Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

In a Different Chord: Interpreting the Relations among Black Female Sexuality, Agency, and the Blues

2003; Saint Louis University; Volume: 37; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1512389

1945-6182

Nghana tamu Lewis,

Musicology and Musical Analysis

Sometimes the lyrics mock and signify even as they pretend to weep. (Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues) Black feminism is not a monolithic enterprise. But it starts to look that way critical treatment of the intercourse among the blues, black female sexuality, and cultural agency. Angela Davis, for example, drawing from the lyrics of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, theorizes that the blues has helped to construct an aesthetic community that validates capacities domains assumed to be the prerogatives of males, such as sexuality and travel (120). Davis follows Hazel Carby's lead identifying the late 1920s and early 1930s as especially progressive periods the history of the blues because black women, as at no other time before, used the medium to manipulate and control their construction as sexual objects (333). Carby likewise reads Ma Rainey's and Bessie Smith's performances subversions of the stereotype of black as down-trodden and forlorn traditional blues matrices. (1) Michelle Russell and Sandra Leib argue similarly that black female blues developed at the turn of the twentieth century as a distinguishable idiom precisely because it enabled black to own their past, present and future by confiscating and reconstructing their identities (Russell 130). Like Carby and Davis, Russell and Leib portray female lyricists of the 1920s and 1930s as ideologists of the notion of black female self-determination, out of which black feminist thought emerged the academy the late 1960s and early 1970s. None of these scholars considers the possibility that musical and literary blues lyrics written by both men and and lacking explicitly emancipatory features might nevertheless afford black similar opportunities for self-formation and self-expression. (2) All take the same formulaic approach toward classifying empowering blues texts, isolating, almost exclusively, lyrics or performances which female singers assert male prerogatives or reject and exact revenge against their oppressors as the loci of liberating and, hence, feminist moments of expression for black women. By focusing exclusively on celebratory black female performances, black feminist blues scholars suggest that the liberating potential of the blues is a primary function of the performer's gender identification. They forget that, while Clare Smith, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday were singing and stomping the blues the '20s and '30s, black male writers and entertainers such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Louis Armstrong were also producing blues texts for mass consumption. Limning Ma Rainey as both feminist foremother and prophet, Leib insists that the body of Rainey's recorded material constitutes a message to women, explaining quite clearly how to deal with reverses love and how to interpret other areas of life. Leib points out that, in striking contrast to the popular concept of the blues as a music of sorrow and despair, Ma Rainey's performances reveal women aggressively confronting or attempting to change the circumstances of their lives (xvi). By contrast, this essay, I work from the belief that the practice of dichotomizing black male- and female-authored blues constructions of black and black female sexuality vitiates the life of the medium--the fluidity of the blues and its ability to circumvent diametrically opposed categorical analyses. Attending exclusively to works that paint only overtly positive images of black women, other words, produces stereotypically negative interpretations of those passive female singers that have historically been condemned or ignored. The scholarly focus inadvertently dismisses a cross-generational body of musical and literary blues texts that, fact, celebrate the multi-dimensionality of black women's characters. By cross-examining blues works by Langston Hughes, Billie Holiday, Mari Evans, and Natalie Cole, I aim to represent the blues' metasexual dimensions as well as the possibilities the blues have historically created for black American to achieve actual and symbolic liberation within the constraints of white- and male-dominated societies. …