Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (1886 – 1939)
Bessie Smith (1894 – 1937)
Known For: bringing the Blues to the mainstream, earning their way out of the Jim Crow South and fearlessly shtupping their slutty chorus-girls along the way.
Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith: Bisexual Queens of the Blues. © Historical Homos 2020
Rhapsody in Black
Bessie Smith poses c. 1925. © Edward Elcha/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Harlem’s Renaissance, Prohibition and the Black, bisexual queens of the blues. What do they have in common?
They all rode America’s pasty Puritan ass at the same damn time.
“Bisexual” makes it sound like these cats were tame. No clinical categorization of queer fuckery was on the menu for Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, two of the blues’ most notorious popularizers in the early 20th century.
They were part of a sizzling underbelly in America that got down, dirty and deep in each other’s orifices, from the Jim Crow South to the rapidly urbanizing North.
In the 1910s and 1920s, people flooded into American cities. They found a glorious fuckstorm of cultural, sexual and racial change when they got there.
This was an America of newfound social mobility, progressive politics and a thriving criminal underground. Many of the old bets were off.
Note “Gladys’ Clam House,” a haven for adventurous queers seeking the boisterous entertainments of 250-lb “bull-dagger,” Gladys Bentley. © Library of Congress
Through it all, Ma and Bessie defiantly sang the dark side of the Black experience: alcoholism, prostitution, adultery, gambling, political inequality, prison, thieving, marriage, death and, of course, queer-as-all-fuck behavior.
A later re-issue of Ma’s tracks. Note the content: barrel houses (a bar), moonshine and praying the lawd to send a man.
Their music became the sound of a generation gorging itself on new social and sexual questions. They launched the blues into the homes and hearts of Americans – Black and white – all over the nation. And they built themselves into the first Black female stars the country had ever seen.
They did this after starting out as two dirt-poor nobodies from the Jim Crow South. They did this in the most iniquitous, racist society available to blacks anywhere on the planet. They did this with financial independence, sexual freedom and Prohibition-levels of binge-drinking.
They were un-fucking-believable then, as they are today.
Josephine Baker wouldn’t have had a career if it weren’t for bisexual badasses like Ma and Bessie.
And they were only the most famous at the time. Many other lesbian and bisexual Black women found careers for themselves in this period (including Josephine Baker, who may or may not have been diddled by Bessie Smith).
Not to mention the many more unnamed souls who were fucking, loving and living their best queer lives against an impossible trifecta of racism, homophobia and disenfranchisement.
Sex-crazed, gin-crazed and blues-crazed, Ma and Bessie changed how Black women (and any woman) could define themselves in this new society.
And one of those definitions remains with us today: the prolific, the peerless, the pussy-pounding “bull-dyke”.
Bull-daggers & Sissies
Gladys Bentley, famed bull-dagger, at the Ubangi Club in Harlem in the early 30s. © Sterling Paige
The deliciously seedy world of bull-dykes (or bull-daggers) thrived mostly in the cities’ nightlife hubs, where homosexual and bisexual desires were part of a subversive spectacle designed to shit all over the inheritance of the Victorian era.
Just like today, there were spots in these towns known to be the jurisdiction of the “bull-daggers,” who broke all the rules by wearing men’s clothes, hunting for women and engaging in some very public heavy petting.
There were also digs for the “sissies,” men who were so feminine in their dress and behavior that they were seen as a direct sexual threat to women. Hetero men were expected to succumb to their bootylicious charms, and we have unsurprising evidence of how far the sissies went to capture their attentions. (Hint: it was rimjobs.)
It may seem like they were simply inverting gender roles. But the maps of sex and gender weren’t clear-cut. The point was to subvert what was expected, to create a spectacle of the most foundational rules of honest society: who you fuck, who you love and who you marry. (We know that some bull-dykes got married to their lovers by posing as men, often en masse in bars and clubs.)
Ma and Bessie became famous because they sang unashamedly about this rock-and-roll life of pansexual pleasure. In “Prove It On Me Blues,” Ma dared her audience to “prove” what queer fuckery she was up to:
Went out last night with a crowd of my friends.
They must’ve been women, ‘cause I don’t like no men.
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.
...
I went out last night with a crowd of my friends,
It must’ve been women, ‘cause I don’t like no men.
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.
Advertisement for “Prove It On Me Blues,” with Ma Rainey depicted in full bull-daggery. Note the policeman looking on, none the wiser. (via LGBTQ Nation)
The trick of the song is that Ma switches between proclaiming her individual subversion and acknowledging with the audience just how subversive it is. She makes us feel how good it feels to be bad.
Ma didn’t give one single fuck when it came to singing this kind of song in public: and this was only what she recorded! We can only imagine the filthy genius flying out of her gold-capped teeth at an actual show.
She had another one that lamented the threat of the sissies:
I dreamed last night I was far from harm
Woke up and found my man in a sissy’s arms
…
Some are young, some are old
My man says sissy’s got good jelly roll [i.e. he’s got a nice ass]
…
My man got a sissy, his name is Miss Kate
He shook that thing like jelly on a plate
…
Now all the people ask me why I’m all alone
A sissy shook that thing and took my man from home.
Bessie Smith, celebrated bull-dyke. © Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images.
Bessie Smith was a bit different: she became a seriously big star in the 1920s and doesn’t seem to have risked producing as much frankly queer content in her (recorded) repertoire.
Ironically, Bessie was the more celebrated “bull-dyke” of the two. She was known for regularly getting into scraps with her husband over her chorus-girl flings. She and Ma may even have been lovers in the early days, but we know for sure Bessie and one of her girls, Lillian Simpson, were a steady couple at some point in the 1920s.
Bessie even once shouted at Lillian during one of their fights on tour: “I got twelve women on this show and I can have one every night if I want it!”
Mature.
In fact, Bessie was known for indulging in lustful appetites of every flavor: including home-cooked southern food, bootlegged moonshine and poontang. Her niece, Ruby Smith, later reported on Bessie’s patronage of a “buffet flat” in Detroit, where she and many other queer Black people could meet and get down:
“A buffet flat is nothing but faggots and bulldykes, a real open house. Everything goes on in that house. A very gay place. ...Buffet means everything, everything goes on. They had a faggot there that was so great that people used to come there just to watch him make love to another man. He was real great. He’d give him a tongue bath and everything…” (McBride 1999)
(From what we can gather, a tongue bath was a rimjob. Also known as God’s gift to humanity.)
Bessie sang about the buffet flats in “Soft Pedal Blues,” and apparently used to perform another song called “It’s Dirty But Good,” though she never actually recorded it:
I know women that don’t like men
The way they do is a crying sin
It’s dirty but good, yes,
It’s dirty but good
There ain’t no difference
It’s just dirty but good
Minstrels, Jim Crow & Chorus-Girls’ Vaginas
This world of gender-bending, tongue-bathing and all-you-can-booze buffets reached its height in the 1920s, but Ma and Bessie started out in much less glamorous origins.
Minstrel shows were originally staffed with whites in blackface - the original and most famous was the character of Jim Crow, invented by Thomas Rice. These hellaciously racist shows continued to tour in the South well past the Civil War, but by the late 19th century, black entertainers set up their own minstrel troupes. © NY Historical Society
Imagine yourself an 18-year-old Bessie Smith, somewhere below the Mason Dixon Line. It’s 1912. You’re young, you’re Black and there’s a boozy show – a tent party – just outside town tonight. It’s the only place Jim Crow isn’t invited — and you’ll be splurging every cent you can scrape just to get a whiff of what’s cooking inside.
The complicated legacy of vaudeville. George Walker and Bert Williams performed in blackface, while Aida (middle) refused to portray stereotypes. Aida was an accomplished dancer and choreographer who married George and toured Europe with these famous comedians in In Dahomey (1903), the first musical written by African Americans. © Wikimedia Commons
This world of underground vaudeville, moonshine and morals looser than a chorus-girl’s vagina was what Bessie Smith jumped into at age 18. It was the peak of vaudeville cabarets and traveling minstrel troupes: one of the few channels of economic mobility available to Black people in the early 20th century.
Subversive queer culture was built in because these shows operated outside white social constraints and were always on the move. Bisexual bravado easily became part of Ma Rainey’s act and Bessie Smith’s early training.
When Bessie got on the scene, Ma was already a veteran. Sometime around 1912, she was headlining for a group called the Rabbit Foot Minstrels and recognized Bessie’s promising talent as a singer. She took Bessie under her wing, taught her a thing or two about performing (and chorus girls), and set off with her on the only train out of the Jim Crow South: entertainment.
Ma Rainey and her Georgia band. Ma was short, dark-skinned, raspy and typically bedecked in glittering jewels.
Gertrude Pridgett had become “Ma” Rainey a decade earlier when she married a vaudeville actor, William “Pa” Rainey, in 1904. She was a Georgia native who performed early on in her hometown of Columbus.
In 1902, she had accidentally discovered the blues while traveling with minstrels. A young woman approached her tent singing a melancholy tune on her guitar, Ma committed it to memory on the spot, and started singing it at the end of her act. The crowds went wild for it.
Elizabeth “Bessie” Smith was born a decade earlier than Ma in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She got her start busking on the streets of her hometown with her brother Clarence. They were orphaned young, and through a bit of chance and Clarence’s scheming, Bessie eventually met Ma and began touring with her.
Bessie Smith dancing up a storm with a male chorus line in Philadelphia. © Anthony Barbosa / Getty Images.
Ma was a maternal figure but also an enabler: she gave Bessie her first real taste of a living wage and queer cabaret life. She impressed her for the same reason she impressed everyone: her presence.
Ma was a warm, caring woman offstage, but onstage she transformed into a peacocking hero of Black autonomy. Despite living and working against one of the most oppressive socioeconomic backdrops in human history, Ma managed to present an image of a Black woman who was free to be loud, emotional and flawed.
Bessie Smith and Ruby Smith (niece) pose with the Dancing Sheiks, 1924. © Anthony Barbosa/Getty Images
She was also a shrewd businesswoman and managed to make her troupe some good money. By 1916, she was running her own troupe with Pa Rainey, before they separated and Ma started up another troupe.
But Ma’s impact was bigger than business.
Her shows brought white and black audiences together under the same tent to hear the same blues every night with the same, raw candor. She fused the minstrel and vaudeville circuits with the nation’s emerging taste for blues on her own terms, reflecting the Black experience back to the nation through these merging forms.
In the process, she spread the demand for blues music across the North and South, creating a market for her and Bessie that would turn them into national stars over the next decade.
Record Queens: Mother and Empress
Ma and Bessie were two of the earliest “race record” stars, though there were many more and the earliest were exclusively women. © Historical Homos 2020
Enter the Roaring 20s: the US had just won a world war, the Progressive Era was reaching maturity and America’s cities were turning into bustling centers of wealth, cultural experimentation and, of course, balls-out bisexuality.
By this point, Bessie and Ma were on separate career tracks. But both of their careers were transformed by the same accident: the enormously popular sale of the first ever blues record: “Crazy Blues” by Mamie Smith. It sold over a million copies in 1920.
This success got other record labels sniffing around for popular performers like Ma and Bessie who could help them capture some of the market. At the time, they were called “race records” because of their intended audiences. But they became enormously popular all over the nation. And they were written and performed by Black women.
America became fanatical for Ma and Bessie, though this decade saw Bessie’s career in particular reach new heights, thanks to the 150+ tracks she cut with Columbia Records. By the end of the decade, she was billing as the ‘Empress of the Blues’ and earning more than any Black performer in the country, pulling in thousands of dollars a week.
Ma was also making good money from her recordings. She cut 90+ tracks with Paramount and composed or collaborated on a third of them. One of these, “See See Rider,” became one of the most popular and influential blues tracks of all time. (Not that Elvis’ version comes close to the soul of Ma’s original.)
Paramount sent Ma on a tour to promote these early tracks: her debut show at Chicago’s Grand Theater was one of the first appearances of a blues artist at a major venue. The Wild Jazz Cats Band backing her included Thomas A. Dorsey, who later recalled what it was like to watch Ma perform, bedecked in pearls, tiaras, feathers and flashing gowns:
When she started singing, the gold in her teeth would sparkle. She was in the spotlight. She possessed listeners; they swayed, they rocked, they moaned and groaned, as they felt the blues with her. (Harris 1994)
Meanwhile, Bessie was busy performing and promoting her own records, keeping up her image as an unpredictable entertainer. At one of her tent parties in 1927, the music was interrupted when the crowd heard people outside shouting and knocking at the tent poles. It was Klansmen.
Bessie gave zero fucks, stepped off the stage and ran toward the intruders in full Empress regalia:
[She] stopped within ten feet of them, placed one hand on her hip, and shook a clenched fist at the Klansmen. “What the fuck you think you’re doin’,” she shouted above the sound of the band. “I’ll get the whole damn tent out here if I have to. You just pick up them sheets and run!” The Klansmen, apparently too surprised to move, just stood there and gawked. Bessie hurled obscenities at them until they finally turned and disappeared. (Davis 1999)
Bessie was known for her temper and no-nonsense attitude. It could defend her against Klansmen and other violent men in her life – including her husband – but by the end of the 1920s, even her defiant spirit couldn’t defend against the financial shitstorm wrought by the 1929 crash.
The Great Depressing After-Party
Bessie’s career took a turn in the 30s, but she kept on performing and recording as much as possible. © Historical Homos 2020.
The Great Depression hit entertainers particularly hard. Bessie and Ma recorded and performed right up to the end of the 20s, but by the early 30s their stars were beginning to wane.
It wasn’t only the economic depression. Blacks and whites alike were looking for a new sound by then: hardcore blues started working its way into new styles of jazz (like swing) and popular music. The golden age of ‘down home’ blues was coming to a close.
Bessie tried to adapt her sound and kept performing as best she could, but Ma retired early to her native Columbus, Georgia. Ever the enterprising businesswoman, she successfully managed several cinemas there. She lived out a quieter life until her death from heart complications in 1939. She was 53 years old.
Bessie – who had always been known for heavy drinking, eating and boinking – separated from her husband and lost much of the fortune she had accumulated in the ‘20s. She made her last recording in 1933 and died tragically in a car accident in Mississippi in 1937. She was 43 years old.
They were both gone before they could feel the full influence of their careers. Already in the ‘30s, poets like Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes recalled the electrifying performances of Ma Rainey and other blues singers.
Bessie and Ma’s records were so popular that they also inspired the next generation of Black blues royalty. Chief among their bisexual ranks was none other than the Lady herself: Billie Holiday.
In the ‘50s and ‘60s, the blues continued to shape genres and stars of every description, from the Beatles to Elvis to Janis Joplin, who credited Bessie Smith as one of her primary influences.
The next generation of bisexual blues badassery: Lady Day (via Medium).
Bessie and Ma are two of the earliest examples of female stardom in America, periodt. That they achieved this as Black female musicians from the South, working against so many odds, is astounding. But they were popular precisely because of their ability to flout the conventions of Black womanhood.
They changed what being a Black woman could mean in America. The frank and explicit lyrics Ma and Bessie sang created an outlet for social, cultural and sexual defiance – if not downright deviance.
This subversion plugged them right into the rising tide of queer visibility in America’s greatest cities. From Chicago and Detroit to Philadelphia and New York, the worlds of jazz, blues and illicit liquor were the perfect playground for sexual experimentation.
Bessie living her best damn life (via Goldmine).
This was happening outside America, too. Just like Berlin in the same period, entertainment venues provided space for all sexes to indulge in a radically new experience of sexuality. The dimly lit bars, speakeasies, “buffet flats” and clubs of the cities were the perfect cover to experiment and express these desires out in the open.
Other bisexual or queer performers – like Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter and Gladys Bentley – survived the Depression to watch the world become increasingly open to this diversity of sexual experience.
Bessie and Ma would have rolled over in their moonshine-soaked graves to see their unflinching displays of brazen bisexuality become tolerated (if not entirely accepted) by society at large. But it was their performances that helped fuel the fires of cultural change.
Performances that, lest we forget, saw throngs of fans clamoring for these beautiful Black women to sing loudly about sex, booze, bull-daggers, sissies and, of course, their beautiful asses:
All the boys in the neighborhood
They say your black bottom is really good
Come on and show me your black bottom
I want to learn that dance
...
Now I'm gonna show y'all my black bottom
They stay to see that dance
Wait until you see me do my big black bottom
I'll put you in a trance
Ma and Bessie: Bisexual Queens of the Blues. © Historical Homos 2020
Further Reading
Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. 2019.
Davis, Angela. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. 1999.
McBridge, Dwight (ed). James Baldwin Now. 1999.
Garber, Marjorie. Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life. 2000.
Harris, Michael. The Rise of The Gospel Blues. 1994.