Black History
by
Susan Robinson
Ma Rainey:
Mother of the Blues
“Ma”
Rainey was known as the “Mother of the Blues.”
While her popularity for the first twenty-five years of her career
was limited to African American audiences in the South, she became a major
influence on subsequent generations of Black artists.
She
was born Gertrude Melissa Nix Pridgett in Columbus, Georgia, in 1886.
Her mother and father were in show business, touring with minstrel
shows around the Southern United States.
Gertrude began performing in 1900, at the age of fourteen, singing
and dancing in a show called “A Bunch of Blackberries.” In 1902, in Missouri, Gertrude was first exposed to the blues.
She began to incorporate this style of music into her act, becoming
the first person known to have performed the blues in the context of vaudeville
and minstrel shows. Her voice
has been described as warm and earthy; it was perfectly suited to the
soulful style of music that was just beginning to attain widespread popularity.
In
1904 Gertrude Pridgett married song and dance man Will “Pa” Rainey.
They toured as “Ma and Pa Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues.”
During their stint with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, Ma Rainey met
the teenaged Bessie Smith;
she coached Smith and became a major influence on the blues singer who
was later to be billed as the “Empress of the Blues.” Rainey and Smith were friends as well as competitors who dominated
the genre during the 1920s.
Ma
Rainey was not conventionally beautiful, as was Smith.
She was short and chubby and displayed gold teeth; however, she
had a penchant for glitter and lavish costumes.
But once she began to sing, audiences were not too worried about
what she looked like--her mastery of the music that embodied the bittersweet
cadences of the tribulations
of rural Southern life drew them in.
Rainey
was said to have lived a wild lifestyle during her touring years.
She separated from her husband, and purportedly carried on affairs
with both men and women.
In 1923, after performing for twenty-five years, Rainey signed a recording contract with Paramount records and made her first record at the age of thirty-eight. Members of her Georgia Band fluctuated, with Rainey being accompanied at times by jazz greats like Tommy Ladnier, Fletcher Henderson, Coleman Hawkins, Buster Bailey, Lovie Austin, and Louis Armstrong.
By the late 1920s, popular music styles were evolving to a more sophisticated urban sound, and Rainey’s recording career was over by 1928. She continued to perform into the 1930s but she, and other traditional blues performers of the 1920s, experienced a professional decline.
An
astute businesswoman, Ma Rainey returned to Georgia to run two theaters. She became the foster mother to seven children.
In December of 1939, Ma Rainey died of a heart attack at the age
of 53.
Hear Ma Rainey’s classic blues, click on this link: www.redhotjazz.com/rainey.html