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Blues et féminisme noir : Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith et Billie Holiday by Angela Y. Davis
adamcarrico91's review against another edition
4.0
If you’re interested in the intersection of black working class feminism and music, you’ll probably enjoy this book. It’s very academic, which leads to a thorough analysis of the lyrics and performances of these artists in a socio-political context. Most of the book focuses on the early blues singers, but the final couple chapters deal with Billie Holiday.
azure_mood's review against another edition
4.0
In this text, Davis exams the many facets in which Rainey, Smith, and Holiday are still relevant in any discourse involving Black American music, history, and feminism. These women and their artistry transformed the sociocultural way in which we examine and experience music, sexuality, love, and on a massive scale cross-cultural communication and issues of social justice. To get a crash course in post-slavery America at the turn of the century and many of the social justice issues that terrorized us then, and still plague us today, this is one of the texts you want to grab.
macbethgonzalez's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
4.5
tangleroot_eli's review against another edition
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Although I sometimes found Davis’s arguments frustratingly circular (“I propose that Smith’s lyrics say A, B, and C, which I will prove by quoting X, Y, and Z lyrics”), this is a powerful book. A must-read for anyone passionate about the blues, Black feminism, or the importance of the arts in discussions of race, gender, class, and sexuality.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Domestic abuse, Misogyny, Racism, and Sexism
Moderate: Slavery and Religious bigotry
Minor: Alcoholism, Drug use, and Homophobia
davyt's review against another edition
Incredibly dense book tackling themes of feminism in black art that are shockingly progressive and out-right ignored historically. This book was written in the late nineties with artist like Tracy Chapman and Erykah Badu being mentioned in the closing paragraphs as catalysts of some of the same sentiments the three main women discussed in the book represented. It’s disheartening to see in genres like hip-hop, contemporary female artists like Little Simz are being so widely ignored and not respected despite making clearly some of the best music in the genre. Artists like Megan Thee Stallion are getting torn down for structuring songs around female sexuality similar to Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith in their time.
cnidariar3x's review against another edition
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.75
Academic in prose, but manages to be gripping nonetheless.
Roughly 150 pages are printed lyrics to Ma Rainey's and Bessie Smith's recorded works.
Is it problematic of me to have wanted to read more material on Billie Holiday? Perhaps thats not the intention of this book.
The knowledge and insight provided herein on Ma Rainey & Bessie Smith (among others such as Ethel Waters and Clara Smith) as well as the cultural context surrounding them is invaluable.
Roughly 150 pages are printed lyrics to Ma Rainey's and Bessie Smith's recorded works.
Is it problematic of me to have wanted to read more material on Billie Holiday? Perhaps thats not the intention of this book.
The knowledge and insight provided herein on Ma Rainey & Bessie Smith (among others such as Ethel Waters and Clara Smith) as well as the cultural context surrounding them is invaluable.
chrisiant's review against another edition
5.0
Overall I really loved this book and was so glad I ended up borrowing it to read on a four-hour bus ride. Davis' prose is very dense and academic, at times almost too dense to wade through. I can see that being a turn-off for many readers, and it's unfortunate, because I think there's a lot of really fabulous and useful points in here. My only other criticism is that it seemed to me Davis was sometimes contorting to get the meaning out of a song that fit her argument. I generally gave her the benefit of the doubt, because so much of the meaning she was wringing from these songs came from the elements of their performance, which is obviously hard to glean from lyrics alone.
Beyond those two things, there is really nothing but awesome about this book. Davis makes numerous insightful points about the role of blues women in creating space and consciousness for black feminism. Their songs expressed the new-found sexual agency of black individuals after slavery, frankly acknowledging and celebrating women's sexual agency. They expressed the black individual experience as separate from the community experience focused on in the music of slavery, but sang them to a wide audience and addressed them in ways that called for recognition of collective experience. The songs also baldly, and without judgment, discussed topics taboo in middle-class society such as domestic violence, homosexuality, multiple relationships, prison, and poverty.
Beyond those two things, there is really nothing but awesome about this book. Davis makes numerous insightful points about the role of blues women in creating space and consciousness for black feminism. Their songs expressed the new-found sexual agency of black individuals after slavery, frankly acknowledging and celebrating women's sexual agency. They expressed the black individual experience as separate from the community experience focused on in the music of slavery, but sang them to a wide audience and addressed them in ways that called for recognition of collective experience. The songs also baldly, and without judgment, discussed topics taboo in middle-class society such as domestic violence, homosexuality, multiple relationships, prison, and poverty.