Ma Rainey

The Mother of the Blues? She claimed to have invented the term. She also claimed to have invented Bessie Smith, although Smith may already have known exactly what the blues were and how to sing them when the women met probably some time right after WWI.

The early blues recordings sound a little less than appealing to modern ears. These folks were essentially performing into big eardrums like on the old phonographs, rather than microphones, so the music is there, but not the impact. Imagine this music live and in person, with bigger than life performers. Ma Rainey was big in her day, and her fame was real enough to warrant a US Postage stamp in 1994. Short of setting down to do some serious research, it's hard to get too much real information on her for our purposes. Did she record with Louis Armstrong and King Oliver, for instance? You can track that down for yourself. The informative data on YouTube (Slowtubbi has a lot of music on his YouTube page worth checking out) makes various claims about her lifestyle that make her even larger than the larger than life she already was. And of course there's the August Wilson play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, which portrays the recording scene of the day, and brings yet another version of Rainey to life. It's all a musicologist's job, but if you want to know the blues, you've got to know what was going on early in the 20th Century, not just with the lone guitarists that seemed to spring up in the South, but the bands who were turning that music into what would soon be jazz (and later, rock).

Ma Rainey was born on April 26, 1886(ish). Here's just one number. "Booze and Blues." That about sums it up.