Written histories have tended to straightwash the stories of the female pioneers of the blues, yet many of these women were either lesbian or bisexual, and sang openly and joyously about having sex with other women. Around the time that Tony Jackson wrote ‘Pretty Baby’, two women who were instrumental in popularising the blues had their first encounter. Bessie Smith was just 14 (some reports say she was as young as 11) when she first met Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, but the older and more experienced woman quickly became her mentor, instructor and – more than likely – her lover, as Rainey’s guitar player Sam Chatmon revealed.2 Both women were bisexual and did not care who knew, although both would marry men who would exert a massive influence on their lives and careers.
With its roots in African American work songs and European folk music, from its earliest days the blues included elements of spirituals, work songs and storytelling ballads. Emerging towards the end of the nineteenth century, the songs were originally performed by one singer accompanying themselves on guitar or banjo, or by a singer accompanied by a pianist. With raw, simple lyrics full of emotion, blues songs dwelt on love and loss, with singers recounting tales of loneliness and injustice, of hard-done-by women and their cheating men. Named, if you believe her own story, by Ma Rainey sometime around 1902, blues is the music of the oppressed, of the experiences of black people at a time when they were considered by many to be second-class citizens. With the majority of singers and musicians all but illiterate, these songs were passed orally from musician to musician, adapted and improved along the way, with ribald slang and double entendres often used to get the far more risqué meaning of many of the songs past censors. The blues quickly became the most listened-to music (with the possible exception of gospel) by black audiences. ‘The Blues,’ poet, novelist and playwright Langston Hughes wrote in his 1927 collection Fine Clothes to the Jew, ‘unlike the spirituals, have a strict poetic pattern: one long line repeated and a third line to rhyme with the first two. Sometimes the second line in repetition is slightly changed, and sometimes, but very seldom, it is omitted. The mood of the Blues is almost always despondency, but when they are sung, people laugh.’3
Hughes is describing the 12-bar, call-and-response music most of us recognise as the blues, yet the genre also encompasses folk-blues, country-blues, urban and electric blues. Although it grew from the cotton fields of the South this music developed in northern cities: in New York (specifically around Harlem), in Detroit where the production lines of the motor manufacturers desperately needed workers, and in Chicago alongside jazz. It was the pop music of its day, and its stars – far from the ragged minstrel described by W. C. Handy in his autobiography Father of the Blues – were well-regarded and occasionally highly paid.
At the end of the nineteenth and in the first decades of the twentieth century, Harlem had become one of the chief destinations for black migrants from around the US and a centre for African American culture. The Harlem Renaissance was fuelled by black intellectuals, including writers, artists, musicians, photographers and poets – many of them gay (like Langston Hughes), lesbian or bisexual – who filled the formerly white, middle-class district. As writer and painter Richard Bruce Nugent put it, ‘Harlem was very much like a village. People did what they wanted to do with whom they wanted to do it … You just did what you wanted to do. Nobody was in the closet. There wasn’t any closet.’4
The antics of Harlem’s lesbians provided fuel for gossip writers, including Archie Seale, whose Man About Harlem column often featured salacious – and anonymous – stories of the area’s ladies, and Geraldyn Dismond, a reporter on the African American paper the Inter-State Tattler.
Some venues in the notorious Jungle Alley district, including the world-famous Cotton Club, only welcomed white audiences even though they featured many of the most popular black entertainers of the day, among them Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong (Bessie Smith played there, while on the comeback trail, in 1935). Photographer and writer Carl Van Vechten was famously turned away from the Cotton Club because the party he arrived with was racially mixed; he vowed to boycott the club until black patrons could hear Ethel Waters singing there. Yet although racism, segregation and bigotry was rife throughout the country – even among the many black Americans who aspired to join the middle classes – for the most part, gay men, lesbians and bisexuals were an accepted part of the Harlem scene. Waters, who began her recording career in 1921 with the jazz number ‘The New York Glide’, but was signed as a blues singer by The Aeolian Record Company when they launched their race records line in July 1923,5 had been a fixture in New York since the beginning of the 1920s and was often seen fighting in public with whoever was her girlfriend at the time. For many years she lived openly with her lover, the dancer Ethel Williams, a relationship that led to them being nicknamed The Two Ethels. The hugely popular Drag Balls, which had thrived underground for more than three decades and had provided a haven for people of all races and all sexual persuasions, became more prominent. Often referred to disparagingly as the Faggot Ball (the first appearance of the word ‘faggot’ in print came in the sentence ‘All the fagots (sissys) [sic] will be dressed in drag at the ball tonight,’ in Jackson and Hellyer’s 1914 book A Vocabulary of Criminal Slang), one such event was held annually at the Savoy Ballroom and attracted many high-society voyeurs, black and white, gay and straight, among them Van Vechten, the novelist Max Ewing and the ‘poet laureate of Harlem’ Langston Hughes. Harlem’s Renaissance Ballroom and Casino hosted the Hamilton Lodge’s annual masquerade, which began in the 1890s and was infamous for the number of both white and black men dressed as women: ‘It seems that many men of the class generally known as “fairies”, and many Bohemians from the Greenwich Village section took the occasion to mask as women for this affair. They appeared to make up at least fifty per cent of the 1,500 people who packed the casino, and in their gorgeous evening gowns, wigs and powdered faces were hard to distinguish from many of the women,’ reported the New York Age.6 By the middle of the 1930s, the Hamilton Lodge ball had moved to the Rockland Palace, a building more suitable for its ever-growing attendance. As Brevities (formerly known as Broadway Brevities), the scandal sheet that called itself ‘America’s first national tabloid weekly’ crowed: ‘6,000 crowd huge hall as queer men and women dance … crowds of spectators gather to witness the horrible orgies of the perverted. Stern men and simpering women who show the marks of passion make up the crowd. Appearances are deceiving. Most of the “women” in attendance at the orgies are men in disguise. A majority of the people wearing tuxedoes are female.’7 ‘Harlem is the one place that is gay and delightful however dull and depressing the downtown regions may be,’ Max Ewing wrote in a letter to his parents. ‘Nothing affects the vitality and the freshness of Harlem’.8
Brevities, March 1932
Thanks to her constant touring, Ma Rainey was quickly becoming the first nationally recognised star of the blues era. Born Gertrude Pridgett (in Alabama in 1882; some sources state that she was born in Columbus, Georgia in 1886), Ma joined the travelling tent show the Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels (aka the Rabbit’s Foot Company) after marrying William ‘Pa’ Rainey in 1904. She wasn’t pretty, but she liked to dress up and she loved jewellery, wearing gold coins on long chains around her neck and ostrich feathers in her hair: ‘When she came out everybody was astonished, she was that ugly,’ Ruby Walker told Bessie Smith’s biographer Chris Albertson in 1971. ‘If you wanted to make a performer mad in those days you would say: “you look like Ma Rainey”!’ That didn’t matter. You didn’t go to look at her dreadful horsehair wigs or the mouthful of gold teeth: people flocked to the tent shows that featured Ma because of her voice: ‘when they hear and see “Ma” Rainey they just do not associate the voice with the person before them’.9 Full and strong, she would soon become known – thanks to a Columbia copywriter’s gift for hyperbole – as The Mother of The Blues.
Advertised (in 1910) as ‘our coon shouter,’10 by 1914 Ma and Pa were being billed as Rainey and Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues. Rabbit’s Foot was the premier black touring revue, and owner Pat Chappelle was recognised as one of the ‘wealthiest colored citizens of Jacksonville, Fla., owning much real estate. He was very successful as a showman, and made considerable money touring small towns in the South.’11 In 1909, Chappelle commissioned the Pullman Company to build ‘the finest sleeping car used by any show,’12 for his troupe to travel in. In the year that Bessie joined the show, Pat Chappelle died from tuberculosis, and his wife sold the Rabbit’s Foot Company to F. S. Wolcott Carnivals.
Bessie Smith auditioned for Rainey some time around 1911 (different accounts state 1912 or 1913) and joined the company immediately. Smith had already been gaining quite a reputation as singer in her hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee, singing on street corners for small change, when her older brother Clarence arranged for the fame-hungry young girl to audition for Ma. The older woman was impressed, but initially took her on as a dancer, not as a singer. A popular story had it that Rainey had Smith tied up in a sack (her niece Ruby Walker insisted that Smith had been kidnapped by gypsies), kidnapped her, forced her join the Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels, and taught her to sing the blues. It wasn’t true, but the rumours did the show no harm and neither woman bothered too much to correct them. Smith became Ma Rainey’s apprentice and stayed with her for around four years before branching out on her own. In 1917, she was booked into the Paradise Club in Atlantic City, and shortly afterwards she established a base in Philadelphia.
Black women’s voices were the first that the majority of the record-buying public heard singing the blues. The first recording to include the word ‘blues’ in its title, an instrumental version of W. C Handy’s rag ‘The Memphis Blues’, had appeared in 1914 (Morton Harvey’s vocal version followed in 1915), but it was Mamie Smith’s debut recording – ‘That Thing Called Love’ and ‘You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down’ made in 1920 for Okeh Records in New York – that proved that the blues could be anything more than a local novelty. It could have all been so different: Mamie Smith’s pioneering recording session only happened because the singer who had been scheduled to record the songs – the stage star Sophie Tucker – fell ill and Mamie was called in to replace her. Before Mamie Smith came along, every blues singer that had been captured on record was distinctly Caucasian. Her follow-up, ‘Crazy Blues’, was a million-seller, and the success prompted record companies – principally Columbia and Paramount – to seek out and record other female blues singers for their new ‘race records’ imprints. Now-forgotten singers were quickly snapped up: Sara Martin, Eva Taylor and Virginia Listen all recorded for Okeh in the early 1920s; Clara Smith (no relation) was picked up by Columbia. Rainey (often billed as Madame Rainey and even on occasion the Million Dollar Highbrow) and Bessie Smith soon followed suit, and both were popular with the record-buying public. Spotted by Frank Walker of Columbia Records while singing in a small club in Selma, Alabama, Bessie Smith made her first recording, ‘Downhearted Blues’, in New York on 16 February 1923. The original recording of the song, released the previous year by Alberta Hunter (a one-time lover of Ethel Waters and former protégé of Tony Jackson), had sold well, but Bessie’s recording (backed with ‘Gulf Coast Blues’) sold an unheard-of 780,000 copies in less than six months and went on to sell two million.13
In 1922, Columbia had issued seven blues records; in 1923 it was three dozen, including fourteen by Bessie Smith,14 and the company launched a major campaign to promote their race records stars:
Special material, including a complete campaign of advertising material is now being issued by Columbia Graphophone Co. in connection with its “blues” recordings made by negro artists. For more than two years the sales volumes of this class of records has increased rapidly, and among the Columbia headline artists today are Bessie Smith and Clara Smith. Records by these artists are meeting with popular reception everywhere, especially in the South, where it is not surprising to hear of dealers ordering as many as 2,000 of a selection within a period of a week or two.15
Bessie’s fame spread so quickly that, by June that year while on a tour of the Southern States, ‘a midnight performance was given by the [Atlanta theatre] 81 for white people, and the house was packed to full capacity. It was estimated by the officials of the theatre that one thousand people were unable to gain admittance.’16 Smith’s show was ‘the first “Midnight Frolic” for white people ever offered in Atlanta’.17 Arguably the most popular female blues singer of all time, she cut 160 sides for Columbia and soon became the highest-paid black entertainer of the period, earning $1,500 a week at her peak.
Two other things happened in 1923: Smith married a security guard named Jack Gee and Ma Rainey recorded her first eight sides for Paramount in Chicago (she recorded a total of 92 songs, all for Paramount). At that point touring with the John T. Wortham tent show with her act Madam Rainey’s Gold Beauties, so huge was Rainey’s following that sales of her discs were not harmed by her regular run-ins with the law, even after her arrest following a raid by police at her home during a lesbian orgy in 1925:
It seemed that Ma had found herself in an embarrassing tangle with the Chicago police. She and a group of young ladies had been drinking and were making so much noise that a neighbor summoned the police. Unfortunately for Ma and her girls, the law arrived just as the impromptu party got intimate. There was pandemonium as everyone madly scrambled for her clothes and ran out the back door. Ma, clutching someone else’s dress, was the last to exit, but a nasty fall down a staircase foiled her escape. Accusing her of running an indecent party, the police threw her in jail, and Bessie bailed her out the following morning.’18
That incident inspired Rainey’s most obviously and outlandishly lesbian-themed recording, ‘Prove It On Me Blues’. Just in case the message was lost on anyone, when it was first issued, ‘Prove It On Me Blues’ was advertised in the press accompanied by an illustration of Ma dressed in a fedora and three-piece suit, flirting with a couple of feminine young ladies while a cop watches suspiciously from the other side of the street. That year, crowds of both black and white blues fans besieged the Broad and Market Music Shop in Newark, New Jersey when Smith made a public appearance: ‘the store was packed … outside in the streets similar crowds jostled, straining to hear’.19
Although Smith was married to the possessive and physically abusive Gee, she was hardly what you would call discreet. When appearing in Detroit she would take her favourite girls and hang out at buffet flats. Described as ‘an apartment to which people come to sit around, eat, drink, talk, sing and dance’ and ‘the modern counterpart of the salons of classical France’ by the New York Recorder,20 buffet flats were, in fact, small, unlicensed clubs in private homes where customers could drink and gamble, eat and sleep … and enjoy watching (or even joining in) every kind of sex act imaginable. She was also known to have had a relationship with male impersonator Gladys Ferguson.21
In January 1927, just a few weeks after Smith and Rainey had collaborated on the latter’s song ‘Don’t Fish In My Sea’, one of Smith’s lovers, Lillian Simpson, attempted suicide after the pair had a fight. Lillian had been a schoolmate of Ruby Walker’s, and her mother had once been Bessie Smith’s wardrobe mistress; it was natural that she would join Smith’s troupe. However the two women soon entered into a tempestuous affair that Smith tried unsuccessfully to hide from Gee. Once, when she made a very public play for the younger girl, Simpson refused her advances. ‘The hell with you, bitch,’ Smith is reported to have said. ‘I got twelve women on this show and I can have one every night if I want it’.22
Blues singers were soon using words such as ‘sissy’ or ‘bulldagger’ in their songs: in ‘Foolish Man Blues’ Bessie sang about ‘mannish actin’ woman and a skippin’ twistin’ woman actin’ man’; in the song ‘Sissy Blues’, Ma Rainey complained of her husband’s infidelity with a homosexual called Miss Kate who can ‘shake that thing like jelly on a plate’. Lucille Bogan (aka Bessie Jackson) warned her listeners that ‘B.D. [bull dagger or bull dyke] women sure is rough’ in ‘B.D. Women Blues’, and told them quite categorically that ‘Women Don’t Need No Men’ on her 1928 Paramount release of the same name. Like Bessie and Ma, Lucille Bogan had also begun her recording career in 1923 (for Okeh) and was an uninhibited bisexual famed for singing some of the most notoriously dirty blues songs of the era, including the frankly obscene ‘Shave ‘Em Dry’: ‘I got nipples on my titties big as the end of my thumb, I got something ‘tween my legs gon’ make a dead man cum’. Often included with Ma and Bessie as the ‘big three’ of the vaudeville-inspired urban blues, Lucille Anderson was born in Amory, Mississippi in 1897 but grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. So many of her self-penned songs are concerned with the seedier side of sex (‘Tricks Ain’t Walking No More’, for example) that it has been suggested that she may have worked as a prostitute before (or possibly during) her marriage to railway worker Nazareth Bogan. She recorded around 100 sides during her career for companies including Okeh and Paramount, but none of her releases emulated the sales of Smith or Rainey.
The best-known LGBT hangout in Harlem was the Clam House, described by Vanity Fair columnist Charles G. Shaw as ‘a popular house for revellers but not for the innocent young’.23 A tiny club with just eight tables for its patrons, Beatrice Lillie and Tallulah Bankhead were known to frequent the Clam House, where Gladys Bentley, big and black and dressed in a white top hat and tails, would hold court, belting out the Kokomo Arnold song ‘Sissy Man Blues’ and risqué versions of popular songs such as ‘Alice Blue Gown’ or ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’: ‘If ever there was a gal who could take a popular ditty and put her own naughty version to it, La Bentley could do it,’ wrote Bill Chase in the New York Age in October 1949. Open all night, the venue soon became known as Gladys’ Clam House; Bentley provided the inspiration for the singer Sybil and the venue appeared thinly disguised as The Lobster Pot in Blair Niles’ 1931 novel Strange Brother.
Born in Philadelphia in 1907, Bentley was an out – and outrageous – lesbian who made a name for herself at such venues as the Ubangi Club (formerly known as Connie’s Inn, where you could also see a female impersonator from Chicago who went by the stage name Gloria Swanson), the Log Cabin Grill (better known as George Wood’s), the Red Rooster and the Rainbow Gardens. One of the many scandalous stories told about Bentley was that she married another woman (a white woman, no less) in a ceremony held in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Initially using the stage name Barbara ‘Bobbie’ Minton, Bentley was a favourite attraction who would flirt outrageously with the prettiest women in her audience and who could often be heard slamming on the piano and belting out a tune at a local rent party when she was not on stage. Although she recorded several sides during her career, none of them were anywhere near as outré as the material she sang in her nightclub act, nor did they challenge the sexually themed records cut by Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey or Lucille Bogan, yet in spite of this her fame, and her earning power, rose quickly. Before long, Bentley was boasting of living in a rented apartment on Park Avenue with her own servants and chauffeur-driven car, and was appearing regularly on radio.
Of course it was not just the women: in his song ‘Say I Do It’, Waymon ‘Sloppy’ Henry sang about using a powder puff and wearing lace; singer Frankie ‘Half-Pint’ Jaxon, a ‘close friend and admirer’ of Bessie Smith24 caused a sensation in Chicago where he often appeared in drag. As the vocalist of Tampa Red’s Hokum Jazz Band, Half-Pint had a hit with the song ‘My Daddy Rocks Me’, a reworking of Trixie Smith’s ‘My Man Rocks Me’, which is often cited as the first song to pair the words ‘rock’ and ‘roll’ in a sexual context. Jaxon’s party piece was a duet, with him singing both the male and female parts. In 1930, singer George Hannah – accompanied by pianist Meade Lux Lewis – released ‘The Boy In the Boat’, a song about lesbian sex (the phrase ‘boy in the boat’ is a euphemism for the clitoris and the clitoral hood). Hannah recorded for Paramount between 1929 and 1931 and also had a hit with the self-penned ‘Freakish Man Blues’ (listed on the disc’s label as ‘Freakish Blues’), a song about a man who has no interest in having sex with his woman. Very little is known about Hannah, but ‘The Boy In the Boat’ had been standard material for LGBT blues singers for a number of years: the aforementioned drag artiste who used the stage name Gloria Swanson (a number of drag acts named themselves after famous Hollywood actresses) is known to have regularly performed the song from around 1920. According to Jazz historian Frank Gillis, the originator of ‘The Boy In the Boat’ was none other than Tony ‘Pretty Baby’ Jackson.25
Bessie Smith’s life, and her career, were spiralling out of control, aided and abetted by her increasing reliance on alcohol. Changing tastes meant that her records were not selling in as large a number as they had been, and her fiery temper and unreliability caused major theatre owners to stop booking her. In an attempt to manage her own affairs, she went back to the tent shows she knew so well, but even these were struggling. Audiences were turning away from vaudeville and minstrel shows towards more sophisticated entertainment, and increasingly to radio and the movies. Courting the new medium, Bessie starred in her own two-reeler, St. Louis Blues, in 1929. The film, shot with an all-black cast, was based on the recording she had made in 1925 with Louis Armstrong. Having made her last recordings in 1928, Ma Rainey returned to the tent show circuit before retiring for good in 1935. She went back to the house she had built for her mother in Columbus, Georgia, where she took over the ownership and management of a couple of local theatres, the Lyric and the Airdrome (after many years of neglect, the house is now home to the Ma Rainey Museum). Paramount, the company she recorded for and who billed her as their biggest star, closed in the early 1930s, another victim of the Depression. She drifted into obscurity until the 1950s, when Riverside Records licensed some of her recordings for reissue. Lucille Bogan retired, too, although she remained involved with the blues scene as manager of her son’s band Bogan’s Birmingham Busters.
In the late summer of 1937, Benny Goodman and John Hammond arranged for Smith to record for Columbia again: she had not set foot in the studio since laying down four sides for Okeh in November 1933. With a big promotion campaign planned, it looked like the Empress of the Blues was going to reclaim her throne. But sadly that would never happen. On 27 September, Bessie died after the Packard she was driving collided with a parked truck near Clarksdale, Mississippi. Horribly injured, with her arm partly severed, her niece, Ruby Walker, insisted she bled to death after a whites-only hospital refused her admittance. In truth she was taken directly to the Afro-American Hospital in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where she died seven hours later. The myth that she was refused entry to the whites-only hospital stems from in an article by John Hammond which appeared in the November 1937 issue of Down Beat magazine entitled ‘Did Bessie Smith Bleed to Death While Waiting for Medical Aid?’ Although her biographer Chris Albertson has proved this was not the case (and Hammond later admitted the piece was based entirely on hearsay), even noted columnist Walter Winchell referred to her death as ‘murder’ (in his syndicated column On Broadway, 22 December 1946), and playwright Edward Albee used this as the basis for his hit play The Death of Bessie Smith.
Seven thousand mourners attended her funeral. ‘We gave Aunt Bessie a big send-off. Everything was done properly,’ her nephew Buster Smith told The Philadelphia Enquirer,26 although her estranged husband refused to foot the bill for a headstone: ‘After paying funeral expenses, we had nothing left,’ Fred Gee claimed.27 Presumably the budget had been eaten up by the gold and velvet trimmed coffin her body rested in. The grave of Lucille Bogan, who passed away on 10 August 1948, also went unmarked. Ma Rainey died of heart disease in December 1939, but the scene was already over – destroyed by the Depression, the repeal of prohibition, increased persecution and the new conservatism sweeping the country. Soon McCarthyism would herald a new witch-hunt, with LGBT entertainers – and even those simply suspected of being homosexual – targeted. The hunt for ‘perverts’, who were presumed to be subversive by nature, resulted in thousands of innocent men and women being harassed and denied employment. In 1948, some of Bessie’s friends held a memorial concert in New York to raise funds for a headstone. The concert was a success, but it seems that Jack Gee pocketed the proceeds and promptly disappeared. He resurfaced in 1952, when it was reported that he had sold 42 recently discovered and previously unrecorded songs written by his late wife.
Referred to in the press as ‘the masculine-garbed, smut-singing entertainer,’28 in her later years Gladys Bentley attempted to clean up her act and straighten herself out – in more ways than one. In the space of three years, she claimed to have been married to three different men. In 1952 Bentley penned an article for Ebony magazine titled ‘I am a Woman Again’ in which she wrote that she had ‘violated the accepted code of morals that our world observes but yet the world has tramped to the doors of the places where I have performed to applaud’. She called her life ‘a living hell as terrible as dope addiction’.29 Two years later, Jet magazine reported, ‘The lives of some strange women, however, have happy endings. Gladys Bentley, entertainer, says injections of female sex hormones three times a week hastened her return to womanhood.’30 Her self-pinned memoir, If This Be Sin, remains unpublished: Gladys died during a flu epidemic in Los Angeles in January 1960. Ethel Waters also ended up marrying three times and renouncing her once-flaunted sexuality. Born in 1900, the product of a knifepoint rape when her mother was just 13, she turned from singing to acting, and in 1929 appeared in On With The Show! the first all-talking, all-colour feature length movie. Waters died in near-poverty in 1977.
Despite being cited as an influence by artists including Billie Holiday (who began her recording career in the same week that Bessie had her final studio session) and Frank Sinatra, interest in Bessie, Ma and the rest of the original blues singers waned until its resurgence in the 1950s with the birth of the electric blues, and later still in to the following decade, when folk singers and pop acts began to cite them as influences. In 1970, Bessie’s grave in Sharon Hill, PA, finally got a headstone thanks to contributions from long-time fan Janis Joplin, Juanita Green (president of the North Philadelphia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP] who, as a child, had done housework for Smith) and Columbia’s John Hammond. Smith had been a huge influence on Joplin, who saw her as something of a role model and had even told friends that she felt she was Bessie Smith reincarnated. Sadly the marker, engraved with the legend ‘the greatest blues singer in the world will never stop singing,’ got the date of her birth wrong. Joplin, herself bisexual, died from a heroin overdose a few months later, but her influence is still being felt today.