Passion, Music and Identity: The Blues - Essay Example

Passion, Music and Identity: The Blues 2010 The women’s blues music was an important element of African American culture of the 1920s. For the first time, black women found a strong united voice to communicate their feelings. The bold music demonstrated the empowerment of the singers as well as the audience by challenging the social stereotypes, especially the sexual stereotypes. The music style followed the typical black aesthetics of engaging the audience, personalizing experiences and talking back to the audience with references. The genre of blues music has continued the trend even today for the purpose of self-assertion of black women following the tradition of the foremothers in order to establish their identity by using traditional creative materials (Johnson, 2003, p1). The blues music of the 1920s performed the function of community-building, especially for the working-class. The lyrics protested against the bourgeois ideas of womanhood and sexual purity. While in the earlier slavery system, black women often worked at the same jobs as men, resulting in a perverse form of gender equality against the dominant white culture. However, after the abolition of the system of slavery, black women were expected to be domesticated just like it was for the white women. Black women, who had earlier got used to some freedom and identity, found this system more inequitable than white women did (Davis, 1998, p7). The blues developed its power by disregarding the decorum adopted by the rising black bourgeoisie that attempted to emulate the dominant culture and resulted in an artistic awareness. The genre protested white domination as was evident in Bessie Smith's live shows of ''I Used to Be Your Sweet Mama' '(Davis, 1998, p9), for which the lyrics went as the following: You've had your chance and proved unfaithful So now I'm gonna be real mean and hateful I used to be your sweet mama, sweet papa But now I'm just as sour as can be. Most blue lyrics spoke about love but in a different manner than that were based on intellectual freedom. Hence, the blues lyrics moved away from the conventionally accepted musical culture by being ostensibly offensive and invasively sexual--including homosexual-- descriptions. While most of the dominant music romanticized nonsexual descriptions of love between man and woman, excluding other kind of sexual relationships like extramarital relationships, household violence, and the short-lived sexual companionship. The blues music, on the other hand, harped on the latter types of themes (Davis, 1998, p 15). Such themes of sexual love were new in the 1920s and hardly ever surfaced in the earlier musical forms during slavery. The reason could be that the supervision of reproduction in slave system disapproved the public display of self- motivated sexual relationships. There was a gap between the personal, nature of sexuality and the group forms and nature of the music that was created and presented during slavery. After abolition of slavery, sexuality could not be conveyed through the musical forms existing under slavery, which included the spirituals and the work songs that reflected the concerns of the black people over shared desire to end slavery. It was not that there was an absence of sexual denotations in the music made by African-American slaves but slave music--both spiritual and secular--was essentially group music, communally performed my men and women to give expression to their longing for freedom. The blues, in contrast was largely a post slavery musical form, evaluating in a fresh way the personal emotional needs and wishes, an artistic proof of new psychosocial realities within the black people. This music was by individuals singing unaccompanied, with instruments as the banjo or guitar, pointing the beginning of a trendy culture with the limits of artist and audience becoming more and more separated. With the specialized blues singer, a mainly female figure with small and large instrumental bands, this personalized style of staging popular music shaped up into a concert culture with a lasting power on African-American music (Davis, 1998, p 16). Black women like "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday facilitated forming black and feminist consciousness rebelling against the overriding white and male culture. They defied the ideas of gender-based lowliness and bourgeois modesty, their songs conveying female self-confidence and insolence, predominantly in the field of sexuality. They gave voices to issues ingrained in their every day experiences as black women, singing not only a lively social history, but also symbolizing the growth of the feminist consciousness- that would surface decades later. The long experience of slavery and isolation in the United States led to black social consciousness. In Rainey and Smith's blues, there were implied references to oppression and feminist resistance. Demystifying the conformist ideas of female sexuality, the lives, lyrics and songs of these women overturned, rebuffed, and redefined images of womanhood in a patriarchal society. Rich with assertions on love and sexuality, the music deliberately contradicted the mainstream, white middle class ideological ideas of women and love, discarding the politics of victimization that branded them as 'fallen women (Davis, 1998, p 21). In sexual connotations, the blues music touched upon metaphysical ideas. However, the blues did not completely break out from the influences of romantic love in the popular songs. Yet, referring to personal relationships had its own historical, social and political significances. Love was not depicted as a romanticized area where dreams of pleasure were downgraded. The African-American vision of sexual love connected it with chances of freedom in the economic and political fields. The slavery was against liberal choice; family relationships of slaves were treated as objects; childbearing age appraised in line with the slaves reproductive possibility and slave women were often compelled to copulate with men selected by the owners for the only intent of making valued children. Besides, sexual exploitation of African women by their white masters was an unvarying aspect of slavery with a shaky stability in domestic relationships subject to the whims of their masters. In such a context, it is understandable that the personal and sexual dimensions of freedom acquired an expansive importance, particularly since the social aspects of freedom were largely denied to black people in the after effects of slavery. The focus on sexual love in blues music was therefore rather different from the existing adulation of romantic love in popular music. For lately liberated slaves, sexual love became a intermediary between historical dissatisfaction and the new social realities of an growing African-American community. Ralph Ellison, the African-American author of the novel, Invisible Man (1952) insinuated to this aspect of the blues saying that the mysteriousness of sex conveyed meanings to describe the metaphysical (Davis, 1998, p 25). The heroines in women's blues are hardly ever wives and nearly never mothers, the absence of direct mention maybe because in African-American cultures the term that replaces “husband” is "male spouse." African-American working-class slang refers to both husbands and male lovers and even in some cases female lovers--as "my man or "my daddy", different linguistic usage that cannot be thought separately from the social realities they stand for and pointing to different standpoints on the institution of marriage. During Bessie Smith's era, most black heterosexual couples had children. Yet blues women hardly ever sang about mothers, fathers, and children. The themes includes the following themes: advice to other women; alcohol; treachery or desertion; broken or unsuccessful love affairs; death: leaving; problem of staying with man or homecoming, illness and sufferings; erotica; hell; homosexuality; unfaithfulness; injustice; jail and love; men; abuse: murder; poverty; promiscuity; grief; sex; suicide; supernatural; traveling: revenge; fatigue, despair and cynicism; weight loss. It is illuminating that the list does not include children, family life, husband, and marriage. The blues women found the conventional cult of motherhood of no importance to their lives which suggested in women's blues women are self-sufficient, free of the household tenet of the existing images of womanhood (Davis, 1998, p 28). W.E.B Bois, the African American leader, theorized a double consciousness of the blacks. Deborah King expanded this theory towards a “multiple consciousness” of black women. The consciousness was not uni-dimensional but included elements of self-assertion against oppression as well as creative outbursts. Hence, for black women, the rhythms in blues music often harped on the interdependence of individuals with other elements of the universe which is constantly changing (Borde, 1994, p 154). In the 1920s, the Vaudeville Blues (female urban blues singers popular including Mamie Smith, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, etc) became a means for African American women to speak about their feelings. Through their commanding voices, charming delivery, and intrepid self-introduction, the black women singers authorized themselves together with their audiences. They defied the inertia of stereotypes, demanding sexual esteem, and an end to abuse --whilst voicing the variety of their experiences. Deriving from the aesthetics of black style, blues women asserted their compassion through total participation (holding their audience), suggesting and personalizing. The tradition has continued to this day, with Blues women today continuing to use and remake time-honored ways to reverberate their experiences and those of their audiences. Like their precursors, modern blues women stress their identity by personalizing customary material, giving a new approach to the traditional statements with a new look (Johnson, 2003, p1). The blues singers of today attempt to continue with the conventional music in a different attitude. In doing so modern African American women musicians make a link with the tradition. The work of blues women of the past and the present is a significant piece in the process of retrieving and avowing black female sexuality. Like the vaudeville blues singers of the 1920w, present-day African American women musicians use the blues, the language and compositions, together with the image the female blues singer asserting their identity and regaining their sexuality. Like the vanderville blues singers, they recover their sexuality both by saying their piece about and in opposition to a history of sexual mistreatment and typecasting by providing self-delineated images of themselves. By observing how modern blues women are personalizing, talking back to, and reconstructing established materials, one can elucidate a drapery of "call and response," a society among women in the blues, a channel for African American women's self- manifestation and power, and more particularly, how the blues has offered a space to verbalize female happiness and lesbian sexuality (Johnson, 2003, p 1). The music has developed a form of black cultural identity and raising questions over identity politics, race and cultural and social change in the present times. Even at a time when direct discrimination against the African American women does not exist, music has remained to be a form of expressing cultural identity. Although blues is no longer a popular music genre as it was in the 1920s and has become a genre for music scholars and experts, the blacks often express regret over the fact that there is no longer a strong genre like the blues to express cultural identity. The souls music of the 1960s and the hip-hop of the present times are perhaps the successors of the blues music in expressing black identity (Jones, 2007, p 36). Thus, blues music has traditionally been a medium of expressing passion for freedom, both sexual and racial. The genre, developed by black women in the 1920s, was a means to overcome the sexual stereotypes imposed by the end of slavery and imitation of the white dominant culture. The apparently explicit notions of sexuality that the music demonstrated were actually a form of protest, in an apparently perverse manner. It moved away from the dominant ideas of romantic, often non-sexual in representation, even though it talked extensively about love. The present day African American women musicians continue with the blues traditions and use similar metaphors and rhythm styles to express shared concerns over identity and freedom even though the constraints on the women’s lives are not as severe any more as in the 1920s. Works Cited Borde, Anne, Heroic "hussies" and "brilliant queers": genderracial resistance in the works of Langston Hughes, African American Review, Fall, 1994 Davis, Y., Angela, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, Pantheon Books, 1998 Maria V. Johnson; “Jelly Jelly Jellyroll": Lesbian Sexuality and Identity in Women's Blues, Women & Music, Vol. 7, 2003 Jones, David M, Postmodernism, pop music, and blues practice in Nelson George's post-soul culture, African American Review, Winter 2007 Read More

It was not that there was an absence of sexual denotations in the music made by African-American slaves but slave music--both spiritual and secular--was essentially group music, communally performed my men and women to give expression to their longing for freedom. The blues, in contrast was largely a post slavery musical form, evaluating in a fresh way the personal emotional needs and wishes, an artistic proof of new psychosocial realities within the black people. This music was by individuals singing unaccompanied, with instruments as the banjo or guitar, pointing the beginning of a trendy culture with the limits of artist and audience becoming more and more separated.

With the specialized blues singer, a mainly female figure with small and large instrumental bands, this personalized style of staging popular music shaped up into a concert culture with a lasting power on African-American music (Davis, 1998, p 16). Black women like "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday facilitated forming black and feminist consciousness rebelling against the overriding white and male culture. They defied the ideas of gender-based lowliness and bourgeois modesty, their songs conveying female self-confidence and insolence, predominantly in the field of sexuality.

They gave voices to issues ingrained in their every day experiences as black women, singing not only a lively social history, but also symbolizing the growth of the feminist consciousness- that would surface decades later. The long experience of slavery and isolation in the United States led to black social consciousness. In Rainey and Smith's blues, there were implied references to oppression and feminist resistance. Demystifying the conformist ideas of female sexuality, the lives, lyrics and songs of these women overturned, rebuffed, and redefined images of womanhood in a patriarchal society.

Rich with assertions on love and sexuality, the music deliberately contradicted the mainstream, white middle class ideological ideas of women and love, discarding the politics of victimization that branded them as 'fallen women (Davis, 1998, p 21). In sexual connotations, the blues music touched upon metaphysical ideas. However, the blues did not completely break out from the influences of romantic love in the popular songs. Yet, referring to personal relationships had its own historical, social and political significances.

Love was not depicted as a romanticized area where dreams of pleasure were downgraded. The African-American vision of sexual love connected it with chances of freedom in the economic and political fields. The slavery was against liberal choice; family relationships of slaves were treated as objects; childbearing age appraised in line with the slaves reproductive possibility and slave women were often compelled to copulate with men selected by the owners for the only intent of making valued children.

Besides, sexual exploitation of African women by their white masters was an unvarying aspect of slavery with a shaky stability in domestic relationships subject to the whims of their masters. In such a context, it is understandable that the personal and sexual dimensions of freedom acquired an expansive importance, particularly since the social aspects of freedom were largely denied to black people in the after effects of slavery. The focus on sexual love in blues music was therefore rather different from the existing adulation of romantic love in popular music.

For lately liberated slaves, sexual love became a intermediary between historical dissatisfaction and the new social realities of an growing African-American community. Ralph Ellison, the African-American author of the novel, Invisible Man (1952) insinuated to this aspect of the blues saying that the mysteriousness of sex conveyed meanings to describe the metaphysical (Davis, 1998, p 25). The heroines in women's blues are hardly ever wives and nearly never mothers, the absence of direct mention maybe because in African-American cultures the term that replaces “husband” is "male spouse.

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