'Black Pearls' highlights '20s female singers

Scholars have been faithfully working, for a number of years now, to fill in the gaps in American music history where women's contributions are absent. Daphne Duval Harrison's book Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s covers that very dense and rich decade in which black female blues singers gained notoriety.

Harrison devotes chapters to some of the more well-known artists, and asserts that black female blues singers, specifically those of the 1920s, were integral to the transformation and growth of American music and popular culture.

During the onset of the 20th century in America, several factors contributed to the rise of black female entertainers. Geographic, economic and cultural changes occurred as many blacks moved from the South to the North in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Harrison cites 1919 as a year that saw a rise in positive black race consciousness that popularized black entertainment. Blacks were purchasing many record albums and helping to set taste standards for the rest of the population. Further, the Theatre Owners' Booking Association (T.O.B.A. or "Toby") was established in Memphis in 1909, and 67 theaters on the T.O.B.A. circuit in the South and Midwest booked blues singers. Though T.O.B.A. had a reputation of treating performers poorly, many blues queens got their big breaks on this circuit.

The demand for blues sung by women increased significantly throughout the '20s and more hopeful stars emerged. It seems very significant that this musical trend occurred in the '20s; but unfortunately, Harrison never explains or explores why that particular decade was so primed to embrace these singers. Many women enjoyed new sexual liberations and the upheaval of social conventions in the 1920s. The book would have benefited from an examination of how the transitional nature of the Gilded Age affected the blues women.

Almost all of the blues singer Harrison writes about were born in the South and headed to Chicago or the Northeast at a very young age. Geographical origins, audience or the religious background of the singers often contributed to their stylistic preferences. For example, Harrison says that rural Southerners preferred the husky, throaty moans and groans of Chippie Hill and Ma Rainey and their songs about country life; singers like Ida Cox, Sara Martin and Mamie Smith incorporated vaudeville showmanship and comedy into their routines and were popular with a more urbane theater-going crowd; other citified blues, such as Bessie Smith's, conveyed, with aggressive tempos and dark vocals, the harshness of living and loving in the big city; performers like Edith Wilson and Lucille Hegamin, however, "sang rather than emoted" with a more polished, torchy style that appealed to wealthy, white cabaret and nightclub patrons.

Especially interesting in Black Pearls is Harrison's tracing of themes in female blues lyrics and the ways in which singers empowered themselves against hardship by addressing pain in songs. Some of the common subjects in women's blues songs are: abandonment; love and sex; travel and independence; alcohol and drugs; poverty; violence and jail; death; and desired freedom from sexual, economic and social oppression.

Many scholars have written about the act of singing a blues song as being cathartic for the singer and audience in that the problem is named, aired and often solved within the context of a song and performance. Sometimes this happens through lyrical shifts from woe to optimism or more upbeat endings ("Now I'm blue, yes, I'm blue, but I won't be blue always. Because the sun is going to shine in my back door someday." - Chippie Hill). Or a blues song may ease a broken heart by humiliating the heartbreaker, threatening to leave, or by unleashing scathing put-downs. The act of performing a blues song can be redemptive in that it allows a singer to vocally retaliate against problems in a supportive, public arena. Through the ritual of blues performance, singers are able to rearticulate and reformulate a painful experience or emotion so as to place themselves in a victorious position.

While it's true that blues singing can provide solace from sadness, that solace is limited. The author dwells primarily on emotional, lovelorn examples of internal despair in songs, but glosses over the roles that race and prejudice played in these women's lives. Black blues queens suffered the double burden of racism and sexism without the luxury of real retaliation. But Harrison never acknowledges the ways in which these blues songs were intensely subversive assertions of violence, aggressive sexuality and independence from very marginalized citizens.

It's also hard to believe Harrison's statement that the blues singers didn't have any race consciousness, anger or black pride. The lack of serious treatment of the role of race in these women's lives and in their music is a gaping hole in the text.

In addition to their ability to provide internal catharsis, the author cites numerous examples of how women's blues from the 1920s permanently affected American music and culture. The divas, with their unique vocal phrasing and timing, inspired the instrumental interplays of jazz. Phonographic recordings by female blues stars created new singing styles involving improvisation on melodic lines and vocal dramatics such as wails and shouts that are evident in much of today's music. Their live performances and recordings also set standards for performance, showmanship, costuming, new interpretations of traditional materials and the introduction of new materials. During the 1930s, male blues artists replaced most of the women in the recording studios. Also, younger, jazzy torch singers like Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald gained popularity along with big band dance music. But Harrison maintains that these women artists of the '20s standardized the blues performance and placed blues into the American musical repertoire as a staple. The themes of empowerment through song and performance, and the author's discussion of the deep marks left on American culture by these women of the '20s, are perhaps the most compelling parts of Harrison's book. The women's life stories on which Harrison reports are innately interesting; but her presentation is often rote or trite. It's obvious that Harrison has done a lot of research, but she omits many juicy details, love affairs, knife fights, jail terms that - even if they aren't all true - have become part of these singers' folklore.

Harrison's commentary on song lyrics adds new layers to the women's stories; but the book lacks a discussion of the craft of music-making in precise terms. There is no coverage of the phrasing, rhythms, or harmonies that immediately distinguish the blues from other genres. Also, Harrison does not address how these women's blues were different from men's blues, why most of these women sang only blues, or if there were any white female blues singers. It's frustrating to finish a book with so many questions unanswered.

Even though other writers have done more thoughtful and insightful justice to subject of blues music, Daphne Henderson focus on a very dense and vital period in America's musical history. Henderson leaves the reader feeling as though she's just touched the surface of a very complex subject; but Black Pearls is at least a handy reference book for a blues fan's library.