Ma Rainey’s ‘Prove it on me Blues’
Ma Rainey and her band
Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey (1886-1939) was an African-American blues singer, also known as the Mother of Blues. She was a prolific recording artist and was known for her powerful voice. Born as Gertrude Pridgett, she became known as Ma Rainey after marrying Will “Pa” Rainey, another entertainer specialized in comedy and vaudeville, with whom she formed the musical act Rainey and Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues. According to historian Robert Philipson, she was one of the first black divas in history. To paint the picture: she adorned herself with diamond tiaras, golden jewelry and lavish dresses, and was said at some point to have taken the stage with ‘an ostrich feather in one hand and a gun in the other’.
She was wildly popular among her predominantly black audience. This was due to the Segregation Era. A web of racist statuses was formed by white people to ‘legally’ separate themselves from everyone else, known as the Jim Crow laws. White people would sometimes hire Ma Rainey to play their smaller parties, but afterwards “she would dance at the local black cafe behind a gas station, to entertain and socialize with her own people”, as remembered by her guitarist Sam Chatmon.
In 1923 Rainey landed a record deal with Paramount Records, and over the next five years she released almost a hundred singles. Her lyrics were innovative, as her songs were about women who “explicitly celebrate their right to conduct themselves as expansively and even as undesirably as men”, pointed out by Angela Davis in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (2011). Besides that, she was also innovative when it came to her sexual self-expression. As stated in the documentary T’Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness: Queer Blues Divas of the 1920s, she was one of multiple blues musicians that we now would describe as queer.
Although it wasn’t widely known, Rainey did not exactly try to hide her queerness either. Sam Chatmon recalls seeing Rainey flirt with Bessie Smith, another blues singer who had also been romantically linked to Lillian Simpson from her band. Smith reportedly had to bail Rainey out of jail in 1925, after the latter had been arrested for throwing an ‘indecent party’. Apparently, the party was broken up right before Rainey and some younger women ‘got intimate’, and being found in a ‘state of undress’.
Despite not being very forward about her sexuality, Rainey released an unambiguously queer song in 1928, called Prove It On Me Blues. In it, she tells the story of a self-assured, defiant lesbian, daring the world to ‘prove it on her’:
[Verse 1]
Went out last night, had a great big fight
Everything seemed to go on wrong
I looked up, to my surprise
The gal I was with was gone
[Verse 2]
Where she went, I don't know
I mean to follow everywhere she goes;
Folks say I'm crooked. I didn't know where she took it
I want the whole world to know
[Chorus]
They say I do it, ain't nobody caught me
Sure got to prove it on me;
Went out last night with a crowd of my friends
They must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men
[Verse 3]
It's true I wear a collar and a tie
Makes the wind blow all the while
Don't you say I do it, ain't nobody caught me
You sure got to prove it on me
[Verse 4]
Wear my clothes just like a fan
Talk to the gals just like any old man
'Cause they say I do it, ain't nobody caught me
Sure got to prove it on me
Both sexuality and gender expression are given attention by Rainey. Besides exclaiming having only attraction towards women, Rainey also describes having a masculine appearance, with ‘collar and tie’, and talking to women ‘just like a man’. Women like this were visible in the blues scene. Like Gladys Bentley, a singer and gifted pianist who regularly wore tuxedos.
In the promotional messages for Prove It On Me Blues, an image of someone like Bentley was used. This somewhat distances Rainey from being the narrator of the song, as she was known for her lavish, feminine outfits on stage. Yet events from her life and the text from the advertisement strongly suggest Rainey is the narrator of the song:
“What's all this? Scandal? Maybe so, but you wouldn't have thought of it "Ma" Rainey. But look at that cop watching her! What does it all mean? But "Ma" just sings "Prove It on Me[…]"
Paramount’s advertisement for ‘Prove it on me Blues’
So how did audiences react? For context, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness was published in the same year, and was dubbed highly controversial, banned and destroyed. However, among African-American audiences, the lesbianism of the song was appreciated. As Sandra Lieb notes in Mother of Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey (1983), “songs of unconventional sexuality were not unusual in the blues and in live black entertainment.” As it happens, Prove It On Me Blues is not the only song with queer themes that Rainey made. Others include Sissy Man and Bull Dyker’s Dream.
Due to her marriage to a man it is still debated whether Rainey was lesbian or bisexual. In any case, her song Prove It On Me Blues shows her undeniable queerness, whatever she might have labeled herself as with today’s vocabulary. In short, Ma Rainey was a black queer woman who reinvented the blues with her musical talent and by being unapologetically herself.
Listen to Ma Rainey’s Prove It On Me Blues here: