Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday
The female blues singers of the 1920s, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey,  and Bessie Smith, not only invented a musical genre, but they also became  models of how African American women could become economically  independent in a culture that had not previously allowed it.  Both  Smith and Rainey composed, arranged, and managed their own road  bands.  Angela Y. Davis's study emphasizes the impact that these singers, and later  Billie Holiday, had on the poor and working-class communities from  which they came. The artists addressed radical subjects such as physical  and economic abuse, race relations, and female sexual power, including  lesbianism. Ma Rainey was well known as a lover of women as well as  men, and her song "Prove It on Me" describes a butch woman who  dresses like a man and dates women.Blues Legacies and Black Feminismplaces the fluid  sexuality of these women within a larger context of African American  artists' attempts to subvert and recreate America.