Singing the Blues and Blowing Our Minds
Listening to music
"Blues, the word," sounds sad, but this music form can lift a mood as quickly as it can evoke melancholy. Try it: listen to some Ma Rainey or Big Mama Thornton or Shemekia Copeland right now.
How do you feel?
Vacations can be boring. You don't know how to get around. You can't just get in your car and go get something done. Waiting lines slither down the block. Tourist-snares beckon. Lying on a beach gets old and hot, for me, fast.
"Ma Rainey's Black Bottom"
But one thing that stands out in my vacation memories is a fancy once-in-a-decade splurge I bought for my husband and me. The room, swaddled in silk drapes and stocked with high-end snacks called me to stay in and watch Netflix from the kingsized bed. I clicked the remote, and on flickered Netflix' 2020 drama "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" by Ruben Santiago-Hudson.
"The Mother of the Blues," Ma Rainey (1886-1939) was one of the first singers of the blues to make recordings. She was born and died in Columbus, Georgia.
Columbus, Georgia
Blues is personal. If you think you don't get it maybe you just haven't tried the right performance.
Ma Rainey's low, throaty voice, coupled with her haunting stage presence brought full houses and hit records during the early 1900s. She also wrote songs, which discussed her being a free-thinking, overtly bisexual African-American woman. People went wild for this uncustomary woman.
Ma Rainey shimmered
Her voice is moan-y, her teeth gold, her clothes and jewelry shimmery. Audiences thronged.
A child of minstrel performer parents, Rainey showed singing ability early, performing in her teens. She sang with touring vaudeville acts in carnivals and honky-tonks.
While singing she ran into comedian, dancer, singer Will “Pa” Rainey, and in 1904 they wed. Their two-person act “Ma and Pa Rainey” toured with African-American vaudeville and minstrel organizations, such as the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. After the couple separated, Rainey designed a show of her own, “Madame Gertrude Ma Rainey and Her Georgia Smart Set.”
Rainey's vocals and style epitomize blues' force "as a vehicle to overcome adversity and lift our collective spirit," said musician Riley Mulkerhar.
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and NPR Music have acclaimed Mulkerhar's expertise. No surprise that in 2020 he won a Lincoln Center’s Emerging Artist Award for being “an original bandleader, composer, arranger, educator, community activist and advocate for jazz and the arts.”
"Ma Rainey teaches us to never shy away from being ourselves, and to use the voice we have to tell our own story."
George C. Wolfe directed that Netflix film I loved. "Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom" highlighted Viola Davis as she stunned audiences. Illuminating the film as well are Chadwick Boseman, Colman Domingo, Michael Potts, Glynn Turman, Dusan Brown and Taylour Paige.
Based on Pulitzer Prize winning August Wilson's play, it's Chicago in 1927, and the characters are arguing in a recording studio. Resentment burns between Ma Rainey (Davis) and her driven hornist (Chadwick Boseman) and the white folk who want to micromanage and control the “Mother of the Blues.”
Some of Rainey's lyrics
Enthralled I was, and sought more of Rainey, in other forms.
In her song "Black Eye Blues" she sings:
"Low-down alligator, just watch me sooner or later/ Gonna catch ya with your britches down/ You abuse me and mistreat me/ you dog around and beat me/ Still, I'm gonna hang around."
From "Runaway Blues" comes these lyrics. It's a Ma Rainey song that expresses a will to get to a better place, with its dance-like tempo of 132 beats per minute and a 3/4 time signature. But it can be sung, too, at either half- or double-time. Although it's in a major mode, the feel is reserved.
"I'll run away tomorrow/ they don't mean me no good/ I'll run away/ Hafta leave this neighborhood"
According to womenshistory.org, Rainey helped link vaudeville and authentic Southern blues. The blues began in West Africa during call-and-response songs people used for telling stories. Africans who had been taken prisoner passed them down to their descendants, while enslaved in the Western Hemisphere.
Unethical management
The Theater Owners Booking Association organized many of Ma and Pa Raineys' shows. Its management was notorious for taking advantage of and demeaning African-American performers: some said TOBA stood for “Tough on Black Artists.”
TOBA booked Black artists exclusively and sent them to theaters on the East Coast and west to Oklahoma. TOBA offered more meager paydays and worse accommodations, for which the show people were charged. The whites in vaudeville fared much better.
Rainey died at 53 from heart disease on December 22, 1939. But her legacy lives ebulliently.
She motivated other singers such as Dinah Washington, Big Mama Thornton and Janis Joplin. She inspired August Wilson to write his 1982 Broadway winner of a play (before the film) "Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom," whose title comes from the 1920s "black bottom dance" craze.
Paramount eventually said Rainey's blues style was no longer popular and cancelled her contract. She performed for private citizens and did some touring. When her sister and mother died, Rainey went back home to Columbus, Georgia, where she owned and operated two theaters and participated in the Baptist Church, where her brother served as deacon.
As Black people escaped the South, according to PBS.org, blues music developed to mirror their changed conditions. But traditional blues now reminded Blacks of hideous days and nights out on the farm. They wanted instead to make music about urbanity, their new homes.
Blues great Muddy Waters, who worked on a Mississippi plantation before leaving for Chicago in 1943, started playing electric, not acoustic, guitars. Standup bass and drums too were big in the blues. Now, electrified blues got audiences dancing instead of sitting. And here came rock and roll.
12-bar blues
The 12-bar blues is the most popular form and implies the number of measures used for a typical blues song. Almost all blues is played in 4/4 time (four beats per measure, with the quarter note getting one of those beats).
The 12-bar blues comprises three four-bar sections. A standard blues progression (note sequence) usually has three chords based on the first (I), fourth (IV), and fifth (V) notes of any eight-note scale.
The I chord dominates the first four bars, and the IV chord shows up in the second four. The V chord pops in during the third four.
The words of a 12-bar blues song are normally in an AAB pattern, where A is the first and second verse, and B is the third verse. The first and second lines often get repeated, with the third line responding to them, with something special added.
Which blues songs have moved you?
Tell us! Which blues performers have moved you—to crying, goose bumping, dancing?
# # #
