A review by lindy_b
Blues Legacies And Black Feminism: Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday by Angela Y. Davis

3.0

It's one of those books that gets cited everywhere and is considered foundational to scholarship around blues women (and I understand why) but was underwhelming to me once I actually read it. In particular, I'm not impressed by how Davis would often assert that she could tell, through careful study of inflection, that a singer meant something ironically (e.g.), but would not go on to describe that inflection. These days, it's easy to search for the song on your streaming service of choice and judge for yourself, but when the book was written, some of the music discussed was not yet available on compact disc. It's just not persuasive.