Subjectivity and Agency: Pioneering Blues Women of the Harlem Renaissance

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Note: This piece is an extract from my dissertation, Intersectional Black Womanhood in Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun: Passing, Home, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance, where I analysed Black womanhood in Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929).

Where she went, I don’t know

I mean to follow everywhere she goes;

Folks say I’m crooked. I didn’t know where she took it

I want the whole world to know.

They say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me

Sure got to prove it on me;

Went out last night with a crowd of my friends,

They must’ve been women, ‘cause I don’t like no men.

The release of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey’s “Prove It On Me Blues”, in 1928, was seminal to the evolution of blues music. Its lyrics detail a lesbian affair, explicitly challenging the notion of straight sexuality. Artists such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith set in motion a wave of blues women. By establishing agency over their music, they crafted their own version of intersectional identity. Popular music as we know today stems from trailblazing Black artists; these women were pioneers in curating feminine identity on their own terms. The Harlem Renaissance (1920s-30s) marked a historical period in defining new African-American identity. Angela Davis, in her book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, refers to the period as one of ‘intellectual independence and representational freedom’. Throughout their careers, Harlem blues women deviated from the idealised trope of ‘faithful wife, devoted mother’, touching on themes of infidelity, promiscuity, sex and vengeance.

Blues women are notable for utilising “masculine” modes of prerogatives to define their experience as women - may that be in romantic relationships, personal welfare or socio-economic status. Whether lyrically or in stage presence, placing women in roles deemed “masculine” elevated them to a position that was equal to men’s. This surely provides an alternative representation of 1920s womanhood, differing from other modes of Harlem art. Ann DuCille notably points out that middle-class authors - such as Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen - were concerned with the same “taboo” themes present in the blues. But where blues women did this overtly, these novelists did so covertly in their texts. DuCille refers to this as the ‘blues inscriptions’ of Fauset and Larsen’s novels.

Furthermore, blues singers were often extolled as muses to Harlem poets, such as in Sterling Brown’s “Ma Rainey” (1930) and Myron O’Higgins’ “Blues for Bessie” (1945). James Baldwin, in his essay, “The Discovery of What it means to be an American”, writes that Bessie Smith ‘helped me to dig back to the way I myself must have spoken when I was a pickaninny, and to remember the things I had heard and seen and felt’. The nod to blues music - and blues women specifically - is symbolic in celebrating the effect of blues on artistic culture. Further, it symbolises the role blues women play in the multi-faceted dimensions of womanhood.

In addition, Davis argues that women’s blues witnessed the contradictory historical demands made of Black women in the 1920s. She points out that they faced ‘ideological expectations of domesticity and subordination emanating from the dominant culture’. Women’s blues challenged mainstream notions of femininity, notably leaving out themes of motherhood, domesticity, marriage and the home. These were themes prevalent in mainstream feminine discourse at the time. In fact, Bessie Smith’s song Safety Mama (1931) parodies the idea of the domestic woman:

‘cause I’m a safety woman, lookin’ for a safety man

Make him stay at home, help me wash and iron

The neighbours know he done lost his mind’

Blues women demonstrated an unwavering power over their image through their lyrics and performance. Hazel Carby argues this as the make-up of female sexuality in the 1920s, stating that their presence was a crucial aspect of their power. Through ‘the visual display of spangled dresses, of furs, of gold teeth, of diamonds, of all the sumptuous and desirable aspects of their body’, these blues women effectively reclaimed narratives of their sexuality from male objectification. They were in control of how their audiences perceived them, demonstrating an agency over their own womanhood.

As Davis states, the presence of any experience in art renders it ‘worthy of public discourse’. For this reason, the blues was significant to 1920s Black consciousness and Black womanhood. It provided a voice for issues that were not articulated elsewhere. Blues women established agency over their own identity, using their artistry to claim their image and sexuality. By doing so, they disassociated themselves as objects of male desire. Rightly so, blues women are hailed feminist trailblazers. The work of female blues singers continue to permeate our society’s consciousness; Fred Moten’s poem “Bessie Smith” (2004) celebrates the art of her performance, while George C. Wolfe’s film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020) pays tribute to “Mother of Blues” Ma Rainey’s artistry. Jackie Kay describes the relevance of Bessie Smith’s blues in 2021, writing in Bessie Smith: A Radio 4 Book of the Week (2021), ‘her blues sought the truth – the truth in all its multiplicity; the hard truth, the strangest truth, the supernatural truth’.

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Bibliography

Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Vintage Books, 1999)

Ann Ducille, “Blues Notes on Black Sexuality: Sex and the texts of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3, no. 3 (1993)

Hazel V. Carby, Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America, The Haymarket Series (London, Etc.: Verso, 1999)