MOTHER OF THE BLUES
BACKWOODS MISSOURI, 1902 — On a muggy Midwestern night, the teenage crooner they call “The Black Nightingale” slumps behind the show tent, exhausted from another vaudeville night. Up steps a young girl with a guitar, asking to play a song. Another song?
But this song is like nothing the nightingale has ever heard. It is slow, haunting, and just so so sad. Something in the musical scale is different, something timeless, something sorrowful. The Black Nightingale can’t describe it, but she can’t stop hearing it, all night. She soon learns the song and makes it her encore. And by the 1920s, she owns the style they call the blues.
“Ma Rainey may not have been the first woman to sing the blues,” the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame wrote upon her induction, “but she might as well have. Her sturdy, tough vocals wiped away any memory of other blues singers. Whatever you heard before, it was not the blues—because no one else sang the blues like Ma Rainey.”
Just being black in Jim Crow Georgia was blues enough, but Gertrude Pridgett had extra spices in her sorrow. Her father died when she was 14, sending her mother to work on the railroad. Debuting at a local talent show in Columbus, Gertrude was a nightingale onstage. But offstage she was just another black girl. Couldn’t read, couldn’t vote, couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t. And then there were men, always men.
I want all you women
to listen to me
Don’t trust your man
No further than your eyes can see.
Touring the South, Gertrude sang with her boyfriend, Will “Pa” Rainey. When they married in 1904, she became “Ma.” They sang vaudeville tunes and ragtime favorites, but when they joined the Rabbit Foot Minstrels out of Mississippi, they learned the blues. From that first haunting song back of the tent, Rainey spread the blues throughout the South. There was, audiences noted, just something about her.
The gold teeth. The bigger-than-life presence, some guessed 300 pounds. The flashy jewelry, feather boas, sequined gowns. And soaring above all the frippery, THAT voice.
CLICK TO HEAR FIVE SONGS BY MA RAINEY IN “I HEAR AMERICA SINGING”
“When she started singing, the gold in her teeth would sparkle,” pianist Thomas Dorsey, recalled. “She possessed listeners; they swayed, they rocked, they moaned and groaned, as they felt the blues with her.”
Divorced in 1916, Rainey poured her blues into other songs about men. “Lawd, Send Me a Man Blues,” “Goodbye Daddy Blues,” “Oh Papa Blues.” Then shortly after the split, she met a young singer named Bessie Smith. The two women became close in ways that aroused suspicion. Neither seemed to care. They had the blues, each other, and soon America’s attention.
During the early 1920s, when “race records” became all the rage, Ma Rainey followed her friend Bessie into the studio. In 1923, one afternoon in Chicago, Rainey recorded eight blues songs. Several became hits, sending her back into the studio and back on tour. Billed as “Mother of the Blues,” she sang with Dorsey, Louis Armstrong, and others. By 1928, she had 92 records and was earning $350 a week. But she was also notorious.
There was that night in 1925 when Chicago police raided her hotel room. Finding men and women doing what Rainey called that “slow driving moan,” cops arrested her. The next day, Bessie bailed her out. Rumors spread, leading Rainey to write “Prove it on Me.”
Went out last night with a crowd of my friends.
They must’ve been women, ‘cause I don’t like no men.
It’s true I wear a collar and a tie,
Makes the wind blow all the while.
Don’t you say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me.
You sure got to prove it on me.
Defiant about her sexuality, Rainey posed on a record cover in a three-piece suit with a cop over her shoulder. She sang openly about domestic abuse in “Black Eye Blues.” It all might have led to scandal but race records were fading fast. Rainey toured on into the 1930s, but when her record company went broke, her recordings ended up in a vault.
Retired in 1935, Rainey went home to Columbus to run a few hotels. Four years later, she died of heart failure. Bessie Smith became a legend, but Ma Rainey was largely forgotten until the 1960s when her records were re-released. Then in 1982, August Wilson wrote “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Nominated for a Tony Award, the play brought Rainey to Broadway, and to new listeners.
Along with the blues, many admired Rainey’s persona. In The Color Purple, Alice Walker based big talking Shug Avery on Rainey. Singers from Bonnie Raitt to Cyndi Lauper became fans. And in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Davis praised Rainey for singing about women who “explicitly celebrate their right to conduct themselves as expansively and even as undesirably as men."
Ma Rainey lived, sang, became the blues. Now a feminist icon, revived in the recent Netflix version of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” the Black Nightingale continues to sing.
In his poem “Ma Rainey,” Sterling Brown summed her up.
I talked to a fellow, an’ the fellow say
She jes' catch hold of us, somekindaway.
