Ma Rainey and the Black Avant-Garde

by Taylor Guidry

Ma Rainey was an American blues singer and influential early-blues recording artist. She was born Gertrude Malissa Nix Pridgett on April 26, 1886 in Columbus, Georgia, where she also passed away on December 22, 1939 in due to heart disease at 53 years old. Her parents, Thomas and Ella (Allen) Pridgett, were minstrel performers. Rainey was known for “her strong vocals, energetic performances, majestic phrasing, and her "moaning" style of singing” (Brandman). Her talents are present and most evident in her early recordings "Bo-Weevil Blues" and "Moonshine Blues."

In the book, Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey, Sandra R. Lieb writes about how Ma Rainey would start her show performing Thomas Dorsey’s “Stormy Sea Blues,” in a theatrical manner that mimicked being in a storm. Ma Rainey sang, “I see the lightnin' flashin' / I see the waves a-dashin' / I'm tryin' to spread the news I feel this boat a-crashin' / I'm tryin' to spread the news / My man has done quit me and left me with the stormy sea blues.” And “she’d sing it and then do whatever you’d do in a storm. The storm start to raining, you try to run here and run there and get away, and you become excited.” (qtd. Lieb 93). Though Ma Rainey would often write her songs, in this instance, she performed a song written by someone else and a reference to Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, but still managed to inject her own invention into the performance (Lieb 93).

Ma Rainey was known for being a theatrical performer, who changed the narrative for what a woman in blues could do. She was simultaneously a star of vaudeville and a minstrel of her own making. Rainey was associated with the genres of blues and jazz, as well as a precursor musically to the swing era. We can also see her as someone that could be considered avant-garde and performance wise; however, she is not often associated with the avantgarde, since her public persona has historically been criticized as inflecting a negative identity of Blackness because her artistic expression was minstrelsy.

Lieb writes about how Rainey emphasized her features to conform to the prejudices against dark-skinned African-American women held by Blacks and Whites while wearing mostly gold jewelry (an occasional tiara) that correlated with her gold teeth and matched the shade her skin was when she lightened it with “heavy greasepaint, powder, and rouge, so that she looked almost gold-colored under the amber stage lights” (Lieb 8). It was interesting that Rainey colored her skin to look like gold instead of black: we most often associate minstrel representations of blackness with literal blackface representations, instead of a gold color, associated with wealth and worth. Ma Rainey also performed in elaborate gowns of maroon, gold, or blue beaded satin (Lieb 8). This imagery of Ma Rainey was aware of what societal stereotypes were prevalent, and she subverted that white gaze by adorning herself with symbols of wealth and feminine glamour. This was not just subversive, but camp and avant-garde. She was simultaneously both a Black Baby Jane and a Black Blanche from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. Subversion and dualism is an antidote to the avant-garde.

All of Wagner's complexities could be characterized in the two main dichotomies of modernism: “one strain of modernism focuses on themes such as progress, novelty, technology, and invention. This is essentially a future-oriented, often overtly optimistic strain. A second strain [...] is somewhat darker, emphasizing alienation, isolation, parody, irony, absurdity, and fragmentation. The common element to be found in both the optimistic and pessimistic strains of modernism is the effort by artists to ‘go against the grain’—to snub orthodoxy and replace it with the unorthodox” (Huron).

In the article, “Expecting the Unexpected: Wagner and the Language of Longing,” David Huron talks about how Wagner and his music were considered the first embodiments of modernism because of the way he articulated romanticism and used leitmotifs to create a contrarian aesthetic of negative identity. His relation with modernism is also related in his goal to compose “music of the future” or zukunftsmusik. Hence why Wagner is associated with the avant-garde: his music was future oriented (Huron).

If modernism is subjugation of structure, then Black modernism or the Black avantgarde experience is a push between the positive identity and negative identity of Blackness, explored against Black formalism, Black traditionalism, and White structure. In the early 1900s to 1920s it seemed that songs through the medium of folklore was the way that black modernism or black avant-garde was explored.

Literary Modernism from the 1920s to the

1950s was a place to explore the Black avantgarde, especially seen in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. “All I know is I ends up singin' the blues. I sings me some blues that night ain't never been sang before, and while I'm singin' them blues I makes up my mind that I ain't nobody but myself and ain't nothin' I can do but let whatever is gonna happen, happen” (Ellison 53). Ellison explores Blackness in relation to the white gaze and white spaces in a Jim Crow America through a narrator that exists within a negative space. In her analysis of Invisible Man, Hortense J. Spillers argues that the book is rooted in the subversion of myth and consciousness, which in turn creates a counter-mythology of the narrator and black body through the motion of black disobedience (Spillers 65-80). “The book has never called itself “revolutionary,” but it begins and ends with a revolutionist determination: If “I” am to be victimized, why not let it be for good reason?” (Spillers 80).

I believe that Ma Rainey used the same subversion tactics in relation to the way she wanted the world to perceive her complexity in personality and in public image. The embodiment of her complexity was also rooted in her nicknames like Ma, Mother of the Blues, Big Mama, and Mama. “But by far the major significance of her name was as a shorthand for “Mama”—a lover, a voluptuous and desirable woman. Her comedy frequently depended on good-natured self-mockery about her looks, and on the contrast between her uninhibited, provocative movements and the discomfort of more straight-laced characters” (Lieb 10). This helped to cultivate a counter-mythology of the true identity of Rainey, and a way to cloak herself from the white gaze—like the narrator in Invisible Man—in order to maintain her mental secureness in a world that was hateful to her and other Black people.

Ma Rainey signified the American dream through her success in music, and in the way she projected success through the clothes and/or jewelry she wore in her performances. “Rainey signed a recording contract with Paramount Records in 1923, making her one of the earliest recorded blues musicians. Between 1923 and 1928, she recorded almost 100 records, many of them national hits that are now part of the American musical canon. Her 1924 recording of “See See Rider Blues” (for which she was accompanied by a young Louis Armstrong) was added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry in 2004" (Brandman).

While Ma Rainey sang the blues, which translated the hardness of her life, it was through the use of physical comedy that she highlighted her personal representations of the negative and positive identity of blackness, which was uniquely avant-garde. Her undisputed and unique expression of southern blues influenced a generation of blues singers and persists to this day.

Works Cited

Brandman, Mariana, NWHM Predoctoral Fellow in Women’s History 2020-2022 https://www.womenshistory.org/educationresources/biographies/gertrude-ma-rainey Huron, David. “Expecting the Unexpected: Wagner and the Language of Longing.” The MIT Press Reader, 12 August 2022, https:// thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/expecting-theunexpected-wagner-and-the-language-oflongin g/.

Lieb, Sandra R. Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey. University of Massachusetts Press, 1981.

Spillers, Hortense J. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. University of Chicago Press, 2003.

WKCR will celebrate the "Mother of the Blues" with a special 8-hour tribute, where we will play the entirety of her discography. Tune into the Ma Rainey Birthday Broadcast on Friday, April 26th, from 10:00AM to 6:00PM EDT.