BLACK LEGEND BLUES SERIES

Starting in 1923, Rainey translated her live reputation into a series of massive hits for Paramount Records.

White people sometimes hired her to play quieter parties-but after she finished “she would go to a dance at the local black cafe behind a gas station, to entertain and socialize with her own people,” remembers Sam Chatmon, one of her guitarists. She would always end with “ See See Rider,” a surefire showstopper, stay on for the inevitable encore, and then bring down the house with a massive finale, featuring dancing from the night’s entire cast. “She would moan, and the audience would moan with her,” Brown later recalled. Poets wrote odes to her- Sterling Brown’s “Ma Rainey” describes fans pouring in “from anyplace/Miles around,” to hear Ma “do her stuff,” laughing at her jokes and weeping at her songs. “By all accounts, she electrified her audience,” writes Lieb. When Rainey finally appeared to end the night-often decked out in a gold gown, a diamond tiara, rings for every finger, and a necklace made out of $20 pieces, carrying an ostrich plume in one hand and a gun in the other, and smiling a gold-capped smile-she uniformly brought down the house. A typical program might include chorus lines, contortionists, acrobats, and comedy skits (one popular act featured trained chickens that would “fly all over the stage,” Lieb writes). Like most shows that traveled the South in the 1910s, Rainey’s generally followed the harvest from city to city, and brought celebration-minded audiences a little bit of everything. The two traveled with a variety of troupes, including the Smarter Set, the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, and Tolliver’s Circus and Musical Extravaganza, which billed the couple as “Rainey and Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues.” As Rainey’s star rose, she began headlining solo acts, under the name “Madame Gertrude Rainey”-“Ma” for short. A few years into her career, she married William “Pa” Rainey, a traveling entertainer who specialized in comedy and vaudeville. What is certain is that she quickly made it her own. Rainey loved the blues so much and so immediately, she claims to have invented the genre’s name in “a moment of inspiration”-though Lieb points out that this is unlikely, as the term was in use long before then. Ma Rainey in 1917, sporting one of her trademark beaded gowns. Rainey was so captivated, she learned it that day, and began using it as an encore in her own act. According to Sandra Lieb’s Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey, Rainey first encountered the blues at one of these shows, when a fellow performer stood up and began singing a “strange and poignant” song about a man who had left her.

Born in Columbus, Georgia on April 26, 1886, Pridgett was a traveling performer by the age of 14, singing cabaret in talent and tent shows around the South. She was, in the words of historian Robert Philipson, “one of the first black divas in history.”īefore Ma Rainey was the Mother of the Blues, she was a young musician named Gertrude Pridgett. She also wore diamond tiaras, recorded nearly a hundred records, and threw at least one illegal queer orgy. Ma Rainey spent decades touring the country, inspired generations of imitators, and knocked the roof off any space she performed in. In the 1910s and ’20s, long before Prince and Beyonce fascinated generations, America vested its quick-changing emotions in The Mother of the Blues-a gender-role-flouting singer with sky-high charisma, great business sense, and a voice that could bring people from laughter to tears and back again.

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