In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Davis, controversial activist, author, and professor widely known for her revolutionary politics, argues against some conventional views of women and their songs in the blues. The lyrics sung by Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, presented in the more than 200 transcriptions in this book, embodied strength, social consciousness, and feminist power in Davis’ analysis. And, in contrast to the idealized social mores often expressed by the Black middle class and white society in popular music of the era, blues lyrics according to Davis manifested “provocative and pervasive sexual-including homosexual-imagery,” incorporating responses to violence, infidelity and misogyny. Sexual freedom was a critical right in the absence of true political and economic freedom in the aftermath of slavery. “The female figures evoked in women’s blues are independent women free of the domestic orthodoxy of the prevailing representations of womanhood,” Davis wrote. Her interpretations, ideology and academic writing style met with mixed reviews, but Davis’ defense of the blues heroines has challenged readers to look deeper into these women’s art and the struggles that led them to sing the blues. Davis is also the author of Women, Race and Class and Women, Culture and Politics.
Biographies and descriptions written by Jim O’Neal (www.bluesoterica.com) with research assistance from Bob Eagle and Robert Ford. The full entries for all Blues Hall of Fame inductees from 1980 to date are posted at https://blues.org/blues-hall-of-fame.