First significant female blues singer in America, known as “The Mother of the Blues.”
Beginning her professional singing career as a child in 1902, she matured into an
exceptional vocalist and popular recording artist of the 1920s, with ninetytwo existing
recordings, one-third of which were her own compositions. A hybrid of the popular
culture of show-business minstrelsy and the folk legacy of country blues, Ma Rainey
moved back and forth between the two traditions throughout her career. She performed
both rural blues and popular songs with equal proficiency and was also skilled as a
dancer and a comedian, sometimes accompanying her songs with humorous skits.
Instrumental backing on Ma Rainey’s recordings includes jazz bands, piano, guitar,
banjo, fiddle, bass jug, musical saw, and slide-whistle (or kazoo). Her singing style—
characterized by masterful use of slurs, moans, and blue notes—was the paradigm for the
classic blues technique of Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, Ida Cox, Sippie Wallace, and
Victoria Spivey. While Bessie Smith refined the style and made it well-known, Ma
Rainey was its earliest practitioner and perhaps its creator. Like the most eloquent of the
classic blues, her songs compellingly expressed anger, sexual jealousy, revenge, despair,
exhaustion, strength, and hope from a female point of view.
During the Depression era, when the classic blues lost its popularity owing to the
increasing ascendance of swing music, she stopped appearing professionally, although
still a robust performer. She is memorialized in Memphis Minnie McCoy’s biographical
ballad “Ma Rainey,” recorded in 1940, six months after Ma Rainey died.
Ruth E.Andersen
References
Lieb, Sandra. 1981. Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey. Cambridge: MIT Press.