The Musical is Political: Blueswomen and Blues Protest

Since the period of popular cross-over in the 1960s, a debate has persisted among scholars and enthusiasts as to the politics of African American blues tradition. Is the blues a music of social protest or of individual catharsis? Is it an expression of black resistance or universal commonality? Can white people sing the blues? What about middle-class people? Were the blues black or white by nature and orientation?

In all of these many debates over the years, however, the discourse has too often been gendered male, and the focus too often narrowed strictly to race and class as the measure of protest. A cult of romance in dominant blues representation enforces an image of the bluesman as universal. African American blueswomen are routinely marginalized as tertiary. Women’s expression in the blues, as in the larger society, is commonly dismissed as second order.

Building on the key contribution of alternative blues scholars Angela Davis and Paul and Beth Garon, this paper insists on a reframing of women’s blues as revolutionary. The “blues queens” of the 1920s were the first superstars of the genre. Rebels in an image of their own making, they aired unmentionables, singing unabashedly about female agency, sexual freedom, class inequality, racism, drug abuse, and domestic violence. The heartbreak and resistance expressed in the blues of African American women challenged the stale dichotomy of “public” and “private.” Historically, blues radicalism was female, not male, and the debates over blues protest have worn thin in their gendered exclusivity.