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148 Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (1886–1939) “Hear Me Talkin’ to You” Steve Goodson    They called her the “Mother of the Blues.” At her peak, in the mid-1920s, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey toured with her company in a $13,000 Mack bus, her name proudly painted on the side. Her bandleader, Thomas Dorsey, later recalled with a healthy measure of awe the power of her onstage presence: The room is filled with a haze of smoke, she walks into the spotlight, face decorated with Stein’s Reddish Make-up Powder. She’s not a young symmetrical streamed-lined type; her face seems to have discarded no less than fifty some years. She stands out high in front with a glorious bust, squeezed tightly in the middle. . . . When she started singing, the gold in her teeth would sparkle. . . . She possessed her listeners; they swayed, they rocked, they moaned and groaned, as they felt the blues with her. Gertrude Pridgett was born on April 26, 1886, in Columbus, Georgia, the second of five children. Her parents, Thomas and Ella (Allen) Pridgett, had come to Columbus from Alabama. Thomas died in 1896, a dismal year in a dreary decade for African Americans in Georgia. Political upheaval, wrenching economic distress, and widespread racial violence characterized the South of the 1890s, and 1896 stands out as the year in which the U.S. Supreme Court in effect authorized racial segregation with its infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Gertrude would grow to adulthood in an increasingly stratified and volatile region. African American women at this time found themselves at the very bottom of the American racial hierarchy. Typically, in addition to the daily indignities of the Jim Crow system, they faced onerous low-wage employment (usually in domestic service); high rates of infant mortality and widowhood; vulnerability to the sexual advances of white male employers; and the serious problems that Gertrude “Ma” Rainey 149 arose from living in neighborhoods that were the last to receive city services, such as water and proper sanitation. But through her music—and in particular through a new musical style to which she helped give birth—Gertrude would assert her dignity, her autonomy, and her humanity, all the while tacitly encouraging her listeners to do the same. The girl who would become Ma Rainey performed publicly for the first time at the age of fourteen as a member of a small troupe that appeared at Columbus’s Springer Opera House. At seventeen, Pritchett married an older stage performer, William “Pa” Rainey. As a song-and-dance team, the couple worked for a dozen years in the traveling black tent shows that crisscrossed the South. They performed with many of the leading black minstrel troupes of the day—of which the Rabbit Foot and Silas Green companies were the best known—and frequently wintered in New Orleans, where Ma had the opportunity to sing with such jazz luminaries as Kid Ory, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong. From 1914 to 1916 the couple appeared with Tolliver’s Circus and Musical Extravaganza, billing themselves as “Rainey and Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues.” Gertrude eventually headed her own shows, as “Madame Gertrude Rainey,” though her moniker was eventually shortened to “Ma,” in part because of her relationship with “Pa” Rainey, but also in fond recognition of her warm maternal nature. Her troupe, the Georgia Smart Set, included a female chorus line and a five-piece band. Perhaps of necessity on the tent-show circuit, she became a versatile performer , skilled as a dancer, a comedian, and a singer in a variety of styles. Her enduring fame, however, would come from her abilities with a new musical genre that developed simultaneously with her career. Some mystery surrounds the circumstances under which Ma first became acquainted with the blues. Musicologist John Wesley Work Jr. interviewed her in the late 1930s and learned that Rainey had “heard them [the blues] in 1902 in a small town in Missouri where she was appearing in a show under a tent. She tells of a girl from the town who came to the tent one morning and began to sing about the ‘man’ who had left her. The song was so strange and poignant that it attracted much attention. ‘Ma’ Rainey became so interested that she learned the song from the visitor, and used it soon afterwards in her ‘act’ as an encore.” The audience reacted so enthusiastically to the new song that Ma began to highlight it in her shows. According...

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