Ma Rainey: A Biography
Ma Rainey was the most popular theater blues-singer of the early 20’s, known for her husky, powerful voice, commanding stage presence, and ability to capture the pains and joys of black Southern life in her songs. She was second in popularity only to Bessie Smith, and held a recording contract with Paramount Records from 1923-1928.
Ma Rainey, whose given name was Gertrude Pridgett, was born in 1886 in Columbus, Georgia. She first appeared on stage at 14 as part of a local talent show called Bunch of Blackberries. Four years later she married Will “Pa” Rainey, a traveling musician and comedian some years older than Gertrude, who was passing through town and fell in love with the young singer. The couple married in 1904, and by the early 1910’s, the couple was touring together on the minstrelsy circuit with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, billed as “Ma & Pa Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues.” Pa died in the late 1910’s, by which time Ma had become a star in her own right and continued to tour until 1921. During this time, Ma worked on at least two traveling shows with the younger Bessie Smith, for whom she acted as a mentor and possibly even a lover. Bessie was known to be bisexual and it is strongly suspected that Ma was as well. Some claim that Ma taught Bessie how to sing, though Maud Smith, Bessie’s sister-in-law, says that, “She was more like a mother to her.”(1)
Bessie achieved greater success and posterity than Ma because she was signed to Columbia, a company with a more sophisticated recording process, and was better able to adapt to the changing demands of the market as Southern down-home blues eventually went out of fashion. While Bessie was said to have a fiery temper, a vulnerable ego and a drinking problem, Ma is remembered as generous, clean-spoken sweet-tempered and at least publicly temperate. Lionel Hampton, the nephew of a South Side bootlegger that hosted parties attended by the likes of Ma Rainey and Louis Armstrong, said that, “I used to dream of joining Ma Rainey’s band because she treated her musicians so wonderfully, and she always bought them an instrument…”.(2) However, Ma was careful to retain ultimate authority among her retinue. One performer recalls, “Oh, she did most of the blues singing. She’d have these prima donnas, yeah, but they didn’t sing blues on her shows, see, they’d sing something else. Like hot pop.”(3) It was also said that while she would lighten her own face with heavy grease paint, powder, and rouge, she would not permit her chorus girls to do the same.
In 1923, Ma won a recording contract with Paramount Records and went to Chicago to make her first recordings. Richard M. Jones, a talent scout for various record companies, recalls that the first recording session had to be delayed a week because Ma, unaccustomed to Northern winters, refused to go out in the snow.(4) Three years earlier, Mamie Smith had become the first African-American woman to be recorded, and had launched a blues mania that induced other record companies to enter the “race market” and record blues singers. Paramount aggressively publicized Ma in the black press as “the Mother of the Blues,” “the Songbird of the South,” “the Gold-Neck Woman of the Blues,” and “the Paramount Wildcat.”(5) By 1925, she had become so popular that Paramount booked her on a tour of the Theater’s Own Booking Agency (T.O.B.A.), a circuit of theaters in the major Southern and Midwestern cities that provided a variety of entertainment, including comedy, circus acts, and vaudeville along with singing and dancing. The theaters played primarily for black audiences, though Thursday night had separate performances for whites. Ma would dress in elaborate costumes and jewelry, and in one instance is remembered as having emerged on stage from inside a giant Victrola.(6) The T.O.B.A. circuit provided little pay, grueling hours, and often inadequate dressings rooms and stages to their performers, so that people joked the acronym actually stood for “Tough on Black Asses.” However, it did provide employment for hundreds of black performers. Ma had an apartment in Chicago (at the corner of 35th and Wabash), but spent the majority of her time on the road with her Wildcats Jazz Band.
By 1927, the competition of radio, records, and sound motion pictures began to spell the demise of vaudeville and the T.O.B.A. Ma was Paramount’s most popular female star and continued to be successful until 1928, when Paramount ended her contract. A Paramount executive explained that “her down-home material had gone out of fashion,” as black urban audiences became more sophisticated and the popularity of the Classic Blues was replaced by male country blues singers and popular swing music. During her five year contract with Paramount, Ma made a total of 92 records.(7) Ma continued to tour the T.O.B.A. until 1930, when the circuit closed down and she fell back into minstrelsy, replacing her gold necklace with one of fake pearls. While some of her contemporaries, such as Bessie Smith and Ida Cox, were able to make the transition to more mainstream swing music, Ma never departed from the authentic black sound of the Classic Blues. In 1935, Ma retired and moved back to Georgia, where she acquired and operated (but did not perform at) two theaters. In 1939, at the age of 53, Ma died of heart disease.
1 Lieb, Sandra R. Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey. Massachusetts: Univ. of Mass. Press, 1983. pp. 15.
2 Lieb, 26.
3 Lieb, 30.
4 Paramount, 76.
5 Lieb, 25.
6 Lieb, 30.
7 Harrison, Daphne Duval. Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920’s. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990. pp. 38.
–Drew Dir, Resident Dramaturg
