Women and Rhetoric between the Wars

9. Bessie Smith’s Blues as Rhetorical Advocacy

143 X 9 Yes, she was terrific, and there’s been nobody since that could sing the blues like Bessie Smith. She would come over to my house, but, mind you, she wasn’t my friend. She was very rough.—May Wright Johnson, Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya Bessie Smith’s Blues as Rhetorical Advocacy Coretta Pittman The 1920s and 1930s were a period of tremendous intellectual and artistic energy in the African American community, a surge of culture characterized by figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Marcus Garvey, Jessie Fauset, and Louis Armstrong. Many of these intellectuals and artists sought to erase negative images of African Americans, replacing them with more positive and “respectable” representations. In Jim Crow America, dominant (white) cultural representations of African Americans emphasized racist depictions that reinforced the second-class status of African American people. However, there was hope among the African American intelligentsia that art could be used as a mechanism to improve the African American cultural image . Alain Locke, in his 1925 essay, “The New Negro,” illustrates this argument that the artistic contributions of African Americans could propel the masses forward: The migrant masses, shifting from countryside to city, hurdle several generations of experience at a leap, but more important, the same thing happens spiritually in the life attitudes and self expression of the Young Negro, in his poetry, his art, his education, and his new outlook, with the additional advantage, of course, of the poise and greater certainty of knowing what it is all about. From this comes the promise and warrant of a new leadership. (5) Coretta Pittman 144 Locke and others believed that if art were to have any power to transform the social and material circumstances of the African American masses, then representations of African American life had to be moderate , not salacious. But while the upwardly mobile and largely male intellectuals of the African American community shaped what came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, another artistic movement was taking place alongside: African American women blues singers were creating a renaissance all their own. Mamie Smith, Clara Smith, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Alberta Hunter, Bessie Smith, and others were writing, recording, and performing blues music and capturing the spirit of a subculture within the African American working classes. Bessie “the Empress” Smith, regarded by many as the greatest classic blues singer and so enormously popular that she became the highest paid African American performer of her time, wowed audiences with songs bearing titles such as “Mean Old Bed Bug Blues,” “Jail House Blues,” “Gimme a Pigfoot (And a Bottle of Beer),” and “Wild About That Thing.” For some key figures in the Harlem Renaissance, however, the blues women’s lyrical content (and sometimes public behavior) was viewed not as a valuable artistic expression of the African American experience but as a challenge to the bourgeois norms embraced by their moderate and elite African American contemporaries.1 Exhortations to help advance the “Negro” race did not come only from the public intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. Long before the classic blues women performed and recorded blues music, African American leaders sought to advance the masses by encouraging them to embrace moderate behaviors that might dispel myths regarding the so-called immoral behavior of the black working class. Before and after the turn of the century, prominent African American women activists such as Anna J. Cooper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, and Nannie Helen Burroughs worked to construct an alternate image of African American womanhood. Their rhetoric of social uplift offered tangible models of appropriate public behavior for working-class women to emulate. As Evelyn B. Higginbotham demonstrates, church policies written by women like Burroughs focused on constructing new identities that emphasized “sobriety, honor, and integrity, and every other wholesome virtue” to alter the perception of African American women in the eyes of white society as well as intraracially (192). (See Sandra Robinson’s chapter on Burroughs’s uplift rhetoric in this collection .) While Wells-Barnett, Burroughs, Terrell, and others stressed the Bessie Smith’s Blues as Rhetorical Advocacy 145 importance of appropriate public and private behavior, however, Smith’s and other blues women’s music stressed independence, fearlessness, and sexual freedom, implicitly arguing that working-class women did not have to alter their behavior in order to be worthy of respect. In this chapter, I demonstrate how, bound by different ideological...