Jazz

43 RAINEY, Gertrude “Ma”. Double-sided broadsheet: “Smart Set Presenting Ma Raniey [ sic ], The Great “Blues” Singer and Twenty Other All Star Acts with The Greatest Colored Show on Earth”. Erie, PA: Erie Litho. & Printing Co., 1917

identification, as her one time pianist and MD Thomas A. Dorsey recalled: “when she started singing, the gold in her teeth would sparkle. She was in the spotlight, she possessed listeners; they swayed, they rocked, they moaned and groaned, as they felt the blues with her”. Rainey called out to identities beyond her Blackness. Angela Davis notes in her study of Rainey, Bessie Smith (who Ma mentored), and Billie Holiday, that the women in Rainey’s songs “explicitly celebrate their right to conduct themselves as expansively and even as undesirably as men … often abandon their men, and routinely and cavalierly threaten them” (Davis, pp. 20–1). Without being fully out, “Rainey didn’t try very hard to hide her bisexuality. In 1925, she was arrested for throwing an ‘indecent’ and ‘intimate’ party with a group of young women, forcing Bessie Smith – a possible lover of hers – to bail her out” (Chow). Her notorious musical rejoinder to comment on the affair, “Prove it on me Blues” – “Went out last night with a crowd of my friends, they must’ve been women, ‘cause I don’t like no men” – is “considered one of the earliest odes to lesbianism on record”. It was promoted by Paramount with an image of Rainey in a three-piece suit and fedora. Paramount allowed Rainey’s contract to lapse in 1928 but she continued to tour the South until the death of her sister in 1935 took her back to her hometown of Columbus, Georgia, where she took over the running of the town’s three theatres until her death in 1939. Subsequently she seems to be have been largely forgotten apart from among the true believers of the blues, but perhaps in recent years she has started to receive the credit due to her as a powerful creative artist. Mamie Smith may have recorded the first blues record, Bessie Smith had her portrait taken by Carl Van Vechten, and Ethel Waters headlined the Cotton Club, but Ma Rainey was the true original. This is a richly evocative piece, an incunable of the blues as a form and of one of the formative geniuses of Black music – “Ma Rainey, The Great ‘Blues’ Singer”. Original illustrated broadsheet (575 × 210 mm). Printed both sides of a single sheet of thin newsprint. 11 illustrative blocks – exterior of the tent, 8 of individual performers, 2 showing ensembles. Shallow loss to upper right corner, two small punctures, one affecting the “T” in “Attention” and “gh” in “Night” on verso, clean horizontal separation at centre, small area of infill restoration with inking at the break; partial separation 35 mm above; a few marginal nicks and chips; moderate toning overall, paper remaining quite supple; recently professionally restored and encapsulated; very good. Window-mounted in double- sided frame, glazed with UV resistant perspex. ¶ Lynn Abbott & Doug Seroff, Ragged but Right: Black Travelling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz , 2009; Andrew R. Chow, “Ma Rainey Is Best Known as a Pioneer of the Blues. But She Broke More Than Musical Barriers”, Time , 18 Dec. 2020; Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism , 1999; Langston Hughes & Milton Meltzer, Black Magic: A Pictorial History of Black Entertainers in America , 1967. £17,500 [143268]

forming the vaudeville troupe the Alabama Fun Makers Company. The Raineys subsequently toured with Chappelle’s Rabbit Foot Minstrels before hooking up with Alexander Tolliver’s highly influential Smart Set; “a freewheeling variety show that initiated the era of blues and jazz in tented minstrelsy. It was under Tolliver’s big tent that Ma Rainey came to prominence as the ‘Assassinator of the Blues’”. Other future recording artists with Tolliver’s Smart Set included Bessie Smith, Clara Smith, Trixie Smith, Leola “Coot” Grant, Butterbeans and Susie, Frankie Jaxon, and Daisy Martin. Tolliver “blended” his blues revue with a stunning array of novelty acts” (Abbott & Seroff, p. 6). The term “blues”, referring to a depressed state of mind, first began to appear in the Black press around 1910. The first “titular” blues compositions were published in 1912 – tunes with the word in the title, the most frequently noted being Hart Wand’s “Dallas Blues” – and in these earlier contexts entertainers represented themselves “wiping out”, annihilating or assassinating the blues. The present piece seems to be the first printed promotion of an artist as performing the blues, the genre as now understood. In the winter of 1916 Tolliver lost his backer, C. W. Park, who set up a competing show, the Colored Aristocrats, and by the end of the 1917 season the Smart Set had lost the greater part of its star attractions, including Rainey. “When the West Virginia coal town tour ended, around 1 September 1917, Ma Rainey returned to southern vaudeville. Later that month, a report from the Queen Theater in Chattanooga, Tennessee, declared her ‘A decided hit with her blues for home sweet home’” (Abbott & Seroff, p. 150). The dating of the present piece to after the introduction of the War Revenue Act, 3 October 1917, is slightly problematic. Abbott and Seroff’s detailed listings of the itineraries and personnel of the Smart Set certainly have Rainey out of the company before this date: it is possible that the bills were produced in anticipation of her expected return, or Tolliver continued to trade on his major draw. With her return to the South Rainey started to build a formidable reputation. By the time she made her first recordings for the Wisconsin-based Paramount label in 1923 she was already famous throughout the region. The inferior production of Paramount’s product means that the recordings do “little justice to her vocal power, but a majestic phrasing and ‘moaning’ style close to folk tradition are evident from her first titles, and most celebrated compositions, ‘Bo-Weevil Blues’ and ‘Moonshine Blues’”, her live performances playing “to large audiences throughout the South and in Mexico established a lasting reputation as the most significant early female blues singer” (Paul Oliver, Grove Music Online). Her performances provoked a fierce

the birth of the blues – the earliest known poster for “ma” rainey

A troubling piece, discordantly resonant with the language and iconography of the Jim Crow era, but remaining an extremely important artefact that refers to the very first moments of the first great Black musical contribution to American culture: the real birth of the blues. This is a remarkable survival: a striking and almost impossibly fragile piece documenting not only the birth of the blues but also the inception of the solo career of the genre’s first headline performer – the “Mother of the Blues”, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey. The original Black diva and a gay icon, she took the blues from minstrelsy to authenticity, from tent show to the Library of Congress, where “See See Rider Blues” entered the National Recording Registry in 2004. As a key document of a major transition in the history of Black music this piece encapsulates guitarist and musicologist Duck Baker’s comments on the difficulties of interpreting this moment: “This is not an easy subject to approach, because the overtly racist social structure of the time forced Black songwriters, publishers and performers to look for ways to retain their dignity while playing the clown. Compromises that were necessary for survival may mortify the modern sensibility, but the only way to gain an understanding of the great achievements of the time is to deal with the context” (review in JazzTimes of Abbot & Seroff’s Ragged But Right ). Dated with certainty to late 1917 by the addition of the “War Tax” to admission prices, this seems to be the earliest poster promoting the blues in this sense, and the earliest to mention Rainey by name. Scarce: there is a copy with significant damage in the Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple, and the Chicago History Museum holds the copy used by both Hughes and Meltzer (p. 69) and Abbott and Seroff (p. 127), which lacks almost the entire top line of text; no other copy traced on the market. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, née Pridgett (1886–1939), began her performing career as a teenager in Georgia, graduating from Gospel choir to minstrel show, marrying Wiilam “Pa” Rainey in 1904 and with him

Elements of the image have been edited here due to their racially sensitive nature; full images available on request.

JAZZ

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