The 1928 song that’s one of the world’s first gay anthems

Quoted as one of the first expressions of black queer popular culture, Ma Rainey’s Sensational Edve it Edve it on Me Blues is a groundbreaking song with a profound and lasting effect.

One night in 1925, a party in a Chicago apartment was disbanded by police. Such raids were commonplace in Speak Age and the ban, but this was different. All the revelries were women and they were undressed.

Singer Ma Rainey, the party host known as “Mother of the Blues,” has been arrested. However, the events of her sexual interest in women and she made a record of it, Prove it to the bluesIt was released in 1928.

“They say I’ll do it, no one will catch me.

It certainly started to prove that to me.

I went out with a crowd of my friends last night,

They must have been women, “Because I hate men…”

This atypical declaration, labelled “female lover” at the time in the claim of the second poem “I want the whole world to know,” is one of the earliest gay national anthems in the world. Bruce was “one of the first expressions of black queer popular culture,” “one of the first expressions of blues,” associate professor of history and author, Dr. Cookie Woolner. Famous Women’s Enthusiasts: Black Women and Strange Desires in front of Stonewall (2023) Tell the BBC. “You would imagine this song resonating and validating the experiences of many black women who loved women at this time,” she adds.

Born in Gertrude Pridgett in 1886, the woman’s empowerment icon actually mandated her husband to name her stage. Pa (Pa” (William) Rainey is a comedian, singer and dancer who performed double acts at the Minstrel show in 1916. In 1923 she was signed by Paramount Records and produced over 100 recordings for them, including her most famous songs. Ma Rainey’s black bottom (1927), took its name from a dance like a squatting Charleston, and inspired plays of the same name (1984) and films (2020).

Rainey and her gravel contralto voices were part of the broader lesbian blues counterculture – many of which focused on New York City’s harem – including Gladys Bentley, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters and Alberta Hunter. Beyond mainstream society, marginal stories found voices in Speak Age, diving bars and “buffet flats.” Bessie Smith explains this underground scene Soft pedal blues (1925), it urges music makers to “put on that soft pedal” to avoid attracting the attention of authorities. She knew the value of discretion as she paid Rainey’s bail on the night of her arrest.

Ma Rainey had a white management team, performing to both black and white audiences, bringing a black and strange culture to the consciousness of a diverse group of Americans. For some, this was an unwelcome commercialization of black culture. The short title HaremWebb du Bois, a sociologist and civil rights activist who appeared in the September 1927 issue of Crisis, lamented the “white desire for black exotics” and the tendency for white visitors to the black community to “spectacle and entertainment.”

For black performers, blues was more than just entertainment, but a delicate form of art that emerged from a legacy of discrimination and white oppression. “Blues as a genre of music is created by descendants of enslaved people of the Mississippi Delta and is always based on daily life, survival and resistance, and early blues songs discuss social issues in a way of fact,” says Woolner. “At a time when topics like female sexuality and queerness were considered unadorable for public debate, female blues singers dared to brooch such topics,” Bruce also added the “soundtrack” of African Americans’ “big migration.” The move that gave Black immigrant women greater freedom is called “participating in strange behaviors that are far from the pure eyes of their family and their nose neighbors.”

Bawdy’s “Hokum Blues” genre reflected this freedom, building and celebrating women’s claims about sexual satisfaction when they found it. Ida Cox’s 1 hour mom (1923) Ethel Waters advocates “endurance” in the bedroom My handy man (1928) is full of suggestions:

“There’s never something to say

While he worked hard.

I wish you could see the road

He will handle my front yard! ”

The female blues singer broadened the concept of black women’s identity, challenged patriarchy and satirized livestock. in Safe Mom (1931) for example, Bessie Smith proposes a reversal of traditional gender roles. The way to “treat a useless man” is to “stay him at home, wash him, and make him iron.”

The exterior also played a role. While the diamond tiara and necklace made of gold coins were flashing ostrich plumes, diamond tiara and necklace flashing gold, Ma Rainey gave a deliberate show of financial independence and self-worth. But like her contemporaries – most notably Gladys Bentley, famous for her stylish three-piece suits – she will also wear clothes that destroy gender norms. advertisement To prove it to me, for example, enjoying her infamousness, drawing Rainey on a suit jacket, tie and hat, flirting with two women while the policeman is watching. “It’s true that I wear a collar and a tie,” she sings on the record.

“Crucially, these performers have made it possible for strange black women to see,” says lecturer and researcher Eleanor Medhurst. Inappropriate – History of lesbian fashion (2024), tell the BBC. “They were smart about how they used their clothes – that wasn’t always an obvious sign of oddity… but for those who know, or “of life” people [the 1920s euphemism for lesbianism]…It made more sense. ”

Blues singers such as Ma Rainey shared themes such as affair and domestic violence from a woman’s perspective, and from a woman’s perspective. Songs such as Blue black eyes (Recorded in 1928) tell the story of a woman whose emotions are not important, but not strong and capable of revenge accurately.

“Take all my money, make both my eyes black

Give it to another woman and go home and lie

You lower the alligator and look at me sooner or later

I’m going to catch you with your britch down. ”

There is a powerful rebellion in these songs. in ‘If I do that, then there will be no one there. (1923), Bessie Smith confronts criticism of her way of life. “I’m trying to do whatever I want anyway, and I don’t care if they’re all dimming me,” she sings. Ethel Waters, who married an abusive husband at the age of 12 or 13 and later formed a nine-year relationship with performance partner Ethel Williams, takes it a step further, celebrates his divorce and imagines a life without a man. “I label my apartment “no man’s land”,” she declares There’s no male mamma now (1925).

Music historians tended to overlook them until scholars such as Sandra Reeve, Daphne Duval Harrison and Angela Davis highlighted the contributions of female blues artists in shaping modern American culture, Woolner says. “There has been a long time the only masculine idea that the only travelling male blues singer travels south with a guitar on her back is a genuine representation of the blues,” she explains.

In this destructive and uncompromising blues scene, prove to me that it is primarily an important national anthem. Davis says he was “a cultural precursor to the lesbian cultural movement of the 1970s.” Cover version featured in the 1977 anthology Lesbian concentratea record released in response to an anti-gay campaign.

The song agreeing with Woolner was original. “On other sites in the 1920s, American culture allowed bold messages that proved me with a bold message about gender violations and same-sex desires,” she says. Rainey knew well, so the song can have a big impact on the community. “Bruce helps you get out of bed in the morning,” her character says Theatre. “You get up knowing you’re not alone. There’s something else in the world. That song added something.”