Angela Y. Davis Blues Legacies & Black Feminism

Rain. Five days it rains. Sky turned black as night. James P. Johnson 's left hand, working the basement of the piano, calls down some thunder, lightning and rushing torrents behind Bessie Smith, who begins to describe a terrible flooding: there' s trouble in the lowlands and the people got no place to go. The Backwater Blues, considered by many to be among the greatest blues recordings of all time, is an eyewitness account - in early 1927 Bessie' s traveling blues revue found itself in the middle of a disaster area somewhere south of Cincinnati. The Mississippi River had reached out and knocked away entire neighborhoods. Bessie looked around and simply said "I can 't stay here tonight." But the people asked her to remain with them. "Miss Bessie, please sing the Back Water Blues." Now, there wasn't any such song. Not yet. But there was a blues condition on the land and in the lives of her people, and after Bessie had gotten herself back home she sat down and wrote them their blues; simple, powerful and to the point.

Most stories come to us in little pieces. Even when the truth gets through, we seldom see the entire picture. The account I have just placed in your mind's eye (and hopefully in your heart) is moving and unforgettable. But I want you to know that it' s like a big landscape which has been cropped down to a small detail. Just recently, the rest of the story came to light. What could be worse than losing your entire homestead to a natural disaster? The terrible presence of unnatural hatred. Listen to this:

"The seasonal rains causing the Mississippi River to flood its banks are part of the unalterable course of nature, but the suffering of untold numbers of black people who lived in towns and the countryside along the river also were attributable to racism. Black people were often considered expendable, and their communities were forced to take the overflow of backwaters in order to reduce the pressure on the levees. While most white people remained safe, black people suffered the wrath of the Mississippi, nature itself having been turned into a formidable weapon of racism. In 1927, between the months of April and June, hundreds of thousands of people lost everything they owned in the floods, with virtually no means of recovery. While relief services were free to white victims, black victims were often informed that they would have to pay cash for food and other necessities. Destitute, they were forced to take loans from plantation owners, who later forced them to work off their alleged debt."

Now take another look at our picture, our wonderful American landscape. The woman who has diIated the iris for us, offering true panoramic vision, is Angela Davis. She is the Great Explainer: for years she has shared her clarity and ethical integrity with us in a series of refreshingly honest books. Her Autobiography tells the story of her formative years as a brilliant activist and revolutionary thinker. Women Race & Class and Women Culture & Politics stand as invaluable sourcebooks for modern feminist thought and action. One marvels at the patience involved in a lifetime of spelling things out for a morbidly distracted population. Blues Legacies & Black Feminism should be recognized and celebrated as her crowning achievement in this life thus far.

The literature of African American music has just begun to arrive at the level of integrity and accuracy which the culture deserves. Even a cursory examination of what has been written about blues in particular will reveal some terribly stunted, often obfuscated interpretations which stem from the European concept of Race, a notion which seems to thrive in North America. This system was founded on racism, classism and sexism. Lousy ethics. It is a malignant social construct, and the pissy smell of inequity seems to permeate everywhere. In attempting to study the history of black music, one must wade through distortions, misquotes, pontifications and lies. The best resource has always been the words of the artists themselves. Next best is the respectful analysis of a dedicated listener who understands where the music is really coming from.

Feminism, and black feminism in particular can usually be depended upon for a refreshingly honest appraisal of how things really are. Honesty you can feel in your bones. A well-stated feminist analysis is imperative, for without this kind of perception the picture makes no sense, holds no water, and is missing its center weight. Any discussion of culture without feminist clarity is vacuous. Angela has given us a work full of unprecedented insights: "The entire body of Bessie Smith's work needs to be reexamined with an eye to uncovering its social content and its political dimension of protest." This she has done with characteristic exactitude.

The entire second half of this book consists of Angela's own transcriptions of the words to all of the songs recorded by Bessie Smith and Gertrude "Ma" Rainey. Leafing through nearly 200 pages of lyrics, one is confronted with honest, straightforward testimonial. Ma Rainey 's fuzzy old Paramount recordings are from time to time difficult to decipher. Some of the CD remastering has helped. But Angela' s efforts enable us to study these recordings like never before.

"The blues are located on an African cultural continuum," explains Angela. She describes "... the West African practice of nommo, which conjures powers associated with things by ritually pronouncing their names. . . Nommo is more powerful than Christian prayer because it attributes to human beings the power of the "word", which, in the Judeo-Christian religion, is exercised by God alone. 'In the beginning was the word,' says the Bible 'and the word was with God and the word was God.' As God created, he named, and as he named, he created. This creative and transformative power, possessed not only by supernatural beings but by living women and men, is an important distinguishing characteristic of the philosophical discourse of traditional West African societies. It can also help us understand blues aesthetics, which linked post-slavery African American culture with its African antecedent."

This music is full of subtleties and multiple meanings. White critics are famous for missing out on most if the context. Angela painstakingly documents the various types of messages inherent in the songs: Ideology, Sexuality, Domesticity, Relationships, freedom and Mobility, Political Protest, Spirituality, Self-Consciousness, and the Black Aesthetic. Nobody has ever gone about analyzing the music as does Angela. And it's about time. How's about the "Social Implications of Billie Holiday's Love Songs" - this is unprecedented. "By playing with the lyrics, she ventures a serious statement about the possibilities of women's independence...instead of mourning her loss by wallowing in her suffering, Lady Day's voice conveys a sense of deliverance and release, as if she were challenging the accepted gender roles within love relationships. She was able to project in her music the female strength she seemed chronically incapable of achieving in her own life."

Billie's inflections say more than the lyrics themselves: "In 'Lover, Come Back to Me,' her voice is saying, 'Lover, please stay away - I am immensely enjoying this state of freedom from the vagaries of love constructed according to male dominance.' Billie' Holiday's songs were subversive in that they offered special and privileged insights to black people about the dominant culture... unlike Gertrude Rainey and Bessie Smith, she did not concentrate on the musical creations of black culture. Rather, she boldly entered the domain of white love as it filtered through the commodified images and market strategies of Tin Pan Alley." Deeper still is the last chapter of analysis: "Strange Fruit: Music and Social Consciousness" - Angela's focused reflections on Billie's unforgettable opus describing the horror of a lynching, which speaks also to the everyday debasements of a racist society.

Everybody needs this book, honest. Go to Common Language Bookstore and get your own copy. Anyone who's read it will probably join me in saying: Thank you, Angela, for the context. ■