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A few years into her career, she married William “Pa” Rainey, a traveling entertainer who specialized in comedy and vaudeville. What is certain is that she quickly made it her own. Rainey loved the blues so much and so immediately, she claims to have invented the genre’s name in “a moment of inspiration”-though Lieb points out that this is unlikely, as the term was in use long before then. Ma Rainey in 1917, sporting one of her trademark beaded gowns. Rainey was so captivated, she learned it that day, and began using it as an encore in her own act. According to Sandra Lieb’s Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey, Rainey first encountered the blues at one of these shows, when a fellow performer stood up and began singing a “strange and poignant” song about a man who had left her. Born in Columbus, Georgia on April 26, 1886, Pridgett was a traveling performer by the age of 14, singing cabaret in talent and tent shows around the South. She was, in the words of historian Robert Philipson, “one of the first black divas in history.”īefore Ma Rainey was the Mother of the Blues, she was a young musician named Gertrude Pridgett. She also wore diamond tiaras, recorded nearly a hundred records, and threw at least one illegal queer orgy.
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Ma Rainey spent decades touring the country, inspired generations of imitators, and knocked the roof off any space she performed in. But then again, it’s usually legends that survive the test of time, and luckily for him, one was built around him, otherwise, his songs and legacy might have been lost forever.In the 1910s and ’20s, long before Prince and Beyonce fascinated generations, America vested its quick-changing emotions in The Mother of the Blues-a gender-role-flouting singer with sky-high charisma, great business sense, and a voice that could bring people from laughter to tears and back again. However, the truth could be metaphorically simplified to a story about a boy born in 1911, stuck standing at a crossroad at one point in his life one road pointing to his struggling mother at home and him by her side living the life she had, and the other pointing towards learning a craft and living the life of a touring musician, leaving his mother and everything else behind and surrendering himself fully to the spirit of the blues, playing what people regarded back then as the devil’s music. Johnson’s guitar Author:Sebby 123 CC BY-SA 3.0Ī fine end to a finer legend best suited to represent a modern variant of the Faustian tragedy and perhaps the best way to emphasize the life of a man of which the world knew little about, one that also became an advantage to a record company trying to make a profit after his death. For “God help us-art is long, and life so short” –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. There are countless scenarios of individuals we know, knew, or merely mentioned in history, who instead of building a “whatever it takes” road toward their dreams and desires, willingly chose the “no matter the cost” shortcut to reach their goals, thus skipping the walk on that road altogether.
Black legend blues free#
No matter the approach, the core of the story inherently remains: man strikes a deal, depriving himself of a future with the sublime gift of free will in it, to make the future he yearns for, his present. Goethe in his tragic play, Faust, took another approach and by inverting the legend, presented a scenario where there is not a bargain but a wager between the scientist who lost all meaning in his life and Mephistopheles (Mephisto), the Devil himself, who promises to provide him with meaning on the condition that when he succeeds, he then agrees to forever be his servant. Faustus, аn esteemed scientist, traded in his moral values and spiritual self to meet his cravings for higher knowledge and power. Аccording to a well-known German legend of the 16th century, Dr.