The Blues Tribute Poem and the Legacies of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith

When asked to describe the Mother of the Blues in an interview, bandleader “Georgia Tom” Dorsey recalled Gertrude “Ma” Rainey’s spectacular performance:

Ma was hidden in a big box-like affair built like a Victrola… . A girl came out and put a big record on it. The band picked up “Moonshine Blues”; Ma sang a few bars inside the big Victrola, then she opened the door and stepped out into the spotlight with her glittering gown that weighed twenty pounds, wearing a necklace of $5, $10, and $20 gold pieces. The house went wild. … Her diamonds flashed like sparks of fire falling from her fingers. The gold piece necklace lay like golden armor covering her chest.

(Harris 93)

In the interview, Dorsey notes her remarkable ability to emotionally connect with her audiences: “She possessed her listeners; they swayed, they rocked, they moaned and groaned, as they felt the blues with her” (Harris 89). These divergent aspects of Rainey’s legacy elucidate her artistic complexity and demonstrate how she has remained a larger-than-life figure decades after her death.

Accordingly, in his eponymous poem “Ma Rainey” (1930), Sterling Brown stages a Rainey performance and pays tribute to the cathartic relief and inspiration she provides her African American fans and, by extension, Brown. “O Ma Rainey, / Li’l an’ low,” Brown’s speaker cries out, “Sing us ’bout de hard luck / Roun’ our do’” (III. 7-10). In fact, Brown’s collection Southern Road (1932), in which “Ma Rainey” was reprinted, includes a number of memorable folk personae—Big Boy, Bessie, Sister Lou, and Slim Greer, to name a few—but Brown’s representation of Rainey remains distinct in blurring the line between history and mythology, for the poem transforms Rainey the blues star into a symbol of African American folk authenticity. Drawing poetic inspiration from an African American blues woman rather than a classical goddess, Brown adapts the Western muse trope to a blues context and, in the process, imbues a historical figure with mythic qualities. Subsequently, Myron O’Higgins (Brown’s former student) composed “Blues for Bessie” (1945), the first homage to Bessie Smith, constructing her as a martyr for racial equality “wid de blood (Lawd) a-streamin’ down” (52), after recounting the tragic story of her death.¹ Following Brown and O’Higgins, numerous writers have invoked blues men and women as their creative inspirations² and similarly characterized them as symbols of folk authenticity, tragedy, victimhood, beauty, heroism, or some combination of these. Whereas biographers and documentarians strive to record objective narratives, Brown, O’Higgins, and the many subsequent blues tribute poets are not beholden to factual accuracy, and their poetic portraits reflect subjective interpretations often informed more by the exigencies and discourses of the era than the innate qualities of the muse.

As Rachel Blau DuPlessis maintains, muses “are projected inventions of the imagination inside poems and have historical status as cultural tropes; they can involve actual historical persons attempting to fill these support roles. There is a two-way exchange between the projection and the actuality” (75). Further, Gayle Levy observes that

poetic inspiration works solely on the author, whereas the muse, like the poem, is actually formulated by both the reader and the poet working together. The muse can be considered the product of a cooperative act between the poet and the reader in the same way that one’s close reading of a given poem is the result of the poet’s creative act and the reader’s analytical work.

(21)

“Ma Rainey,” “Blues for Bessie,” and all tribute poems must be seen as texts requiring the reader to temporarily invest in the imagined projections of the muse, thereby reshaping the historical figure’s legacy to coincide with an individual poet’s perspective.

At the same time, these poems perform valuable sociocultural work by keeping blues women such as Rainey and Smith alive in the minds and ears of generations of readers and listeners. As T. Austin Graham argues, a musical text “asks its readers to ‘do’ something beyond merely reading it...