A Bad Woman Feeling Good: Blues and the Women Who Sing Them

by Buzzy Jackson

The women who broke the rules, creating their own legacy of how to live and sing the blues. An exciting lineage of women singers―originating with Ma Rainey and her protégée Bessie Smith―shaped the blues, launching it as a powerful, expressive vehicle of emotional liberation. Along with their successors Billie Holiday, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, and Janis Joplin, they injected a dose of reality into the often trivial world of popular song, bringing their message of higher expectations and broader horizons to their audiences. These women passed their image, their rhythms, and their toughness on to the next generation of blues women, which has its contemporary incarnation in singers like Bonnie Raitt and Lucinda Williams (with whom the author has done an in-depth interview). Buzzy Jackson combines biography, an appreciation of music, and a sweeping view of American history to illuminate the pivotal role of blues women in a powerful musical tradition. Musician Thomas Dorsey said, "The blues is a good woman feeling bad." But these women show by their style that he had it backward: The blues is a bad woman feeling good. 70 illustrations

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, History

336 pages, Hardcover

Published February 17, 2005

About the author

Buzzy Jackson is an award-winning author, historian, and book critic for the Boston Globe and other publications. Buzzy grew up in the American West, moving between Truckee, California and Montana. She eventually headed for sea level, living in Perth, Australia, Los Angeles, Barcelona, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area, where she earned a Ph.D. in History at UC Berkeley.

Her work experience includes stints as a radio DJ, tennis hostess, NATO Headquarters tour guide, NBC Sports gopher, and college professor. She lives with her family and a freethinking dog named Ralph in Colorado.

Reviews

[Karyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the beginning were Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. The twentieth century had begun for American women and their passion and artistic truth telling has influenced everyone since.

“Moan them blues, holler them blues, let me convert your soul.” ~ Bessie Smith, “Preachin’ the Blues” (1927)

Buzzy Jackson won me over with this bridge: “On Friday, November 24, 1933, Bessie Smith took the subway downtown to the Columbia Records studios at 55 Fifth Avenue in New York City. It was to be her last recording session. The following Monday, a young singer made the same trip down from Harlem, found her way to the same studio and the same microphone, and made her very first recording. That young singer was Billie Holiday. Historical hindsight makes the question inevitable: was this the day the torch was passed? Four years later, Bessie Smith was dead; four years later, Billie Holiday was the new dark star of jazz singing.”

Etta James. Tina Turner. Aretha Franklin. Janis Joplin.

This is the story of a good woman feeling bad and a bad woman feeling good. “It seems simple to me, but for some people, I guess feeling takes courage,” Aretha Franklin said. “When I sing, I’m saying: ‘Dig it, go on and try. Ain’t nobody goin’ to make ya. Yeah, baby, dig me ~ dig me if you dare.”

[Katherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subtitle of this book is "Blues and the Women Who Sing Them." I think a better subtitle woudl be "The Influence of the Blues on American Women's Music." The focus is not so much on the blues form as it is on the emotional content of the music. Jackson treats a long line of singers from various backgrounds as a sort of genealogy of "blueswomen," each inheriting a legacy of attitude and style from her predecessors: Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, Janis Joplin, Lucinda Williams. There are others, and some of them seem a bit strange: Courtney Love, for example, is discussed in passing as someone who has a bit of the same attitude as the blueswomen although her style is different. Each chapter focuses on one or two singers, giving a biographical sketch and discussing several songs.

I picked this book up years ago, in the leisure-reading section at my university, and thought it was interesting enough to look for later. I was a little disappointed when I did sit down to read it, though. The author means well, and there's a lot of interesting information in here, but overall I thought she was trying to do too much. The author spends a lot of time discussing civil rights, but I don't think she gave enough time to the evolution of the blues as a genre. The book lacks momentum, and I found it very hard to read (I tried at least three separate times to get through it, and only made it through this time by virtue of sheer determination). I think it would have been stronger had Jackson kept herself to shorter biographical sketches and given a little more background on the American blues tradition.

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blues has its origins in American slave culture. When "christian" religion was 'given' to slaves many of the stories were put into songs and sung with strong emotions bringing Gospel music to American culture. Most of the lyrics of these songs had double meanings and lamented what the slaves did not have in this world. After the Civil War African-Americans had expected better treatment and opportunities then came about. The laments of what they did not have were put into songs song with emotion. The music evolved as African-American performers added their own styles with Ma Rainey being the first blueswoman. She and others sung about what was getting them down, often in their own lives, making them blue. As time went on the blues changed in musical style, but the subject was the same, it was what made people blue. Janis Joplin is quoted in the book as saying, "the black man's blues is based on the "have-not" --I got the blues because I don't have this... it's the want of something that gives you the blues. It's not what isn't, it's what you wish was that makes unhappiness." That pretty much sums up the reason for the blues.
An enjoyable read that will add to anyone's understanding of the Blues genre providing a history of its development through the women who sang/sing them.

[Ellen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Looked really good at first...but it read like a poorly written dissertation...

[Sasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Initially I thought that "A Bad Woman Feeling Good: Blues and the Women Who Sing Them" will be lightweight - judging the book by its gaudy cover, I expected something else completely but the writing style is actually quite serious and thoughtful. As expected, its analysis of women musicians who were pioneers one way or the other, starting with earliest Blues artists and what is the most surprising is that every now and than Buzzy Jackson comes with a interesting idea or a sentence where reader understands she really thought about this from various perspectives. I have read a tons of books about music and too often authors are either lost in a discography or blinded by the inconsequential gossip - not Jackson, who seriously approaches these lives with a respect and curiosity. Than again, it shows how far we traveled from the earlier music literature, where instead of slim fan booklet with nice pictures, nowadays we expect that author understand socio-political circumstances and atmosphere of the times.

To illustrate how books differs from so many similar titles, it does not start with obvious - first Blues recording, Mamie Smith and "Crazy Blues" that got the ball rolling but with an undocumented (and to my knowledge unrecorded) artist who worked even before that, a certain Mamie Desdoumes who played piano around the bars of infamous red-light district Storyville in New Orleans. Way, way before other musicians could have been recorded, Desdoumes worked her way trough bordellos and bars, banging the piano long in the night with her hands from which two fingers were cut off. Apparently she was very good musician and no less than Jelly Roll Morton spoke very highly of her. From here we move on to 1920s Blues Queens, than swinging 1930s and right now I am reading about long twilight of Lady Day, where Jackson understands perhaps why was this celebrated and successful artists turning to drugs - "it calmed her nerves before performances and allowed her an emotional distance that afforded some relief from the chaos of her insecure financial situation, odd hours and abusive relationships." Where so many other authors focused on Gardenias, this one actually understands why Lady chose this path.
-----------------
Unfortunately, author lost the steam somewhere halfway trough - by trying to shoehorn later artists in the same Blues format, the book just evaporates somewhere along the way. Even if later generations of women like Etta James, Tina Turner or Janis Joplin had some connection with Blues, going so far to insist that Joni Mitchell or Madonna are actually spiritual descendants of earlier Blues queens was just too ambitious - they had to cut their own path in a world, but so does everybody. First part of the book was excellent, it lost me later, unfortunately.

[Gilles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Le titre est trompeur. Plutôt qu'un livre essai sur les chanteuses de Blues (un genre que j'adore), ce que je m'attendais, il s'agit plutôt d'un livre sur quelques chanteuses qui chantent leurs états d'âme (qui ont les bleus (blues)) à travers leur musique. Le livre parle de quelques vraies chanteuses de Blues, dont Ma Rainey et Bessie Smith, mais aussi de Billie Holliday (jazz), Etta James et Aretha Franklin (Rhythm and Blues, Soul), etc. Heureusement, j'aime la plupart des chanteuses abordées.

Il s'agit en fait d'un projet de thèse de l'auteur qui se concentre sur des chanteuses qui ont fait leurs marques en mettant toute leur âme dans leur musique, avec un ton didactique qui est quelquefois déplaisant.

J'ai été passablement déçu au début. Je m'attendais à faire la découverte de nouvelles chanteuses de Blues, que je ne connaissais pas, et de leur musique. J'ai eu plutôt droit à des mini biographies, de chanteuses connues, qui couvrent leur vie personnelle en plus de leur musique.

Malgré tout, le livre est intéressant, mais ne m'a pas appris grand chose sur l'aspect le plus important pour moi, la musique. Par contre, il présente assez bien le contexte dans lequel elle ont fait leur carrière.

[Deborah Carter · Rating 3 out of 5]

With the subtitle of "Blues and the Women Who Sing Them", you wouldn't expect the author to start with Bessie Smith and end with the likes of Courtney Love and Lucinda Williams. It makes no sense to me. It's like a book on sushi, starting with the history of sushi and ending with the marketing of hamburgers. Could you go any further out into left field?
There are still great blues singers in existence and the blues - though not mainstream - is still quite strong in influence. There is still plenty to write about within the 'blues world' without venturing out too far to fill up book pages.
In any case, the book was a very superficial, vanilla-flavoured perception of the blues singers and the blues culture.
Perhaps it's suitable for someone who has absolutely no idea of this music genre, but it only brushes the surface with a feather.

[Nicola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excelente si te gusta la música (o no) y quieres conocer la historia de los Estados Unidos, de su población negra, la esclavitud, las mujeres de la música (desde el blues) en un contexto políticamente machista, blanco, dominante y violento en el que nacen las grandes voces femeninas del blues en ese contexto, que dan paso a una actitud rebelde y sometida hasta hoy.

Pero el título en castellano "Disfruta de mí si te atreves" no es muy acertado en relación a lo que revela el título en inglés, que es una cita que se encuentra dentro del propio libro y que tiene un sentido con la historia que narra, el cual (sentido e intención) la traductora , bastante acertada en toda la obra, tiene que haber captado. Por lo que no entiendo por qué no se hizo un intento de titularlo siguiendo el mismo sentido e intención, de la cita, de la frase, y de la autora.

[Chi Chi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Starts off all right, but really falls apart at the end. The women she chooses to cover at first make sense, then seem more and more arbitrarily chosen. Not reccomended for anyone with a working knowledge of female blues singers.

[Alegria · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting book with some great history about blues and jazz. Kind of loses it at the end with some of the musician choices, but still, very cool read.

[Sumayyah · Rating 3 out of 5]

No new information is contained in these pages. Also, by focusing on only a handful of Blues Women, this author leaves A LOT out. Feels incomplete.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice overview, making more sense at the beginning. It is what it is: a dissertation that got published. And I'd love to know what the author's real name is . . .