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MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., Volume 39, Number 4,

Winter 2014, pp. 69-91 (Article)

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The Blues Tribute Poem and the Legacies
of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith
Emily Rutter
Oberlin College

When asked to describe the Mother of the Blues in an interview, bandleader

“Georgia Tom” Dorsey recalled Gertrude “Ma” Rainey’s spectacular performance:
Ma was hidden in a big box-like affair built like a Victrola. . . . A girl came out and
put a big record on it. The band picked up “Moonshine Blues”; Ma sang a few bars
inside the big Victrola, then she opened the door and stepped out into the spotlight
with her glittering gown that weighed twenty pounds, wearing a necklace of $5, $10,
and $20 gold pieces. The house went wild. . . . Her diamonds flashed like sparks of
fire falling from her fingers. The gold piece necklace lay like golden armor covering
her chest. (Harris 93)
In the interview, Dorsey notes her remarkable ability to emotionally connect with
her audiences: “She possessed her listeners; they swayed, they rocked, they
moaned and groaned, as they felt the blues with her” (Harris 89). These divergent
aspects of Rainey’s legacy elucidate her artistic complexity and demonstrate how
she has remained a larger-than-life figure decades after her death.
Accordingly, in his eponymous poem “Ma Rainey” (1930), Sterling Brown
stages a Rainey performance and pays tribute to the cathartic relief and inspira-
tion she provides her African American fans and, by extension, Brown. “O Ma
Rainey, / Li’l an’ low,” Brown’s speaker cries out, “Sing us ’bout de hard luck /
Roun’ our do’” (III. 7-10). In fact, Brown’s collection Southern Road (1932),
in which “Ma Rainey” was reprinted, includes a number of memorable folk
personae—Big Boy, Bessie, Sister Lou, and Slim Greer, to name a few—but
Brown’s representation of Rainey remains distinct in blurring the line between
history and mythology, for the poem transforms Rainey the blues star into a sym-
bol of African American folk authenticity. Drawing poetic inspiration from an
African American blues woman rather than a classical goddess, Brown adapts
the Western muse trope to a blues context and, in the process, imbues a historical
figure with mythic qualities. Subsequently, Myron O’Higgins (Brown’s former
student) composed “Blues for Bessie” (1945), the first homage to Bessie Smith,
constructing her as a martyr for racial equality “wid de blood (Lawd) a-streamin’
down” (52), after recounting the tragic story of her death.1 Following Brown and

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 Rutter

O’Higgins, numerous writers have invoked blues men and women as their crea-
tive inspirations2 and similarly characterized them as symbols of folk authen-
ticity, tragedy, victimhood, beauty, heroism, or some combination of these.
Whereas biographers and documentarians strive to record objective narratives,
Brown, O’Higgins, and the many subsequent blues tribute poets are not beholden
to factual accuracy, and their poetic portraits reflect subjective interpretations
often informed more by the exigencies and discourses of the era than the innate
qualities of the muse.
As Rachel Blau DuPlessis maintains, muses “are projected inventions of the
imagination inside poems and have historical status as cultural tropes; they
can involve actual historical persons attempting to fill these support roles.
There is a two-way exchange between the projection and the actuality” (75).
Further, Gayle Levy observes that
poetic inspiration works solely on the author, whereas the muse, like the poem, is
actually formulated by both the reader and the poet working together. The muse
can be considered the product of a cooperative act between the poet and the reader
in the same way that one’s close reading of a given poem is the result of the poet’s
creative act and the reader’s analytical work. (21)
“Ma Rainey,” “Blues for Bessie,” and all tribute poems must be seen as texts
requiring the reader to temporarily invest in the imagined projections of the
muse, thereby reshaping the historical figure’s legacy to coincide with an individ-
ual poet’s perspective.
At the same time, these poems perform valuable sociocultural work by keeping
blues women such as Rainey and Smith alive in the minds and ears of generations
of readers and listeners. As T. Austin Graham argues, a musical text “asks its
readers to ‘do’ something beyond merely reading it, and in the process it chal-
lenges and transcends many of the Western world’s most persistent cultural divi-
sions, whether between author and audience, subject and object, material and
ideal, black and white, or male and female” (3). Musical texts such as “Ma
Rainey” and “Blues for Bessie” facilitate transformative sociocultural encounters
between authors, musicians, and readers. As Brown and O’Higgins link their
poetry and poetics to the blues styles of Rainey and Smith, respectively, they dem-
onstrate the music’s communal function as a creative form of resistance to Anglo-
American dominance, while also fortifying readers’ resolve against oppression via
the symbolic values that they invest in these icons. Brown, O’Higgins, and their
many successors play significant, and often unacknowledged, roles in memorial-
izing, vivifying, and reshaping cultural understandings of the blues musicians
they invoke as muses.
While there has been a relatively extensive amount of scholarship devoted to
classic blues women and the blues more generally, the relationship between
poetic representations and these women’s legacies has remained understudied.3

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Specifically, this essay explores how “Ma Rainey” and “Blues for Bessie” both
reproduce and depart from the personae that Rainey and Smith cultivated for
themselves as early African American women stars. Representing Rainey as a
symbol of folk authenticity and Smith as a martyr, these poets omit Rainey’s
and Smith’s provocative stage personae as well as their subversions of patriarchal
norms that limited women’s sexual expression to marriage and childbearing,4
qualities that feminist poets and critics later showcase. Brown and O’Higgins
emphasize aspects of these women’s legacies to effectively convey their own con-
cerns: institutionalized racism and racial uplift and the sociocultural and artistic
value of the blues—a concern that is of particular significance to Brown’s broader
literary and sociopolitical agenda.
Of course, it is not the responsibility of tribute poets to comprehensively or
even accurately represent the figures they invoke as muses, and the implicit
(and often explicit) protest against white oppression underwriting these poems
compels writers to efface details of their muses’ lived experiences otherwise
obscuring this aim. Rather than reading blues tributes as a form of biography,
it is necessary to critically examine the connections between Brown’s and
O’Higgins’s ideological and aesthetic outlooks and their emphases and elisions
on the page, as well as the impact of these choices on readers’ interpretations
of Rainey’s and Smith’s legacies. Brown and O’Higgins originated what has
become a distinct and influential subgenre of American poetry combining the
mythic and the historical, the oral blues tradition and the written poetic one,
and enjoining readers to similarly imagine, listen, and ultimately internalize
the images and narratives that tribute poets advance. Thus, the precedent that
“Ma Rainey” and “Blues for Bessie” set for the numerous twentieth- and
twenty-first-century tributes dedicated to famous African American blues, jazz,
and musicians of all genres demands closer consideration.

“She jes’ catch hold of us, somekindaway”

Before turning to the “Ma Rainey” text, it is useful to examine the theoretical per-
spective that informed Brown’s portrait of Rainey. As a critic, poet, and Howard
University professor, Brown dedicated his career to fostering an African
American literature capable of instilling racial pride and resisting endemic forms
of racism. Unlike many of his New Negro peers, Brown drew his inspiration from
what he perceived as the more authentic oral traditions indigenous to the rural
black South, as his title Southern Road suggests. Seeking to preserve Southern folk
traditions and make them the foundation of his own artistic vision, Brown earned
the respect of many African American artists and intellectuals for his ability to
realistically render vernacular speech, thus avoiding the pitfalls of dialect litera-
ture with its long tradition of caricature and stereotype. For example, in the intro-
duction to Southern Road, James Weldon Johnson, who only a year prior to the
71
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publication of Brown’s volume claimed that the era of African American dialect
poetry was over,5 lauded Brown for “adopting as his medium the common, racy,
living speech of the Negro in certain phases of real life,” thereby countering
“conventionalized dialect, with its minstrel traditions of Negro life (traditions that
had but slight relation, often no relation at all, to actual life)” (xxxvi). Although
Brown had previously written poetry using Euro-American forms, which appear
in Southern Road’s aptly titled final section “Vestiges,” his decision to invest pri-
marily in the blues and the African American vernacular English spoken by the
men and women who sang them makes an implicit political statement about the
art and humanity of the African American masses during a time characterized by
the unflinching persistence of institutionalized racism.
In fact, in “The Blues as Folk Poetry,” an essay published alongside “Ma
Rainey” in the 1930 edition of the journal Folk-Say, Brown announces his concern
that the commercialization of the blues would dilute the music’s authenticity:
“The Blues have deservedly come into their own, and, unfortunately for the lover
of folk art, into something more than their own” (540). Brown is especially trou-
bled by changes in the content of the blues:
The poetry of the Blues deserves close attention. Crudities, incongruities, of course,
there are in abundance—annoying changes of mood from tragedy to cheap farce.
This seems to be entering more recently, a sophisticated smut, not the earlier breadth
of Rabelais, but the snickering of the brothel. Blues are becoming cabaret appetizers.
Perhaps the American public, both Negro and white, prefers this to the simpler, more
poetic phrasing of burdened folk. But at their most genuine they are accurate, imag-
inative transcripts of folk experience, with flashes of excellent poetry. (551)
Warning of the “cheap farce” and the influence of “brothel” vulgarities, Brown
privileges an unadulterated blues uncorrupted by the “crudities” of “cabaret” cul-
ture. Phillip M. Richards observes that “Brown’s literary ethos had a deeply
romantic aspect, which attacked the estranging quality of modern life and pro-
moted a transcendent ethos” (84). Brown’s nostalgia for African American folk
culture is particularly evident in his anxiety about the urbanization of the blues
and the vulgarity that he believes has been ushered in as a result. Yet his anxiety
about the vulgarization of blues lyrics is somewhat incongruous with the history
he evokes. From the beginning of the blues tradition, blues men and later women
such as Rainey and Smith spoke of sex in frank terms and about heterosexual and
homosexual liaisons that may not have been consummated in brothels but cer-
tainly did not all involve husband and wife.6
In an interview in 1998 with Charles Rowell, Brown reiterated the importance
of maintaining the purity of the blues: “I think the blues should be kept authentic.
And then again the qualities of the blues are so strong and distinctive that it’s easy
to recognize the fake blues” (789). Brown’s decades-long interest in distinguish-
ing between genuine and “fake” blues was predicated on his desire to preserve the
collective spirit of resistance underwriting the music while simultaneously
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demonstrating the beauty and sophistication of African American folk art as a

counter narrative to claims of Anglo-American superiority, dual aims necessary
to consider when examining the implications of poems like “Ma Rainey.” For
instance, as Brown constructs Rainey’s image and narrative on the printed page,
we might ask the following questions: What does he privilege and elide in regard
to Rainey’s persona and her “authentic” blues style? What kind of precedent does
Brown set for O’Higgins and the many blues tributes that will follow?
Although Rainey was one of the first African American woman celebrities
and enjoyed remarkable commercial success during the 1920s as Paramount
Records’s “most-recorded female star” (Lieb 48), Brown’s poem showcases the
mesmerizing sway she holds over her African American audiences in the rural
South. He begins the poem with the speaker’s description of the long distances
her fans travel to see Rainey perform:
When Ma Rainey
Comes to town,
Folks from anyplace
Miles aroun’,
From Cape Girardeau
Poplar Bluff,
Flocks in to hear
Ma do her stuff . . . (I. 1-8)
Employing African American vernacular English, Brown situates his poem in
Rainey’s blues oeuvre. However, as Joanne V. Gabbin argues, “Ma Rainey” is
not strictly a blues poem but a fusion of the blues and ballad form, which “com-
bines the narrative framework of the ballad and the ethos of the blues.” Gabbin
observes that Brown’s allusion to the ballad works to reinforce his characteriza-
tion of Rainey as a folk hero, singing the blues but occupying mythic stature like
the legendary figures of well-known ballads such as “Casey Jones,” “John Henry,”
or “Stagolee” (159).
Divided into four parts, the poem’s movement reflects the ballad’s narrative
structure as it progresses from the speaker’s description of the audience’s arrival,
to the speaker’s own homage to Rainey, to Rainey’s rendition of “Backwater
Blues” (a song Bessie Smith recorded but Rainey did not), and finally to the audi-
ence’s tearful response. Through this narrative framework that calls upon multi-
ple speakers, Brown elucidates the profound effect of Rainey’s performance on
her audience as they are transformed from an initially heterogeneous group—
“some jokers keep deir laughs a-goin’,” whereas “some folks sits dere waitin’
wid deir aches an’ miseries” (II. 5-6)—to a unified collective by the poem’s
end. Moreover, since everyone in the poem speaks the same language, there is
no hierarchy of linguistic registers potentially degrading the audience members’
vernacular. Thus, while Rainey is ostensibly the subject of the poem, Brown
focuses primarily on the audience, particularly Rainey’s male fans, and her
73
 Rutter

identity is determined almost entirely by the qualities that they, via Brown, invest
in her.
Accordingly, Brown highlights the audience members’ paradoxical feelings of
grief and uplift as Rainey’s lyrics bear witness to their hardships while simulta-
neously affirming their humanity. Clyde Woods describes this communal func-
tion of the blues as a distinct epistemology: “The blues is a vision of a society
that is dialectically polyrhythmic, a democracy where both cooperation and indi-
vidual expression thrive. This philosophy is expressed in, through, and beyond
the music” (288). In part three, the speaker’s aforementioned plea to Rainey
makes it clear that she possesses this blues spirit facilitating personal and collec-
tive catharsis:
O Ma Rainey,
Sing yo’ song;
Now you’s back
Whah you belong
Git way inside us,
Keep us strong. . . . (III. 1-6)
Beginning with an apostrophe to Rainey, the speaker initially elevates her to
mythic heights but then firmly grounds her presence in the material world of
the rural South, telling Rainey this is “Whah you belong” and asserting she is
one of them. The speaker places the community members’ trust in her to pene-
trate their deepest feelings (“Git way inside us”), commiserate with their hard-
ships, and ultimately fortify their resolve. In the process, Brown enjoins
readers to listen not only to Rainey but also to her audience, characterizing
her performance as a group experience and distinguishing her from other singers
and musicians whose fame and glamour may distance them from their fans.
Though “Ma Rainey” does not replicate a blues song structure as do many
other poems in Southern Road, Brown formally alludes to several techniques
Rainey and other blues men and women commonly employ. Specifically, the
poem’s final section begins with a two-line stanza in AA rhyme, reaffirming
the community’s admiration of Rainey through vernacular phrasing frequently
quoted by critics in their descriptions of her legacy: “I talked to a fellow, an’
the fellow say, / ‘She jes’ catch hold of us, somekindaway’” (IV. 1-2).7
Employing the caesura in the stanza’s first line, Brown similarly gestures toward
the singing of a standard blues song in which the beat would serve as the natural
pause between two lyrical phrases, such as the following line from Rainey’s “Don’t
Fish in My Sea”: “Don’t like my ocean, don’t fish in my sea.” Next, the speaker
recounts hearing Rainey sing “Backwater Blues one day” (IV. 3), the words of
which the poem incorporates:
‘It rained fo’ days an’ de skies was dark as night,
Trouble taken place in de lowlands at night.

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 The Blues Tribute Poem

‘Thundered an’ lightened an’ the storm begins to roll

Thousan’s of people ain’t got no place to go.
‘Den I went an’ stood upon some high ‘ol lonesome hill,
An’ looked down on the place where I used to live.’ (IV. 4-9)
Transcribing these lyrics, Brown demonstrates the similarity between the poem’s
language and delivery and Rainey’s song. He also allows the song to stand on its
own terms and voice the suffering and injustices of black life in the Jim Crow
South. Though the song refers to a natural disaster,8 it exposes the racism that
left thousands of African Americans stranded while their white counterparts were
rescued from the flooded riverbanks.
Yet as Tony Bolden points out, Brown “does not so much incorporate Smith’s
song [“Backwater Blues”] as riff on it,” altering slightly the verb tense, the stanza
structure, and the opening word in the first two lines (89). Signifyin(g) on Rainey,
and inadvertently Smith, who made this song famous, Brown inserts himself into
a community of blues musicians who, according to Angela Y. Davis, considered
blues songs to be the “collective property of the black community.” Davis further
contends that “A blues sung by one person and heard, remembered, revised, and
resung by another belonged as much to the second performer as to the first”
(136). Affirming this communal approach to the music, Brown’s revised version
of “Backwater Blues” testifies to his self-reflexive desire for “Ma Rainey” to be
part of this socially conscious blues tradition.
Moreover, while the audience’s response is not structurally built into blues
songs, as Ted Gioia notes, the call-and-response trope, with its origins in commu-
nal African music, did not disappear with the blues. Rather, the singer performs
both the call and the response through the repetition of the first line and, in effect,
creates “a communal style of singing . . . in the expression of a single person”
(14). Through the interaction between the speaker and the song, Brown’s struc-
ture creates this kind of implicit call-and-response that is further developed as the
poem highlights the audience’s emotional reaction to Rainey’s performance, by
way of a “fellow” with whom the speaker interacts:
“An’ den de folks, dey natchally bowed dey heads an’ cried,
Bowed dey heavy heads, shet dey moufs up tight an’ cried,
An’ Ma lef’ de stage, an’ followed some de folks outside.”
Dere wasn’t much more de fellow say:
She jes’ gits hold of us dataway. (IV. 10-14)
Brown underscores the collective transformation from heartbreak to resolve that
Rainey’s blues engenders, and although the audience is moved to tears, Rainey
has established a strong sense of camaraderie between performer and audience
that is solidified as she physically joins her fans by the end of the poem. These
final lines also gesture toward the blues stanza structure, as Brown “worries”9
75
 Rutter

the line—“bowed dey heads” becomes “bowed dey heavy heads”—and employs
the prototypical AAB blues rhyme scheme. Thus, although not technically a blues
song, Brown’s poem operates in a blues mode anchored in the genre’s ethos
and common tropes, establishing a tribute form inspired by the musical styles
of Rainey and other blues women and men without being indebted to a song
structure.
In a taped interview with the blues scholar Paul Oliver, Brown described meet-
ing Rainey and the indelible impression she made on her Southern audiences,
claiming that she “wouldn’t have to sing any words; she would moan, and the
audience would moan with her.” Further, “Ma really knew these people; she
was a person of the folk; she was very simple and direct” (qtd. in Stewart-
Baxter 42). Brown implies that, unlike most performers, Rainey’s “simple and
direct” stage persona was a true extension of herself, and “Ma Rainey” effectively
conveys this unvarnished quality that he admires. However, Brown also repre-
sents Rainey not as the spectacular performer with diamonds and “glittering
gown” that Dorsey described, but rather as a symbol of the “earthy and genuine”
folk art that Brown champions in “The Blues as Folk Poetry” (540). For instance,
his selection of “Backwater Blues,” a less popular, never recorded song, reflects
Brown’s interest in emphasizing both Rainey’s Georgia connection to her rural
African American fans and the sociopolitical function of the blues as an essential
vehicle for protesting white supremacy, interests that James Smethurst notes led
Brown to “underplay Rainey’s considerable connection to jazz” (77). Nicole
Furlonge appropriately asserts that “Brown chooses to focus on a piece of history
and of Rainey’s career that is readily recognizable by the folk” (978).
Yet it is also important to note aspects of her persona that are conspicuously
absent or altered because of Brown’s choices, particularly because his symbolic
portrait of Rainey has shaped generations of readers’ understandings of her leg-
acy and influenced other poets’ representations of blues women. In Mother of the
Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey (1981), Sandra Lieb states that “For the most part,
Ma Rainey’s songs omit direct mention of race discrimination or white oppres-
sion, and they ignore lynchings and riots,” but her lyrics do convey “some essen-
tial truth about the black experience in this country: poverty, suffering,
heartbreak, and pain, as well as humor, fortitude, strength, and endurance.”
Lieb insists that “Her great theme is the intense sexual love between men and
women,” and, “most strikingly, she sings of mature, highly sexual women”
(82). Despite the lack of overtly political content, Rainey’s songs communicated
the resilient “laughing to keep from crying” ethos of the blues, providing cathartic
relief from the pain of institutionalized racism, all of which Brown movingly ren-
ders on the page. At the same time, Rainey’s assertions of women’s agency and
sexual desires, including the low-brow subjects that Brown disparaged in “The
Blues as Folk Poetry,” were an essential part of her repertoire and the story of
her fame that Brown’s portrait excludes.
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In contrast to Brown’s representation, Memphis Minnie’s musical tribute to

Rainey, also titled “Ma Rainey,” links her legacy with “Bo-Weevil Blues,” a song
that addresses both socioeconomic circumstances (the boll weevil infestation that
wreaked havoc on southern crops during the early twentieth century) and sexual
frustrations. Rainey opens, “Hey, bo-weevil, don’t sing them blues no more / Hey,
bo-weevil, don’t sing them blues no more / Bo-weevils here, bo-weevils every-
where you go.” In the third verse, she shifts from this broader context to a more
individualized fear of being abused by her lover: “I don’t want no man to put no
sugar in my tea / I don’t want no man to put no sugar in my tea / Some of ’em evil,
I’m ’fraid he might poisin me.”10 Correspondingly, in “Ma Rainey,” Minnie sings,
“When she [Rainey] made Bo-Weevil Blues, I was living way down the line /
When she made Bo-Weevil Blues, I was living way down the line / Every time
I hear that record I just couldn’t keep from crying.” Minnie concludes, “People
it sure look lonesome since Ma Rainey been gone / People it sure look lonesome
since Ma Rainey been gone / But she left little Minnie to carry the good works on.”
Associating Rainey with “Bo-Weevil Blues,” a song Rainey composed and
recorded, Minnie honors her as a groundbreaking artist who voiced collective
African American struggles as well as those particular to women, declaring that
now she will “carry the[se] good works on.” As Brown’s and Minnie’s “Ma
Rainey” make clear, allusions to particular songs in Rainey’s oeuvre (and, in
Brown’s case, Smith’s) are not ideologically innocent; rather, they are directly
linked to the writer’s own sociopolitical vantage point, a connection that is also
evident in O’Higgins’s allusion to “Backwater Blues” in “Blues for Bessie.” Thus,
whereas Steven B. Shively contends that “Brown’s manipulations [associating
“Backwater Blues” with Rainey, not Smith] allow his poem to transcend history
and biography to achieve a high degree of universality” (162), I consider this
“manipulation” to be an example of Brown’s intervening in, not transcending
of, Rainey’s legacy, whereby she becomes a more poignant symbol of folk resis-
tance to racial inequities.
Portraying Rainey’s performance as a natural expression of her rural African
American worldview, Brown then elides Rainey’s self-conscious efforts to achieve
fame. Elijah Wald observes that “to understand the appeal of artists like Smith
and Rainey it is important to remember that they were practiced professionals
with many years of stage experience, and that they presented themselves not
as pure, down-home blueswomen, but as successful stars” (24). However,
Brown’s poem mostly excludes Rainey’s visual expressions of empowerment,
mentioning her physical appearance in only two phrases. In part two, he writes
of the gold teeth that have been captured in the most widely circulated picture of
Rainey11: “Ma comes out before dem, a-smilin’ gold-toofed smiles” (II. 7). Next,
in part three, the speaker calls out to Rainey, “O Ma Rainey / Li’l an’ low” (III. 7-
8). Short and unintimidating, there is seemingly no distance between Rainey and
her audience. She is “a-smilin’,” “li’l and low,” good-humored and approachable,
77
 Rutter

lacking the pretension that other performers might exude. Absent from Brown’s
portrait are the necklace of gold coins and her greasepaint that apparently made
her appear “almost gold-colored under the amber stage lights” (Lieb 8). On the
one hand, Rainey’s striking appearance advertised her financial success and inde-
pendence, as indicated most obviously by the flickering gold coins; on the other
hand, Rainey’s grease-painted skin exemplified her capitulation to the widespread
belief among the majority of whites and blacks during the early twentieth century
that dark skin was less attractive. Subverting race and gender hierarchies by don-
ning symbols of her socioeconomic achievements while also choosing to rather
“inauthentically” adhere to dominant social conventions regarding skin tone,
Rainey cultivated a provocative stage persona that Brown elected to omit from
his poetic portrait.
Further, whereas biographers highlight Rainey’s sensuality as a defining fea-
ture of her persona on and off stage,12 Brown essentially represents her as asex-
ual. Although she is gazed upon by men—the speaker either genders the audience
as male in his references to the “fellow” (IV. 13) or simply gender-neutral as
“folks” (IV. 10)—she is not physically gendered, and besides being described
as “Li’l and low” (III. 8), there is no mention of her body at all. Nor is there
anything particularly feminine about Rainey besides the maternal care she seems
to offer her audience. In fact, Brown carefully avoids any description that could be
associated with the historical stereotype of black women as sexually wanton.13
Arguably, his lack of attention to Rainey’s physicality serves as an implicit protest
against the denigrating discourses circulating about African Americans during
the early twentieth century, in which the focus was primarily on their bodies.
Brown was more interested in invoking the aspects of Rainey’s persona represent-
ing the aesthetic and sociopolitical value of African American folk art than the
complexities and even paradoxes of the image she self-fashioned in order to
become professionally successful in the racist and sexist era in which she lived.
Thus, Brown celebrates her sociocultural importance in the same way that he
champions the blues: not for its national popularity but as the “poetic phrasing
of burdened folk” (“Blues” 551).
However, because Rainey is a historical figure and not an imagined persona,
the symbolic values that Brown invests in her and the lived experiences that he
excludes impact cultural understandings of Rainey’s legacy. “Ma Rainey” is
widely anthologized, and, as a cursory look at the accounts of her life and art will
attest,14 the poem has become an integral part of Rainey’s posthumous narrative.
Acknowledging this trend, Angela Y. Davis justifies her own reference: “Every
study of Gertrude Rainey cites Sterling Brown’s powerful poem, ‘Ma Rainey.’
I, too, want to quote it here because it so successfully conveys the southern flavor
of her appeal” (139). Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s Modernism and the Harlem
Renaissance (1987) features a picture of Rainey on the cover, but Baker limits
his discussion of Rainey to a four-page analysis of Brown’s poem (92-95).
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Certainly there is no denying the poetic power of “Ma Rainey,” especially in terms
of Brown’s compelling renderings of the vernacular and blues. Brown’s homage is
a moving portrait honoring many of Rainey’s best qualities, such as her humility,
strength, and ability to relate to and uplift blacks during a time of institutionalized
racism. Nevertheless, it is necessary to recognize that, while the enduring impor-
tance of “Ma Rainey” is a testament to Brown’s abilities as a poet and Rainey’s
symbolic importance as a folk matriarch, the poem is not a comprehensive por-
trait, nor was it necessarily meant to be.
Tellingly, in his introduction to the later 1974 edition of Southern Road,
Sterling Stuckey writes that Brown “has demonstrated, as well as any artist known
to this writer, how music and myth function in the lives of ordinary people”
(xxvii). Brown understood the mythology Rainey had already created among
her fans through decades of tent performances and many recordings. “Ma
Rainey” evidences his interest in shaping his own version of this mythology
and spreading it beyond the masses to a broad audience of readers and, ulti-
mately, to future generations first introduced to Rainey through his poem.
Brown privileges the parts of her performance he finds most supportive of his
literary and sociopolitical agenda and dispenses with the elements he may have
considered too closely associated with either minstrel shows or the vulgar aspects
that he warns against in “The Blues as Folk Poetry.” In the process, Brown sets a
precedent for later blues tributes, including O’Higgins’s “Blues for Bessie,” in
which blues men and women are represented symbolically and mythically rather
than as multidimensional historical figures.

“dey lef’ po’ Bessie dyin’”

First published in the 1945 edition of the Parisian journal Portfolio,15 “Blues for
Bessie” was later reprinted in Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps’s The Poetry
of the Negro, 1746-1949 (1951) and was critically lauded by Alain Locke as “a real
folk poem” (12) and by Paul Oliver for making “both a political and poetic point”
(11). In many respects, “Blues for Bessie” reiterates the formal and thematic
tenets of Brown’s “Ma Rainey” and elucidates the influence of this landmark
poem on Brown’s students and subsequent generations of African American
poets. On the other hand, though O’Higgins’s literary and sociopolitical agenda
is not nearly as well-documented as Brown’s, “Blues for Bessie” evinces
O’Higgins’s desire to pen a blues tribute advancing his own perspectives and con-
cerns, specifically about the second-class citizenship that African Americans con-
tinued to endure mid-century and the role of the blues in protesting this injustice.
For instance, O’Higgins follows Brown in subverting Anglo-American literary
conventions and demonstrating the lyrical poignancy of the blues and African
American vernacular English in which they are typically sung; yet, “Blues for
Bessie” is more structurally indebted to the blues than “Ma Rainey” because
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O’Higgins employs a lone (presumably male) speaker rather than the multiple
speakers and sections that comprise “Ma Rainey.” O’Higgins also utilizes a
song-like refrain—“Let de peoples know / what dey did in dat Southern
Town” (3-4)—that compels his audience not only to sympathize with his mes-
sage but also to join him in delivering it.
However, as with Brown’s symbolic portrait of Rainey, O’Higgins’s “Blues for
Bessie” is not so much about Smith the historical figure as it is about what she
signifies, in this case, a tragic martyr for racial equality. The poem begins with
an epigraph that attributes Smith’s death to a white hospital in Mississippi refus-
ing her treatment after a car accident: “Bessie Smith, the greatest of the early blues
singers, died violently after an auto accident while on a theatrical tour of the South
in 1937. The newspapers reported that she bled to death when the only hospital in
the vicinity refused her emergency medical attention because she was a Negro
woman.” As Chris Albertson proves in his biography Bessie (2003), Smith was
never taken to a white hospital, and she passed away at the local African
American hospital several hours after the accident occurred (267). Given the
widespread nature of the rumors of racism surrounding Smith’s death and the
many racially motivated fatalities that did occur, O’Higgins was most likely
unaware that the story he recounted was a myth.
Nevertheless, this story exemplified in profound terms the consequences of
institutionalized racism. As with Brown’s allusion to the abject living conditions
of Southern African Americans by way of “Backwater Blues,” Smith’s untimely
death served as a useful rallying point for O’Higgins’s own blues protest against
Jim Crow in “Blues for Bessie”:
Let de peoples know (unnh)
what dey did in dat Southern Town
Let de peoples know
what dey did in dat Southern Town
Well, dey lef’ po’ Bessie dyin’
wid de blood (Lawd) a-streamin’ down
Bessie lef’ Chicago
in a bran’ new Cadillac;
didn’t take no suitcase
but she wore her mournin’ black (unnh)
Bessie, Bessie,
she wore her mournin’ black
She went ridin’ down to Dixie (Lawd)
an’ dey shipped her body back (1-14)
Writing in vernacular and worrying and repeating particular lines and phrases,
O’Higgins’s poem is clearly modeled on the blues form. O’Higgins also indicates
his studied appreciation of Brown’s rendering of blues and work songs
in Southern Road, especially the collection’s title poem, in which the speaker,
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a man on a chain gang, renders the tradition of collective call-and-response

by spontaneously responding to his own lines. He first calls out, “Swing dat ham-
mer—hunh— (1), then later “White man tells me—hunh—” (31), and, in the
final stanza, “Chain gang nevah—hunh—” (37). Similarly, parenthetical phrases
in O’Higgins’s “Blues for Bessie” document the sociopolitical and communal
function of the blues as a form of resistance to white dominance and self-reflex-
ively situate the poem in this mode; although Smith “won’t sing de blues no mo’”
(38), O’Higgins will continue to bear witness to the fatal injustice she endured.
Employing the word Dixie, O’Higgins affirms that, despite the nearly three-
quarters of a century that separated the Civil War and Smith’s southern tour,
an Old South ideology still prevails below the Mason-Dixon line. The hortatory
chant “let de peoples know” underscores the imperative of spreading the word
that Smith “went ridin’ down to Dixie (Lawd) / an’ dey shipped her body back”
(13-14). In fact, where the polyvocality of “Ma Rainey” structurally instantiates
the collective catharsis that Rainey’s performance inspires, O’Higgins’s lone
speaker indicates the potential fragmentation of the black community and the
pressing need for readers and listeners to respond to O’Higgins’s call. Smith
and the story of her death become powerful vehicles through which O’Higgins
not only exposes but also enjoins readers to protest the dehumanizing racism
endemic to the Jim Crow South.
At the same time, other than noting that she rode in a Cadillac south from
Chicago to perform, O’Higgins’s portrait excludes any physical details about
Smith, the dynamic and glamorous star, that made her death notable in the first
place. As Hazel Carby observes, classic blues women
were gorgeous and their physical presence elevated them to being referred to as
Goddesses, as the high priestesses of the blues, or like Bessie Smith, as the
Empress of the blues. Their physical presence was a crucial aspect of their power;
the visual display of spangled dresses, of furs, of gold teeth, of diamonds, of all the
sumptuous and desirable aspects of their body reclaimed female sexuality from
being an objectification of male desire to a representation of female desire. (239)
Similar to Rainey’s stage persona, the characteristically extravagant and sensual
image Smith projected advertised both her financial independence and her liber-
ated views toward sexuality and monogamy, striking qualities in an early twen-
tieth-century woman. Yet, as Ann Ducille cautions, “Under what might be called
the cult of true primitivism, sex—the quintessential subject matter of the blues—
was precisely what hot-blooded African women were assumed to have always in
mind and body” (427). Just as Brown elided much about Rainey’s appearance,
perhaps strategically resisting these caricatures of the hypersexualized black
woman, O’Higgins’s decision to efface Smith’s physicality may have been moti-
vated by a desire to subvert negative stereotypes. As a result, the only visual image
that readers are left with is that Smith “wore her mournin’ black” (12).

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Of course, both the funeral attire and images of an impending storm fore-
shadow Smith’s death and further solidify the poem’s place within her blues tra-
dition, especially the song “Backwater Blues”:
Lawd, wasn’t it a turr’ble
when dat rain come down
Yes, wasn’t it a turr’ble
when de rain come down
An’ ol’ Death caught po’ Bessie
Down in ’at Jim Crow town
Well, de thunder rolled
an’ de lightnin’ broke de sky
Lawd, de thunder rolled
an’ de lightnin’ broke de sky
An’ you could hear po’ Bessie moanin’,
“Great Gawd, please doan lemme die!” (15-26)
Alluding to the torrential downpours documented in “Backwater Blues,”
O’Higgins limns a similar scene in which Smith and her “bran’ new Cadillac”
are deluged as “dat rain came down” and “de thunder rolled / an’ de lightnin’
broke de sky.” Not unlike Brown’s incorporation of the same song, O’Higgins
strategically references “Backwater Blues” in order to expose how the conse-
quences of a natural disaster (a thunderstorm) are compounded by America’s
racial caste system. However, where Brown includes the song’s image of survival
on “some high ol’ lonesome hill” (IV. 8) and, via Rainey, imparts the strength to
collectively persevere, O’Higgins’s allusion further reinforces Smith’s weakness
and vulnerability, for no one is there to rescue her from the storm or accident
that ensues.
When Smith is granted a voice, it is not to lift the community’s spirits, as
Rainey does, but to cry out in vain for mercy:
She holler, “Lawd, please help me!”,
but He never heerd a word she say
Holler, “Please, somebody help me!”,
but dey never heerd a word she say
Frien’, when yo’ luck run out in Dixie,
well, it doan do no good to pray
Well, dey give po’ Bessie
to de undertaker man;
ol’ Death an’ Jim Crow (Lawd)
done de job, hand in han’
Well, Bessie, Bessie,
she won’t sing de blues no mo’
Cause dey let her go down bloody (Lawd)
trav’lin’ from door to do’ (27-40)

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Emphasizing her lack of agency in this hostile environment, Smith’s pitiful cries
go unanswered by both God and humanity as she travels “from door to do,’” des-
perately seeking treatment for her wounds. Transforming Smith into “po’ Bessie,”
O’Higgins thus omits the notoriously bold and defiant persona that made Smith
such a beloved figure during her lifetime. For instance, when Ku Klux Klan mem-
bers attempted to disrupt one of her tent performances in Concord, NC, Smith is
reported to have successfully rebuffed them by shouting angrily, “What the fuck
you think you’re doin’? I’ll get the whole damn tent out here if I have to. You just
pick up them sheets and run!” (Albertson 157). As Buzzy Jackson further notes,
Smith “was more than merely famous, she was a living symbol of personal free-
dom: she did what she liked; she spoke her mind, no matter how outrageous her
opinion; she flouted bourgeois norms and indulged in alcohol, drugs, and recre-
ational sex” (68). Akin to Brown’s portrait of Rainey, O’Higgins excludes these
subversive behaviors to more effectively render Smith not as a folk hero but as
a helpless casualty of Jim Crow.
In fact, although Smith died almost a decade before O’Higgins published
“Blues for Bessie,” he suggests that she remains a powerful martyr figure because
the racial persecution that she and others experienced continues unabated.
Whereas Brown’s poem concludes by reiterating the camaraderie and emotional
uplift that Rainey’s performance provides her rural black fans (“She jes’ gits hold
of us dataway” [IV. 14]), O’Higgins’s mournful final couplet—“Well, dey lef’ po’
Bessie dyin’ / wid de blood (Lawd) a-streamin’ down” (51-52)—offers no such
relief. As such, “Blues for Bessie” becomes both a warning to the African
American community about the dangers of being non-white in the Jim Crow
South, where prayer will “do no good” (32), and a blues call for solidarity against
racial segregation and discrimination. As a recent veteran, O’Higgins had person-
ally experienced the painful contradiction of defending freedoms he was himself
denied within the segregated US Army,16 what Eric Lott describes as “its own the-
atre of combat” (707). Indeed, O’Higgins’s strategic departures from Brown indi-
cate not only his subjective take on the blues tribute poem but also the passage of
time from the New Negro to the World War II era, when American claims of
moral superiority in its fight against the Nazis were systematically undermined
by the treatment of African Americans at home. Striking a chord of urgency,
“Blues for Bessie” thus affirms that the institutionalized oppression that “Ma
Rainey” bears witness to has still not been addressed.
Although “Blues for Bessie” has not intervened in Smith’s posthumous leg-
acy as profoundly as “Ma Rainey” has in Rainey’s, the image and narrative
O’Higgins advances has shaped sociocultural understandings of Smith’s legacy
in significant ways. Recently, the poet and critic Kevin Young included “Blues
for Bessie” as one of the seven poems in the “Finale (For Bessie Smith)” sec-
tion of his anthology Blues Poems (2003) that, as part of the Everyman’s
Library Pocket Poets series, is available and accessible to a general readership
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with possibly little prior knowledge about Smith’s biography or music before
reading O’Higgins’s poem.17 Moreover, as the aforementioned accolades by
Locke and Oliver suggest, since its appearance in Hughes and Bontemps’s
The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949, the poem has been widely recognized
for its formal excellence and political acumen, but no attention has been paid
to the aspects of Smith’s persona that O’Higgins emphasizes and elides or to
the ideological and aesthetic perspectives underwriting these choices. For
example, in 1996, the dramatic production Who Am I? included a reading
of “Blues for Bessie,” and a review in The Seattle Times noted that the poem
both “lament[ed] legendary blues singer Bessie Smith’s bleeding to death after
being denied aid at a ‘white-only’ hospital” and testified to “a collective
strength and spirit borne of pain and discrimination” (Orr). As this review
makes clear, more than fifty years after the publication of “Blues for
Bessie,” the poem’s representation of Smith as a tragic victim was still being
interpreted in historical rather than symbolic terms.
Acknowledging the inherently fictional nature of “Blues for Bessie” and “Ma
Rainey” does not negate the sociocultural work these poems perform in maintain-
ing the posthumous memory of Rainey and Smith for generations of readers (and
potential listeners). Moreover, adeptly rendering blues tropes on the printed page,
Brown’s and O’Higgins’s poems draw needed attention to the music’s ritualistic
function as a repository of African American cultural and communal knowledge.
At the same time, these poets’ focus on Rainey’s and Smith’s symbolic impor-
tance in the struggle to end discrimination and segregation and, particularly
for Brown, to demonstrate the sociopolitical and artistic value of African
American folk art led them to exclude the aspects of these icons’ personae that
did not support their agendas. In so doing, they set a precedent for Rainey,
Smith, and other blues icons to be treated as mutable figures whose symbolic
value changes over time and who are rendered differently depending on the writer
and the outlook that he or she brings to bear on the poem.
For example, Robert Hayden’s “Homage to the Empress of the Blues” (1949)
invokes Smith not as a victim of Jim Crow but as an inspiring and beautiful diver-
sion (“a favorite scenic view” [6]) from the pain and violence of poverty engulfing
African American communities. In fact, O’Higgins and Hayden published a col-
laborative collection of their poetry, The Lion and the Archer: Poems (1948), in
which “Homage to the Empress of the Blues” first appears. Arguably, Hayden’s
“Homage” was signifyin(g) on the portrait of tragedy in “Blues for Bessie” and
emphasizing instead the solace that Smith provided as Hayden grappled with
“both inner and external realities” (“The Poet” 129). Alternatively, Al Young’s
“A Dance for Ma Rainey” (1969), published at the height of the Black Power /
Black Arts Movement, follows Brown in constructing Rainey as an iconic emblem
through which he declares his sociopolitical outlook, specifically that “our beau-
tiful brave black people” (43) have progressed beyond Rainey’s “murderous
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vibrations” (45) and no longer need to “play the veins of their strong tender arms
/ with needles / to prove how proud we are” (46-48). Young celebrates Rainey’s
sociohistorical significance while also characterizing her as a rather tragic symbol
of the suffering and despair his generation must now cast off.
To illustrate another approach, in a sequence of poems in the collection, Some
One Sweet Angel Chile (1982), Sherley Anne Williams represents Smith and
Rainey through a black feminist perspective. Williams suggests that their lifestyles
and song lyrics addressed not only racism but also the intersecting forces of
discrimination based on race, gender, class, and sexual identity. Following the
precedent set by Brown and O’Higgins, she strategically alludes to songs, particu-
larly in Smith’s oeuvre, that impart this proto-black feminist agenda. For exam-
ple, in the poem “Rome, Georgia,” Williams riffs on the lyrics from Smith’s
self-composed “Young Woman Blues” as the speaker declares, “I ain’t no high
yella / I’m a deep killer brown,” and “If Love ain’t where I’m at / I can always
get some on up ahead” (44). Williams highlights Smith’s subversion of white
patriarchal discourses by taking pride in her dark skin and boldly asserting
her agency and independence (44).
If one continues to trace the blues tribute poem—not to mention the myriad
of homages to jazz musicians—into the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries, there are many other worthy examples in the work of Michael S.
Harper, Sterling Plumpp, Cornelius Eady, Harryette Mullen, Colleen McElroy,
Kevin Young, and Tyehimba Jess.18 Their tributes similarly evince Brown’s and
O’Higgins’s influence as the progenitors of a form honoring famous blues
performers while reshaping their legacies in ways that reflect these writers’ con-
cerns and perspectives and the discourses of the current era. Decades after these
musicians recorded and performed, the poets invoking them breathe new life into
their music and personae, shedding light on many of the reasons why, as Brown
put it, Rainey “jes’ catch hold of us, somekindaway” (“Ma” IV. 2) and why we
continue to mourn the injustices that O’Higgins’s image of “po’ Bessie dyin’”
(5) evokes. The question of what these poems include and exclude is important
because tributes have a real and often lasting impact on how historical figures are
remembered. Moving forward, it behooves critics and the public to recognize the
differences between symbolic constructions and lived experiences and to consider
the questions of representation that these tribute poems raise, as well as the
discursive, divergent, and often provocative answers that they elicit.

Notes
1. Smith died from internal bleeding and shock as the result of a car accident on 26
September 1937, near Clarksdale, MS. However, the story that she died because
she was denied treatment at the local white hospital was widely believed until
recently. John Hammond, the legendary producer who recorded and promoted

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Smith during the early 1930s, seems to have first spread the rumors of Smith’s
death in a November 1937 Down Beat article titled “Did Bessie Smith Bleed to
Death While Waiting for Medical Aid?” Down Beat ran a subsequent article that
refuted Hammond’s claims, but, according to Chris Albertson, “the truth lacked
the intrigue of the original rumors, so no one seems to have paid attention” (257).
2. See Sascha Feinstein’s A Bibliographic Guide to Jazz Poetry (1998) for an anno-
tated list of twentieth-century blues and jazz tributes.
3. The following represents only a fraction of the blues histories that have provided
valuable biographical information about classic blues women but have neglected
the relationship between tribute poems and these women’s legacies: Sandra
Lieb’s Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey (1981), Daphne Duval
Harrison’s Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (1990), Francis Davis’s The
History of the Blues: The Roots, the Music, the People from Charlie Patton to
Robert Cray (1995), Angela Y. Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism:
Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1998), Chris
Albertson’s Bessie (originally published in 1972 and reprinted in 2003), Buzzy
Jackson’s A Bad Woman Feeling Good: Blues and the Women Who Sing Them
(2005), and Ted Gioia’s Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi
Masters Who Revolutionized American Music (2008). Additionally, Jennifer
Ryan’s Post-Jazz Poetics: A Social History (2010) considers Sherley Anne
Williams’s and Harryette Mullen’s poetic constructions of blues women from
a black feminist perspective; however, Ryan is primarily interested in jazz
poetics rather than the ways in which poems intervene in Smith’s and
Rainey’s legacies.
4. Angela Y. Davis observes, “Women of that era were expected to seek fulfillment
within the confines of marriage, with their husbands functioning as providers
and their children as evidence of their worth as human beings. . . . Such notions
were based on the social realities of middle-class white women’s lives, but were
incongruously applied to all women, regardless of race or class” (11).
5. In the “Preface to the Revised Edition” of The Book of American Negro Poetry
(1931), James Weldon Johnson writes, “The passing of traditional dialect as a
medium for Negro poets is complete” (3).
6. Angela Y. Davis writes, “Sexuality was central in both men’s and women’s blues.”
Citing blues scholar Giles Oakley, Davis notes that in men’s blues “‘Almost all
other themes, leaving town, train rides, work trouble, general dissatisfaction,
sooner or later revert to the central [sexual] concern.’ In woman’s blues . . . there
was an even more pronounced emphasis on love and sexuality” (11).
7. There are numerous examples of critics quoting “somekindaway” as a descrip-
tion of Rainey’s unique verbal style. For example, both Francis Davis and Sandra
Lieb employ the phrase in their biographical accounts of Rainey.
8. Although many writers, including Hazel Carby, Angela Y. Davis, and Tony
Bolden, have mistakenly assumed that Smith’s song was about the Mississippi

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River floods of 1927, it was in fact composed about the Cumberland River flood-
ing Nashville on Christmas Day 1926. See David Evans’s “Bessie Smith’s ‘Back-
Water Blues’: The Story Behind the Song” (2007).
9. In “The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry” (1979), Sherley
Anne Williams describes the common blues trope of worrying the line as
“changes in stress and pitch, the addition of exclamatory phrases, changes in
word order, repetition of phrases within the line itself, and the wordless blues
cries that often punctuate the performance of the songs” (77).
10. Sandra R. Lieb also notes that Rainey transforms the metaphorical blues trope of
the boll-weevil by making her song not only about the black struggle against
white dominance but also more specifically about the challenges of being a sex-
ually uninhibited, independent woman (87-88).
11. See the cover of Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
(1987).
12. Angela Y. Davis notes, “Ma Rainey was notorious for being able to outshine any
man with her amazing sexual voracity” (22), and Lieb asserts that Rainey “was
fully alive to the varieties of sexual experience and expression” (170). Moreover,
Buzzy Jackson writes that “Despite her married status, she [Rainey] chose not to
disguise her polyamorous tastes” (17).
13. Arguably, these classic blues women not only subverted but also alternately utilized
the stereotypical notions of their exoticism in order to appeal to a mass market. In
Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), bell hooks notes this as a common
practice among African American women performers: “Since black female sexual-
ity has been represented in racist/sexist iconography as more free and liberated,
many black women singers, irrespective of the quality of their voices, have culti-
vated an image which suggests they are sexually available and licentious” (65).
14. As an indication of the common practice of citing Brown’s “Ma Rainey”
in biographical accounts of her life, the following all reference the poem:
Carby’s “‘It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometime’: The Sexual Politics of Black Women’s
Blues” (1988), Jackson’s A Bad Woman Feeling Good: Blues and the Women
Who Sing Them, Lieb’s Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey, Angela Y.
Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie
Smith, and Billie Holiday, and Francis Davis’s The History of the Blues: The
Roots, the Music, the People from Charlie Patton to Robert Cray.
15. In Graham Lock’s essay “Blues on the Brush: Rose Piper’s Blues and Negro Folk
Songs Paintings of the 1940s” (2009), he confirms in a footnote that “Blues for
Bessie” was published in Portfolio in 1945, but it is still unclear as to when the
poem was actually written (68).
16. Although I have not been able to ascertain O’Higgins’s exact years of military ser-
vice, the timeline in his biographical note in Langston Hughes and Arna
Bontemps’s The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949 (1951) places him in the Army
during World War II.

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17. As an example of general readers’ lack of familiarity with Smith, I recently taught
an undergraduate course in which we read selections from Kevin Young’s Blues
Poems (2003); prior to reading the section of poems dedicated to Bessie Smith,
including “Blues for Bessie,” none of the twenty-two students had ever heard
of her.
18. Michael S. Harper has written tribute poems to blues and jazz musicians for
decades, including his “Last Affair: Bessie’s Blues Song” (1972). Among other
collections of blues poetry, Sterling Plumpp’s The Blues: The Story Always
Untold (1989) includes a tribute to Smith alongside a series of other blues trib-
utes, and Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge (1995) invokes a composite blues
woman muse in the figure of Sapphire, whom she describes as “an iconic black
woman who refuses to be silenced” (xi). Furthermore, Colleen McElroy’s poem
“Mae West Chats It Up with Bessie Smith” (2001), which is also included in
Young’s Blues Poems, pays tribute to Smith and West and elucidates the com-
monalities between these women’s bawdy and iconoclastic personae. Kevin
Young pays tribute to Robert Johnson as well as many famous jazz figures in
To Repel Ghosts: The Remix (2005), Tyehimba Jess’s leadbelly (2005) narrates
the life and work of Huddie Ledbetter (“Leadbelly”), and Cornelius Eady includes
a series of blues tribute poems in Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems
(2008). These are but a few of the many blues tribute poems published in the
last several decades.

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Davis, Francis. The History of the Blues: The Roots, the Music, the People from Charlie
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