1920s-40s: The Dawn of Black Sexual Liberation and the Blues

The first song in my chronology, this critical karaoke explore Ma Rainey's 1928 song "Prove It On Me Blues." Because there are no video performances of Ma Rainey, I laid the critical karaoke audio over the trailer for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020), a Netflix original film about Ma Rainey starring Viola Davis. Because the audio is longer than the trailer, I added my portraits of Ma Rainey to the very end as an added visual component. Enjoy.

Transcript:

In her essay “I Used to be Your Sweet Mama,” Angela Davis outlines a history of Black women expressing sexuality in blues music. This trend was born out of the newfound sexual autonomy granted to Black people in light of emancipation. For the first time, Black people were able to partake in any sexual practices they desired and to celebrate this freedom, Black women took to the blues.

Much like with the blues of the time, many of Ma Rainey’s past songs explore sexuality, however they refer to love affairs with men.

Prove it on Me Blues is different. While they still explore sexuality, its lyrics reference lesbianism. Rather than only singing about new heterosexual freedoms, she goes down a more taboo route, singing about possibly loving women in the same way that men do. However, Rainey is sneaky. She teases her listeners. She leads them to believe that, yes, she is gay, but the chorus pokes fun at that.

Lets Listen to the chorus:

They say 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

In the chorus Ma Rainey explicitly says that she must have been hanging out with women because she does not like men. The lines “they say I do it, ain't nobody caught me / Sure got to prove it on me” are teasing. Rainey pokes fun at those who say that she’s “crooked” because they cannot prove it. Throughout the song she’s like “I may be gay, I don’t like men, and I spent the night with a girl… but you can’t prove it so maybe it’s not true.. Or maybe it is” It is her secret to tell and she gouds the listener into trying to figure it out, but she know they cant.

In this song, Rainey explores sexuality much like her blues women contemporaries, however, in exploring it from a non-heteronormative angle, she opens doors for queer Black women to come to freely express their non-normative sexualities, like Janelle Monae does today. In insinuating her queerness but challenging her audience to prove it, Rainey opens these doors while still protecting her peace in a time where Black people were just being able to express sexuality but queerness was out of the question.

Rainey’s use of sexuality, in and of itself is a site of resistance. Black blues women expressed sexuality in music as a way of pushing back against the policing of Black bodies that occured for the previous three centuries. However, in bringing light to queerness, Rainey takes this resistance a step further, talking about a subject that would continue to be considered taboo until the turn of the next century, and even longer.

In doing so implicitly, Rainey leave space for listeners who don’t pay attention to the lyrics to just enjoy the fun bluesy song. Listeners who are paying attention have no choice but to listen to the song a few times in order to catch every queer Easter egg that Rainey leaves. Rainey is smart, she crafted a song that someone can either casually just enjoy or deeply analyze. Either way, she gets the listens and people are talking about the jovial “Prove it on me” blues.

Works Cited:

Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism : Gertrude "ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.

novonine. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey - Prove It On Me Blues. 2010. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRyaUcVfhak.