The Radical Subtlety of the Blues Femme
Like the blues legends of the past, modern black femme artists and songwriters blur the line between biographic and entertainment writing. This work uses a post-modernist definition of the term “femme.” In this work, “femme” is a term that describes people who are acquainted with the socialization, aesthetics, and politics of womanhood, even if they do not necessarily identify as women. In addition to politics and aesthetics, the term “black femme” is used by this author to imply the lived experiences of all people familiar with the unique lens that gendered socialization offers them; not just cisgender heterosexual black women.
The blues, like jazz, has a lot of feminine talent. With their composition and performance prowess, artists like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith ruled the industry. This is evidenced by HistoryMaker Micheal White. White is a Jazz musician and music professor of African American music at Xavier University of Louisiana, and bandleader of the Original Liberty Jazz Band in New Orleans, Louisiana. Of the feminine impact on the blues, he says, “The heyday of classic jazz was also the heyday of classic blues when you had mainly African American females like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and many others recording blues music, which was the main staple of, of the race record market.” Indeed, these figures would go on to shape other forms of music like gospel, rock n’ roll, and R&B.
Their songs were frequently autobiographical in nature, and they rarely avoided taboo subjects like crime, sex, and politics. In an industry and a country that consigned black women to the lowest rungs of society, the fame of these artists made their music all the more potent. This is best shown by the story of Bessie Smith's "Back-Water Blues" as well as "Muddy Water (A Mississippi Moan)," which would compete for sales at the same time. Both songs lament a natural disaster that has decimated a community, however Smith's "Back-Water Blues" was written by her, while "Muddy Water" was written by two white male musicians. Despite the fact that both songs were major hits with millions of copies sold, Smith's song outsold "Muddy Water" by 50 units. In this sense, it's evident that black female artists like Smith not only compose more evocative songs than white writers do for them, but that they also sell equally as well, if not better.
Sexuality is a premiere example of the ways that black women used the blues to empower and liberate themselves. The admiration and enjoyment of the femme are at the heart of the sexuality-based blues penned by Blues women. This is evidenced by the existence of the blues subgenre dubbed “dirty blues”, which was known for its profanity. The black femme's perspective, on the other hand, focuses not only on her as an active and hopeful participant in sex but also on her as the major beneficiary of pleasure. The song "Prove It On Me Blues," composed and sung by Ma Rainey, is possibly the greatest example of this. Rainey's queerness and overall dislike of males are affirmed in the song, which says“Folks say I'm crooked. / I want the whole world to know…/Went out last night with a crowd of my friends/ They must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men.” This attitude, while sincere and revolutionary, excludes males from black women's sexuality. Instead of focusing on what the song's protagonist seeks, this version of black sexuality ignores the masculine gaze and their desire.
However, as these divas began to gain more commercial success, their lyrics began to lean heavily on double entendre. This allowed for blues femme to simultaneously speak their truths while appealing to wider audiences. This was the case for five-time Grammy Award-winning jazz singer Dianne Reeves. She talks about growing up hearing the raunchy lyrics saying, “[My great aunt] played piano and she would sing all of this very risque music from, you know, Bessie Smith, and you know Ma Rainey and all of these you know artists of the time that she grew up listening to and she would teach me these songs, and I would sing them and do the movements and I learned how to shimmy and you know her friends you know…Oh, it was just part of the family you know, … 'cause the reality was I had no idea what these words were. They were laughing because this was a lot of double entendre.” This phenomenon was common for black households who wanted to expose their children to liberated thought without the explicit content. Grammy-nominated HistoryMaker Irma Thomas. She talks about how this trend, saying “I mean, they couldn't just come right out and say what it is they want so they found another way to express their feelings by using some inanimate object to describe that, you know, what they're talking about…To me it was more fun back then when it was double entendres because it gives you an imagination… Now that you're older and you realize what you were singing back then, you say, ‘They let me sing that?’” This trend of the double entendre continued through the decades up until very recently.
In the turn of the 21st century, black artists tend to lean toward a more literal portrayal of their carnal activities. However, it was the songwriting skill and performance virtuosity of divas like Rainey and Smith that set the groundwork for such a triumphant declaration. Indeed, the people shown in this work stretched the boundaries set for black women in the areas of love, incarceration, and sexuality, all of which are recurrent themes in the genre. Black women all throughout the country have been given diverse personalities to relate to thanks to their biographical viewpoints. Finally, it is apparent that these blues women paved the way for contemporary black female performers in R&B and other genres to explore comparable themes.
