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A review by outcolder
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday by Angela Y. Davis
4.0
Challenging. She'll write stuff that has me thinking, "well, I don't know about that..." but then maybe why I don't know is because I am white and male. In any case, it gave me lots of good reasons to listen to those songs again and to listen for something that I hadn't been listening for before.
There are plenty of less challenging bits in here, where she is mainly pointing out how the white male writers have missed or better said misdirected the way these women are represented in the larger culture. The chapters on Billie Holiday are like that. You have Billie Holiday's autobiography, and the genius of her music, and then you have this crap, dopey image of her everywhere from the Diana Ross pic to most of the writing about her. It doesn't add up, but Davis's chapters about her do.
Also, it is nice to put all this music in the context of the social struggles Davis is more known for. It's like, kinda, white (for lack of a better word) to always want to consider art as something timeless and, uh, art-for-art's sake... the artist against the world. Eric Crapton is always talking about the blues like that: "a man and a guitar against the world." Davis doesn't make that mistake. She quotes some Marcuse, a Marxist academic she studied with in another era, and tries to identify both the timelessness and the timeliness in this music.
The second half of the book is her transcriptions of the lyrics. Reading blues lyrics is as challenging as reading about them. It always feels like they were never meant to be written down, and for me, that the voice in my head isn't doing the words justice.
There are plenty of less challenging bits in here, where she is mainly pointing out how the white male writers have missed or better said misdirected the way these women are represented in the larger culture. The chapters on Billie Holiday are like that. You have Billie Holiday's autobiography, and the genius of her music, and then you have this crap, dopey image of her everywhere from the Diana Ross pic to most of the writing about her. It doesn't add up, but Davis's chapters about her do.
Also, it is nice to put all this music in the context of the social struggles Davis is more known for. It's like, kinda, white (for lack of a better word) to always want to consider art as something timeless and, uh, art-for-art's sake... the artist against the world. Eric Crapton is always talking about the blues like that: "a man and a guitar against the world." Davis doesn't make that mistake. She quotes some Marcuse, a Marxist academic she studied with in another era, and tries to identify both the timelessness and the timeliness in this music.
The second half of the book is her transcriptions of the lyrics. Reading blues lyrics is as challenging as reading about them. It always feels like they were never meant to be written down, and for me, that the voice in my head isn't doing the words justice.