Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight  was called the “Mother of the Blues,” and was one of the earliest known American blues singers and recording artists. She is recognized as one of the great female blues vocalists. Today's Out Spotlight is Ma Rainey.

Born Gertrude Pridgett in Columbus, Georgia on April 26, 1886, she was one of five children in a family of performers. From age 14, she sang and danced with traveling minstrel shows. At 18, she married singer Will “Pa” Rainey, and took the stage name Ma Rainey. Billed as the Assassinators of the Blues, the couple toured the Southern minstrel circuit. In 1916, Rainey separated from her husband and began touring the nation with her own band.

In 1923, Paramount Records signed Rainey. Over the next five years, she recorded more than 100 songs with some of the great musicians of her era, including Louis Armstrong and Thomas Dorsey, the “father of black gospel music.”

 

In 1928, Paramount considered Rainey’s classic style of blues no longer fashionable and terminated her contract. Before that, she recorded one of her last songs for label, “Prove It On Me Blues,” which was cited as a watershed for its lyrics about lesbian desire.  Some of Rainey's lyrics have open references to lesbian or bisexual behavior.

 "Prove It on Me", lyrics include: They said I do it, ain't nobody caught me. Sure got to prove it on me. Went out last night with a crowd of my friends. They must've been women, cause I don't like no men. According to some, the lyrics refer to an incident in 1925 in which Rainey was "arrested for taking part in an orgy at [her] home involving women in her chorus." "Prove It on Me" further alludes to presumed lesbian behavior, "It's true I wear a collar and a tie... Talk to the gals just like any old man." Political activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis notes: "'Prove It on Me' is a cultural precursor to the lesbian cultural movement of the 1970s, which began to crystallize around the performance and recording of lesbian-affirming songs.

In 1935 Rainey returned to her hometown, Columbus, Georgia, where she ran two theaters, "The Lyric" and "The Airdrome", until her death from a heart attack in 1939 in Rome, Georgia.

Her song "See See Rider Blues" was included by the National Recording Preservation Board in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry, and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Big Ma Rainey passed away December 22, 1939

In 1983, Rainey was inducted into the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame. Seven years later, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

In 2007, the Gertrude “Ma” Rainey House and Blues Museum in Columbus, Georgia, opened to the public.

 “You sing ’cause that’s a way of understanding life.”