Angela Y. Davis: life, activism, and intellectual contributions

Davis, Angela. Y. Blues, Legacy and Black Feminism. New York: Random House, 1999.

Angela Y. Davis was one of the founding mothers of the radical Black feminist and civil rights movement. Her participation in these movements was not simply vocal and intellectual, but profoundly political, as well. Angela Y. Davis was brought to trial for her supposed activities against the federal government of the United States during the 1960's. However, a different, more artistic side of her political interests comes to light regarding Davis' works in Blues, Legacy and Black Feminism. The author of the seminal Black text Women, Culture, and Politics; Women, Race, and Class shows, in this 1999 book, an interest in Black feminist works beyond that of the purely verbal and prosaic.

Angela Y. Davis argues that through female expression in blues and jazz women such as Gertrude 'Ma' Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday together created an unrecognized (at the time) uniquely Black cultural expression of feminist consciousness. The purpose of Davis' book, clearly and directly stated by the author, is to bring this fact to light and life by examining the art of these three seminal figures and placing their music and lyrics in their cultural context. Davis traces a progression between all three women's work over their development as artists over the course of the development of Blues and Jazz. Davis states by way of her introduction, that their work provides "rich terrain for examining a historical feminist consciousness that reflected the lives of working-class black communities." These women have been ignored in their feminism and in their contribution to Black music, Davis states, because of their femaleness, their color, and also because of their class status. Musicology ignores politics, and political and literary analysis often eschews performance art as a means of political expression.

Davis hopes to correct this through her work. Moreover, Davis also notes that beyond their musical talents and voices, the first two of these women were great organizers of the music scene. They composed as well as sang. They managed their own road bands, navigating the roads of a segregated America. In the presentation of the material Davis does not only draw from the lives of Rainey and Smith to substantiate her argument but also transcribes their lyrics for analysis over the course of the book's second half. Thus the scope of the book is hugely ambitious, not only to provide a historical and political contextualizing of three working class Black female artists and their legacy, but to provide a critical overview of their work.

Perhaps inevitably, the second half of the work and its project falls a bit short. The main problem with the methodology of emphasizing lyrics is that it tends to bring 'the word' or a literary rather than a musical perspective to the forefront in understanding these performance artists. This bias may be inevitable, given Professor Davis' own background. But these women were not of the academy -- their music was performed as a living text. However, although the inclusions of the lyrics and the lyrical analysis is not as strong as the first more historically oriented part of the book that seems to be more in line with Davis' abilities as an historian, the analysis of the lyrics does reveal that these artists did discuss issues of domestic violence and transgressing lesbian love in a way that is seldom given credit.

Davis' book still falls short in her discussion of Holiday, whose legacy seems more tenuously connected to the more expansive creative control Smith and Rainey exercised over their own lives and work. Holiday was also more known as a voice rather than a composer. Because she did not write her own songs, the emotional quality of her voice in transforming the songs she sung is lost on the page.

Biographically, Davis uses contemporary transcripts as well as the lyrics of these women to substantiate her thesis that these Black women were successful creative artists during their day, even if their art has been marginalized geographically. Again, this portrait seems more effective when the lives of Rainey and Smith are used to substantiate Davis' thesis, because of their work in organizing their own bands. Through these two women, Davis clearly shows Black women were profoundly successful, in a way often ignored by musical and civil rights historians alike.