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THE PUBLICATION IN 1981 OF SANDRA Lieb's Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey was a significant first for researchers and aficionados of early blues.(1) A dissertation-turned-trade text, Lieb's book is a meticulously documented study of early blues, generally, and blues pioneer Rainey, specifically. Lieb's study focuses on Rainey's songs and examines blues expressions of women's attitudes about love. Rainey's recorded blues are transcribed and analyzed throughout; in addition, Lieb includes a detailed discography and three appendices that classify the songs by blues type. Lieb hints at a feminist slant in Rainey's blues, stating in the introduction that "the body of Ma Rainey's recorded songs constitutes a message to women," many of which "show women aggressively confronting or attempting to change the circumstances of their lives" (xvi). Seven years later, in 1988, Daphne Duval Harrison published Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s, a comprehensive investigation of the blues women of the 1920s that includes Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Sippie Wallace, Edith Wilson, Alberta Hunter, and Victoria Spivey but focuses on Rainey and Smith.(2) Harrison's book "provides the reader with an opportunity to see these [blues women] as pivotal figures in the assertion of black women's ideas and ideals from the standpoint of the working class and the poor" (10). Chapter 3 of the book is centered on the singers' song texts, which illustrate, Harrison alleges, "an emerging feminist perspective." In her introduction, Harrison describes the focus of chapter 3:
It [chapter 3] also asserts that interpretation and analysis are a critical key to understanding the general nature of black cultural expression and the movement of black women toward self-determination and independence. Although the blues women sang about the same topics that men did, they provided new slants. They dealt openly with the issues that were of particular concern to black women in the urban setting -- freedom from social and religious constraints, sexual and economic independence, alcoholism and drugs. Issues of sexuality and sex were addressed directly and indirectly in their lifestyles and their blues. Lesbianism was practiced and sung by such diverse singers as Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Gladys Bentley -- the last was known as a tough-talking, singing piano player who some believed to be a male...