Out of the Blues, a New Identity for Black Women

Angela Davis is best known as a militant activist in the antiwar and black liberation movements of the 1960s; today, she is a professor in the curiously named History of Consciousness program at the University of California. In her latest work, Davis attempts to analyze the blues through the prism of working-class black feminism. Her book is a model of the original insights such an analysis can provide and of the pitfalls into which it can stumble.

As even the most cursory listener knows, the blues are, to a large extent, obsessed with sex--and, in particular, with infidelity, loss, abandonment and betrayal. But Davis argues that, far from being grim, these themes were manifestations of the painful yet thrilling ways in which African Americans emerged from slavery into freedom. The politically disenfranchised ex-slaves, and their descendants, still toiled as maids and porters and sharecroppers, but they were free--at last, at least--to fall in and out of love, and to live out the consequences of their freedom. The blues may be profane, but they are also profoundly ethical, for they register the joys and terrors of adults making choices and, thereby, creating their own history.

“It was the status of their personal relationships that was revolutionized,” Davis writes of the ex-slaves. “For the first time . . . black women and men were in a position to make autonomous decisions regarding the sexual partnerships into which they entered. . . . [S]exual love was experienced as physical and spiritual evidence--and the blues as aesthetic evidence--of freedom.”

Davis views the blues as a particularly subversive form for black women who, whether through necessity or choice, lived largely outside the dominant culture’s notions of domesticated married bliss. The blues were central in creating and reflecting a female identity in which independence, sexual pleasure, assertiveness and even defiance were affirmed and in which “bourgeois notions of sexual purity and ‘true womanhood’ were absent.” She notes that the blues--with their disdain for taboos and respectability--may have been the only place in the popular culture of the early 20th century where male violence was openly acknowledged.

Echoing the critic Albert Murray, Davis argues that both “absolute despair” and “the optimism so evident in the spirituals” violate the spirit of the blues. But Davis gets into trouble when--unlike Murray she is unable to acknowledge the devastating, albeit quotidian, defeats that the blues so often record.

For Davis, the blues must always be the music of resistance--both social and political--never of rout, or even accommodation. Thus, she insists that the scores of songs about the catastrophic 1927 Mississippi River flood were really “metaphors about oppression,” and that “ ‘Tain’t Nobody’s Bizness if I Do”--with its uncomfortably memorable “I’d rather my man would hit me than to jump right up and quit me”--is actually an “affirmation of women’s right as individuals to conduct themselves however they wish.”

This line of reasoning reaches its unfortunate apotheosis in Davis’ discussion of Billie Holiday, who time and again took Tin Pan Alley pap and transformed it into art. “With the incomparable instrument of her voice, Billie Holiday could completely divert a song from its composer’s original and often sentimental and vapid intent,” Davis correctly notes. But she seems deaf to the ache of defeat that permeated Holiday’s work, and refuses to acknowledge that Holiday’s fixation on emotional pain and, especially, sexual violence (“He isn’t true, he beats me too / Oh my man, I love him so”) may not, in fact, have been “an implicit critique” of victimhood.

We remember Holiday, Davis argues, because she somehow anticipated the “social movements that would insist upon historical transformations of gender, race and class relations.” This is not true. We remember Holiday for her highly disciplined, terribly crystalline distillation of how it feels when a heart is slowly, surely splintered into shards.