional escape. Ten of the most notable Blues women were:


1. Mamie Smith (OH, 1883-1946) Crazy Blues (1920)

2. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (GA, 1886-1939) Black Bottom (1927)

3. Bessie Smith (TN, 1894-1937) Poor Man Blues (1928)

4. Alberta Hunter (TN, 1895-1984) Down-Hearted Blues (1922)

5. Ida Cox (TN, 1896-1967) Wild Women . . . (1924)

6. Ethel Waters (PA, 1900-1977) Stormy Weather (1933)

7. Josephine Baker (IL, 1906-1975) Lonesome Lovesick Blues (1927)

8. Billie Holiday (MD, 1915-1959) Strange Fruit (1939)

9. Eartha Kitt (SC, 1927-2008) St. Louis Blues (1958)

10. Nina Simone (NC, 1933-2003) Mississippi Goddam (1964)

Although most of Blues lyrics referenced unrequited love, they provided a means of

articulating pain, suffering, endurance, and overcoming. By the mere fact that these women were

permitted to sing in public forums, announced to Africans in America that they had something to

say about their treatment at the hands of slave owners, traders, rapists, and punishing spouses,

whether they were white men with whips or black men, who betrayed them. The replacement

from generation to generation of one Blues singer by another, created a heirarchy of rhetorical

agents clothed in beaded dresses of entertainers. Surely, each women understood within her soul

that she provided an emotional outlet for her people.

Blues was performed in the South, since the beginning of the 20th century, but none were

recorded “due to racism and the assumption that African-Americans couldn’t – or wouldn’t – buy

record players or 78s. [Mamie Smith’s] Crazy Blues changed all that, sparking a mad scramble

among record execs to record blues divas” (Obrecht, 2013, p.1). (See Appendix I for the lyrics

to songs by Blues women). Smith’s Crazy Blues sold 80,000 copies in one month. It

“revolutionized pop music [and] the song could be heard coming from the open windows of

virtually any black neighborhood in America” (Ibid.). According to Danny Barker, a noted jazz

musician from New Orleans, “That record turned around the recording industry [because] every

family had a phonograph in their house, specifically behind Mamie Smith’s first record” (Ibid.).


Following in Ma Rainey’s footsteps, Bessie Smith became the voice of Blacks migrating

to the North and West. In Blues Empress in Black Chattanooga: Bessie Smith and the Emerging

Urban South (2008), Michelle R. Scott outlines black life in Chattanooga, in “Ninth Street's

saloons . . . the few veiled environments in which they could be truly human, a humanity that was

powerfully expressed in the blues music that Smith perfected as a stage performer and recording

artist” (Goodson, 2010, p. 179). Bessie’s song Poor Man Blues called on the rich man to open up

his heart and mind, and give the poor man that fought WW I a chance. (See Appendix I).

For Kari Winter (1998) Alberta Hunter wrote blues lyrics that “empower the singer

toward feminist self-affirmation, agency, movement, and change” (Kuribayashi & Tharp, 1998,

p. 204). Hunter’s rough childhood, filled with abandonment, abuse, molestation, and communal

disdain, gave her the self-determination to rise to the top and stay away from trifling men, which

resulted in her inveterate lesbianism and feminist lifestyle. Her most noted song, Down-Hearted

Blues, declared that anyone who wanted her company must succumb to her command. This song

put Hunter and Bessie Smith “on the road to international fame in the 1920s” (Kuribayashi

& Tharp, 1998, p. 202).

Throughout her 77-year career, Hunter understood the power that writing weilded for

African Americans but also took precautions because the mere act connoted the connection

between freedom and “the decolonizing of identity – processes undertaken at tremendous risk

[because] literacy was outlawed [and] African Americans who wrote literally endangered their

lives with the same strokes whereby they claimed ownership of their lives” (Kuribayashi & Tharp,

1998, p. 203). As James Baldwin so aptly put it, “the blues artist risks ‘ruin, destruction, madness,

and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen’ [by encouraging her listeners] ‘to leave

the shoreline and strike out for the deep water’” (Ibid.). Having composed well into her eighties,


Hunter “participated in the blues philosophy that, resisting Master Narratives inspires energies

that undermine, bypass, subvert, and exceed patriarchal logic” (Ibid., p. 204).

Ethel Waters was a “pioneering Broadway, film, recording, and television star pioneering

Broadway, film, recording, and television star” (Frank, 2011, p. 98). Waters was the first to do

many things. “She was the first African American to be billed above the title in a Broadway

show” (Ibid.). Also, Waters was the first black woman to have a radio show and the first to sing

Am I Blue, Stormy Weather, Heat Wave, and The St. Louis Blues by W. C. Handy. In Heat Wave:

The Life and Career of Ethel Waters, biographer Donald Bogle (2011) recounted “the adulation,

the money, the critical acclaim, and the long runs [going] into great detail on how Waters rendered

a song so as to make one feel transported by it” (Gill, 2012, p. 256).

While touring Vaudeville as "Sweet Mama Stringbean", Waters encountered continuous,

life-threatening experiences. She was moved to sing Little Black Boy at the funeral of a “lynched

black youth deposited on the floor of the lobby of a theater where she was booked in Macon,

Georgia” (Saltz, 2009). As a result, “she had to plot a fast escape from the menacing theater

manager and the police” (Ibid.). Waters's dramatic performances on stage and screen included

the Broadway musical, As Thousand’s Cheer, and the films Mama's Daughters, Cabin in the Sky,

The Member of the Wedding, and Pinky (Gill, 2012) for which she was nominated for an Oscar.

Offstage, Waters was known to be mean due to a “lifetime of slights, [resulting from the]

economic, aesthetic, and racial politics of 1920s-60s popular culture” (Frank, 2011, p. 98). She

was openly bi-sexual and her voice could not be quieted. Her autobiography His Eye Is On The

Sparrow (1951) is a raw and memorable account of the injustices Waters suffered from childhood,

growing up in Chester and the ghettoes of South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, three failed


marriages, since the age of 12, through her turbulent journey from stardom to eventual poverty,

before her death in 1977. As a postscript,

Ethel Waters should have spent her last years treated with the reverence and respect due a

person of her accomplishments. Unfortunately, she . . . distance herself from . . . militant

black colleagues by (a) starring as a maid on the TV series Beulah; (b) aligning herself

with . . . white Establishment types Billy Graham and Richard M. Nixon; and (c)

[proclaming] "I'm not concerned with civil rights. I'm concerned with God-given rights,

and they are available to everyone!" (Erickson, 2014).

The performances of singer and dancer Josephine Baker were “a popular form of

entertainment [and] tools that she used to display and communicate her resistance to ‘white

imagination’. [Baker] used nudity to display her own opposition against being placed under the

same gaze” (Bennerson, 2011, p. 9) as Sarah Bartmann, the South African woman put on display

in European side shows because of the size of her buttocks. At 11 years old, Baker witnessed

one of the worst post-WW I race riots, in 1917, in St. Louis, MO, that left thousands homeless

and at least 39 people dead. A victim of domestic abuse, from an early age, Baker “rebelled

from her teachers because she wanted to be seen; . . . rebelled from her mother because she saw

how unhappy her mother had become, and . . . rebelled from her husband because she saw

herself falling into the same trap of poverty that her mother had” (Bennerson, 2011, p. 45). Her

performance career began with a troupe known as The Jones Family. She moved from them to

the tutelage of Blues singer Clara Smith. After two failed marriages, she moved to New York to

join the casts of Shuffle Along and Chocolate Dandies, solidifying her career as a comedienne.

In 1925, Baker moved to Paris, where her illustrious career as The Banana Dancer

skyrocketed. “Her acceptance of her own sexuality suggested that Baker believed Black women

were more attractive than white women, French or American, and throughout her career she

would use herself as an example to prove it” (Bennerson, 2011, p. 50). Although many black


artists ceded to Paris, where the French marveled at the Black experience, the presence of racism

loomed large, influenced by class ranking in Parisian society (Bennerson, 2011, p. 52),

constantly reminding Baker that she was still a second-class citizen.

Ironically, this icon’s “original dancing style [and] nudity gave Baker the ability to ‘talk

back’ to her audience. By refusing to wear clothes, she challenged her audience to face their

own curiosity and fear about the black female body” (Bennerson, 2011, p. 61). Her ability to use

exaggerated eye movements, during her performance, forced the audience to reflect on their own

sexuality, placing Baker in control of the total experience. Baker “chose to go against what

people expected of her . . ., creating a platform for the future voice of resistance for those who

have not yet spoken” (Bennerson, 2011, p. 62).

Baker’s implicit control spilt over into her radical activism around racism in Europe and

the U.S., where she toured in 1950. Reportedly, Baker “demanded that she perform only for

integrated audiences at every venue. If curfew and segregation ordinances were still in place, she

requested that they be lifted for the duration of her performance in the hope that they would change

permanently” (Leigh, 2012, p. 165). Her persona as an agent of change for American blacks was

evidenced by three incidents. She “championed Willie McGee, a man accused of and convicted of

raping a white woman in Mississippi [and] . . . called attention to integrated housing in Cicero,

Illinois, while promoting integrated hiring of bus drivers in Oakland, California” (Ibid.).

Baker’s activism attracted the attention of not only the FBI but the NAACP that named May

20, 1951, Baker Day for her civil rights efforts. Baker spoke, worldwide, about the devastation of

racism. On August 28, 1963, she was the only female speaker at the March on Washington (Leigh,

2012, p. 166). Her efforts resulted in the desegregation of night clubs in Northern cities. But the

ultimate reality of Baker’s insistence on diversity was her adoption of 12 children from varying

nationalities and her insistence upon educating them within their respective cultures.


In 1939, Billie Holiday first sang Strange Fruit written by Abel Meeropol under the pen

name Lewis Allan. This was “the first significant song of the civil rights movement and the first

direct musical assault upon racial lynchings in the South” (Margolick, 2001). Holiday sang it at

Cafe Society in New York, revolutionizing the struggle it personified. Holiday’s rendition, is

“poignant and raw and saturated with pain, evok[ing] another time and place and yet is still

utterly relevant to race relations in the United States” (Casper, 2012). The song is a testament to

“the civil rights movement . . . [and] examines the lives of . . . Holiday and Meeropol, the Jewish

schoolteacher and communist sympathizer who wrote the song that impact[ed] generations of

fans, black and white” (Margolick, 2001).

The bastard child of a raped, 14-year-old cotton field worker in South Carolina, Eartha

Kitt debuted in her first film Casbah in 1948, at 16. She was a student of famed choreographer

Katherine Dunham. In 1960, she was blacklisted in the United States, after speaking out at a

Women Doer’s Luncheon at the White House, hosted by Lady Bird Johnson. Kitt explained to

the women of this elite group that some of the crime in the streets could be attributed to

“American youth . . . rebelling because of the Vietnam War” (Mezzack, 1990, p. 745).

Since 1953, Kitt taught dance to black children, who could not afford lessons. Later, in

1966, she founded the Kittsville Youth Foundation, a non-profit that served children in the

depressed neighborhoods of Watts in Los Angeles (Ibid., p. 747). Later that year, Kitt was

approached by youngsters in Anacostia, a neighborhood in Washington, D.C., to help them

fundraise for Rebels with a Cause. She contacted Congress Roman Pucinski and they went

before the House General Subcommittee on Education of the Committee on Education and Labor

regarding the Juvenile Delinquency Prevention Act of 1967, and won a grant for Rebels with a

Cause. In June, 1967, Kitt was appointed to the Citizen’s Advisory Board on Youth Opportunity


by President Lyndon Johnson, however, Kitt was not cleared to be on the board due to the

remarks she made at the Women Doer’s Luncheon in 1960.

However, in January 1968, Kitt was cleared to attend another luncheon at the White

House, where a panel of speakers discussed crime in America and the Vietnam War. Once more,

Kitt admonished the Johnsons that crime was connected to youths having to go fight an unjust

war. Although many in the room disagreed with Kitt’s statements, while hailing Mrs. Johnson

for her retort to Kitt, several citizens sent correspondence to the White House, stating that Kitt

spoke the words that millions of Americans, especially mothers of sons who had lost their lives.

One woman wrote, “So Lady Bird cried – well, doesn’t she know that the mothers of 15,000

boys MURDERED in Vietnam by her husband’s foreign policy cry every night” (Mezzack,

1990, p. 752)? Others felt that Kitt’s remarks were “a release of frustrations built up over

decades in blacks humiliated and disriminated against” (Ibid.). Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said

that “Kitt’s remarks were ‘a very proper gesture’ and that they ‘decribed the feelings of many

persons’” (Ibid., p. 753). The leader of the Welfare Rights Movement, Etta Horn described

Kitt’s claims as beautiful, while Dick Gregory said, “Someone in Mrs. Johnson’s position ought

to be informed” (Ibid.). Baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson was quoted in an editorial in The New

York Times, stating “because whites have not experienced the pain and humiliations blacks have

suffered, they could not understand the anger” (Ibid.).

Despite disparate comments from many supporters of The Johnson, Kitt’s remarks

resounded throughout the nation, bringing awareness to the problem of crime and enlisting the

support of numerous organizations on the issue, including

15,000 chapters of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, B’Nai B’rith, the District

of Columbia Anti-Crime Crusade, National Federation of Business and Professional

Women's Clubs (250,000 members), National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs,


Association of Junior Leagues of America, and 7 Keys to Freedom, a rehabilitation center

for ex-inmates. (Mezzack, 1990, p. 754).

Kitt’s career suffered largely because of a report generated by the FBI, Secret Service, National

Security Agency, and the CIA that was sent to the White House one week after the luncheon.

Kitt lost several contracts and a radio station KHEN in Oklahoma stopped playing her records.

Nevertheless, with all the bad publicity generated about her from her outspoken stance on “the

luncheon was symbolic of what many who were opposed to the war believed was insentivity on

the part of the White House to their views” (Mezzack, 1990, p. 745). Kitt was the voice in the

wilderness for minorities to whom it appeared the Johnsons had turned a deaf ear.

Contemporary Voices

A study of young feminists and leadership found that, when asked to identify outspoken

feminists, most young feminists point to music icons, exemplary of emotional mobilization

empowering women (Reger, 2007). In recent years, the song Wild Women Don’t Have The

Blues penned by Ida Cox in 1924, became a feminist anthem because she wrote and sang openly

about sexual freedom, a subject rarely broached by African American women of her time

(Harrison, 1988). This song was also the theme song for the W.C. Handy multi-award-winning

feminist/black power group Uppity Blues Women that morphed into Saffire, led by singer/

songwriter Gaye Adegbalola, who held that the group’s music was about empowerment,

following in the tracks of those divas in the '20s. Adegbalola and her group sang “about sex, its

joy and its pain [and] . . . topical things like 'School Teacher Blues' or 'Nothing's Changed' or '1-

800-799-7233,' the national domestic violence hotline number” (Harrington, 2005, p. 6). She

said, “the whole point of the blues is just to get the pain out."

Nina Simone “located American race relations in an international context in ways that

drew attention to gender as well as race” (Feldstein, 2005, p. 1373). Simone was one of the

“black women who evoked international [and] American issues in discussions of race” (Ibid.).


Miriam Makeba was a staunch activist against South African apartheid to the point of exile. She

joined her protests to “American calls for black power when she married Stokely Carmichael in

1968” (Ibid.). Simone’s fight for gender equity induced her to use “her body, her music, and her

words to forge links between Africa and African Americans and disseminated ideas about black

freedom that were not specifically about the U.S.” (Ibid.).

"I started to think about myself as a black person in a country run by white people and a

woman in a world run by men" (Feldstein, 2005, p. 1373), said Simone. In her song Go Limp,

“Simone played with an older tradition of African American female singers who [sang] about sex

. . . [like] second-wave feminists who would write about sex” (Feldstein, 2005, p. 1376). Their

“protest and politics converged in Simone's music [and] gender and sexuality informed her

denunciation of racial discrimination” (Ibid.). (See Appendix I for lyrics for Go Limp).

Conclusion

The Blues are neither mournful nor the cries of victims. Rather, they “articulate a hard-

won affirmation of life and self. The blues artist ‘fills the air with life,’ with her own life, which

[she] understands contains the lives of many other people as well” (Kuribayashi & Tharp, 1998,

p. 204), according to Baldwin. Most Blues singers are adept at shining light on the darkest

scenarios of existence, while simultaneously bringing laughter to center stage as a form of relief

for themselves and the entire audience, as well as the accompanying musicians. Blues women

have instituted the primary healing of the human spirit with their musical dalience that we can

forever be delighted with and grateful for. Blues is a breath of fresh air in the stagnant world of

discrimination, racism, physical and psychological abuse, and over all inhumanity towards

children, women, men, and whole groups of people. It is no wonder that Blues premeate the


planet, wherein, people from all nations and all walks of life enjoy the sound of the flatted third,

as the foundation of lyrics that can light up the face of even the most sardonic human being.

1. Mamie Smith (OH, 1883-1946) Crazy Blues (1920) 2. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (GA, 1886-1939) Black Bottom (1927)

3. Bessie Smith (TN, 1894-1937) Poor Man Blues (1928)

4. Alberta Hunter (TN, 1895-1984) Down-Hearted Blues (1922) 5. Ida Cox (TN, 1896-1967) Wild Women . . . (1924)

6. Ethel Waters (PA, 1900-1977) Stormy Weather (1933)

7. Josephine Baker (IL, 1906-1975) Lonesome Lovesick Blues (1927) 8. Billie Holiday (MD, 1915-1959) Strange Fruit (1939)

9. Eartha Kitt (SC, 1927-2008) St. Louis Blues (1958)

10. Nina Simone (NC, 1933-2003) Mississippi Goddam (1964)


Appendix I

CRAZY BLUES by Mamie Smith (1920) I can't sleep at night

I can't eat a bite

'Cause the man I love

He don't treat me right

He makes me feel so blue

I don't know what to do

Sometime I sit and sigh

And then begin to cry

'Cause my best friend

Said his last goodbye

There's a change in the ocean

Change in the deep blue sea, my baby

I'll tell you folks, there ain't no change in me

My love for that man will always be

Now I can read his letters

I sure can't read his mind

I thought he's lovin' me

He's leavin' all the time

Now I see my poor love was blind

Now I got the crazy blues

Since my baby went away

I ain't got no time to lose

I must find him today

Now the doctor's gonna do all that he can

But what you're gonna need is an undertaker man

I ain't had nothin' but bad news

Now I got the crazy blues

BLACK BOTTOM by Gertrude “Ma” Rainey

Now, you heard the rest

Ah, boys, I'm gonna show you the best

Ma Rainey's gonna show you her black bottom

Way down south in Alabamy

I got a friend, they call dancin' Sammy

Who's crazy about all the latest dances

Black bottom stomps and the Jew baby prances

The other night at a swell affair

Soon as the boys found out that I was there

They said, "Come on, Ma let's go to the cabaret"

Where that band you ought to hear me say"

I want to see that dance you call the black bottom

I wanna learn that dance

Don't you see the dance you call your big black bottom

That'll put you in a trance

All the boys in the neighborhood

They say your black bottom is really good

Come on and show me your black bottom

I want to learn that dance

I want to see the dance you call the black bottom


Come on and show that dance you call your big black bottom

It puts you in a trance

Early last morning 'bout the break of day

Grandpa told my grandma, I heard him say

Get up and show your old man your black bottom


Now I'm gonna show y'all my black bottom

They stay to see that dance

Wait until you see me do my big black bottom

I'll put you in a trance

Ah, do it ma, do it, honey

Look it now Ma, you gettin' kinda rough here

You gotta be yourself now, careful now

Not too strong, not too strong, Ma

I done shown y'all my black bottom

You ought to learn that dance

Songwriter: MA RAINEY, GERTRUDE

Published by Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group


WILD WOMEN DON’T HAVE THE BLUES by Ida Cox

I hear these women raving 'bout their monkey men

About their trifling husbands and their no good friends

These poor women sit around all day and moan

Wondering why their wandering papa's don't come home

But wild women don't worry, wild women don't have no blues

Now when you've got a man, don't never be on the square

'Cause if you do he'll have a woman everywhere

I never was known to treat no one man right

I keep 'em working hard both day and night

'Cause wild women don't worry, wild women don't have their blues

I've got a disposition and a way of my own

When my man starts kicking I let him find another home

I get full of good liquor, walk the streets all night

Go home and put my man out if he don't act right

Wild women don't worry, wild women don't have their blues

You never get nothing by being an angel child

You better change your ways and get real wild

I wanna tell you something, I wouldn't tell you a lie

Wild women are the only kind that really get by

'Cause wild women don't worry, wild women don't have their blues


POOR MAN BLUES by Bessie Smith

Mister Rich Man, Rich Man

Open up your heart and mind

Mister Rich Man, Rich Man

Open up your heart and mind

Give the poor man a chance

Help stop these hard, hard times

While you livin' in your mansion

You don't know what hard time means

While you livin' in your mansion

You don't know what hard time means

Oh, workin' man's wife is starvin'

Your wife is livin' like a queen

Please, listen to my pleadin'

'Cause I can't stand these hard times long

Oh, listen to my pleadin'

Can't stand these hard times long

They'll make an honest man do things

That you know is wrong

All man fought all the battles

All man would fight again today

All man fought all the battles

All man would fight again today

He would do anything you ask him

In the name of the U.S.A

Now the war is over

All man must live the same as you

Now the war is over

All man must live the same as you

If it wasn't for the poor man

Mister Rich Man what would you do?

Songwriter: Bessie Smith

Published by FRANK MUSIC CORP.

DOWN-HEARTED BLUES by Alberta Hunter

My man mistreated and he drove me from his door

Lord, he mistreated me and he drove me from his door

But the Good Book says you've got

To reap just what you sow

I got the world in a jug, got the supper?

Right here in my hand

I got the world in a jug, got the supper?

Right here in my hand

And if you want me, sweet papa

You gotta come under my command

Say, I ain't never loved but three men in my life

Lord, I ain't never loved but three men in my life

'twas my father and my brother And a man that wretched my life

Lord, it may be a week and it may be a month or two

I said, it may be a week and it may be a month or two

All the dirt you're doin' to me

Sho' comin' home to you

Lord, I walked the floor, hang my head and cried

Lord, I walked the floor, hang my head and cried

Had the down hearted blues

And I couldn't be satisfied


STORMY WEATHER by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler

(First sung by Ethel Waters in 1933)

Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky

Stormy weather

Since my man and I ain't together,

Keeps rainin' all of the time

Life is bare, gloom and mis'ry everywhere

Stormy weather

And I just can't get my poorself together,

I'm weary all the time, so weary all the time

When he went away the blues walked in and met me.

If he stays away old rockin' chair will get me.

All I do is pray the Lord above will let me

Walk in the sun once more.

I can't go on, can't go on, can't go on, ev'ry thing I had is gone

Stormy weather

Since my man and I ain't together

Keeps rainin' all the time

I walk around heavy-hearted and sad

Night comes around and I’m still feeling bad

Rain pouring me down blindin’ every hope I had

This pitterin’, patterin’, beatin’, and splatterin’ drives me mad

Love, love, love, love

This misery is just too much for me

Can’t go on, all I have in life is gone

Stormy weather

Since my man and I ain’t together

Keeps rainin’ all the time

Keeps rainin’ all the time

Stormy Weather lyrics © EMI Music Publishing


ST. LOUIS BLUES by W.C. Handy

(Sung by Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and Eartha Kitt)

I hate to see the ev'nin' sun go down

I hate to see the ev'nin' sun go down

It makes me think of all my left go 'round

Feelin' tomorrow like I feel today

Feelin' tomorrow like I feel today

I'll pack my trunk and make my getaway

St. Louis woman with her diamond rings

Pulls my man around by her apron strings

Wasn't for powder and his store-bought hair

The man I love, wouldn't go nowhere, nowhere

I got the St. Louis blues just as blue as I can be

He's got a heart like a rock cast in the sea

Or else he wouldn't have gone so far from me

I love my man like a school boy loves his pie

Like a Kentucky colonel loves his mintn rye

I love my baby till the day I die

STRANGE FRUIT by Abel Meeropol

(Performed and Recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939)

Southern trees bear strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop

Published by Lyrics © EMI Music Publishing


GO LIMP by Nina Simone

Oh Daughter, dear Daughter

Take warning from me

And don't you go marching

With the N-A-A-C-P.

For they'll rock you and roll you

And shove you into bed.

And if they steal your nuclear secret

You'll wish you were dead.

[Refrain:]

Singin too roo la, too roo la, too roo li ay.

Singin too roo la, too roo la, too roo li ay.

Oh Mother, dear Mother,

No, I'm not afraid.

For I'll go on that march

And I'll return a virgin maid.

With a brick in my handbag

And a smile on my face

And barbed wire in my underwear

To shed off disgrace.

[Refrain]

One day they were marching.

A young man came by

With a beard on his cheek

And a gleam in his eye.

And before she had time

To remember her brick

They were holding a sit-down

On a neighboring hay rig.

[Refrain]

For meeting is pleasure

And parting is pain.

And if I have a great concert

Maybe I won't have to sing those folk songs again.

Oh Mother, dear Mother

I'm stiff and I'm sore

From sleeping three nights

On a hard classroom floor.

[Refrain]

One day at the briefing

She'd heard a man say,

"Go perfectly limp

And be carried away."

So when this young man suggested

It was time she was kissed

She remembered her briefing

And did not resist.

[Refrain]

Oh Mother, dear Mother,

No need for distress,

For the young man has left me

His name and address.

And if we win

Tho' a baby there be

He won't have to march

Like his da-da and me.




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Blues Women: First Civil Rights Workers

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