But Rainey, known as the "Mother of the Blues," is not as famous as the blues artists who built on its foundations, from Bessie smith but also BillieHoliday, but its overlooked legacy is being reckoned with again thanks to the release of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, a film adaptation of the acclaimed 1982 play by August Wilson who came to Netflix.
In the movie, Viola Davis he plays Rainey with regal composure and pitch-black fury over the course of a sultry afternoon recording session in 1927 as he fights for respect and artistic autonomy.
The truth is that the real Rainey would struggle to get a job, with the decline of classic blues, its genre, and the growing popularity in favor of swing jazz. But despite the problems, Rainey's impact is really in music and fashion, proving that she was a star ahead of her time.
Source: Grown Folk Music
Rainey was born in the 1880s in Columbus, Ga.; performed on the circuit vaudeville for many years across the South, he inherited some minstrelsy performance traditions and honed his massive stage presence and comedic timing. But while Rainey leaned toward maximalism onstage, she was also mesmerized by the blues guitarists she saw on the path they took. a more spartan, improvisational and emotionally raw approach to his music.
So Rainey began incorporating bluesy songs and structures into performances, helping to pioneer a genre that would entertain crowds while also speaking candidly about black life in U.S. This approach captured the imagination of many black Americans at a time of transformation when, thanks to the great migration, the old divisions between north and south, rural and urban, ancient and modern were eroding or blurring.
Rainey's duality made her a hit with Southern audiences as well as Chicago, where he recorded and established a model for future waves of music innovation African American.
Rainey had the perfect voice for his new brand of music: low and gravelly, full of raw pathos and strident authority. And he too would inspire imitators for generations to come. A young man Louis Armstrong learned from Rainey while playing with her on various recordings (including "See See Rider", a song that would later be covered by Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Janis Joplin and the Old Crow Medicine Show). The raspy-voiced Joplin spoke openly about how Rainey was one of his biggest influences.
Rainey not only popularized the classic blues genre, he helped write it. While other blues singers of the time, such as Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith, largely singing songs written by others, Rainey wrote at least a third of the songs he recorded.
In an era dominated by white songwriters, Rainey imbued his songs with the depth and diversity of her own experiences and those of other black women, portraying anguish, rage, euphoria, love, sexual desire and much more.
Angela Davis in his 2011 book, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, wrote: “She transgressed these ideas of white middle-class female respectability,” Kimberly Mack, assistant professor of literature at the University of Toledo and author of Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack, said in an interview. White: "Through the narrative of both the words she sang and her lifestyle, she fought against heteronormative ideas of what a woman should be."
Rainey merrily leaned into the sexual revolution of the Roaring Twenties, excelling at writing and performing the types of double entenders often used at the time.
While very few public performers were completely out of the closet, Rainey made little effort to hide her bisexuality. In 1925, she was arrested for throwing an "indecent" and "intimate" party with a group of young women, forcing her to Bessie smith, a possible mistress of his, to rescue her. A few years later, she would release "Prove It On Me Blues", considered one of the first recorded odes to lesbianism.
In addition to everything mentioned above, Ma was also a fashion icon. And it is that long before bling was fashionable, Rainey traveled with four trunks full of accessories that included ostrich feathers, sequins and jewels. On stage, she wore satin gowns and diamond tiaras; a necklace of gold coins often hung around her neck. "When she began to sing, the gold on her teeth gleamed," wrote Rainey's music director, Thomas A Dorsey, riding a his unpublished memoirs.
Rainey's popularity waned during the 1930s when his style of Blues was considered much less fashionable, and he retired from touring in 1935. This was a time of rebuilding in the country and his stories of family angst, promiscuity, heavy drinking, and the harsh life of prison gangs were presented in a powerful, lyrical style that lent itself easily to becoming Blues songs.
Nonetheless, Rainey still performed, often recurring at big top shows. After the death of his mother and her sister, Rainey retired from the music business in 1935 and settled in Columbus. Over the next several years, she dedicated her time to tending to her two entertainment venues, the Lyric Theater and the Airdome, as well as activities in Friendship Baptist Church.
Rainey died in Rome, Georgia on December 22, 1939.