Finding Her Voice: The Body Politics of Sherley Anne Williams’s Blues

Abstract

In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, her 1998 study of the careers of classic-blues singers Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, Angela Y. Davis quotes a 1925 Vanity Fair article by Carl Van Vechten that encapsulates the essentialist attitude held by some white patrons of Harlem Renaissance artists. His admiration of Smith’s exoticized physique dominates his description of her onstage presence:

[A] great brown woman emerged. She was at this time … very large, and she wore a crimson satin robe, sweeping up from her trim ankles and embroidered in multicolored sequins in designs. Her face was beautiful with the rich ripe beauty of southern darkness, a deep bronze brown, matching the bronze of her bare arms. Walking slowly to the footlights … she began her strange rhythmic rites in a voice full of shouting and moaning and praying and suffering, a wild, rough, Ethiopian voice, harsh and volcanic, but seductive and sensuous, too, released between rouged lips and the whitest of teeth, the singer swaying lightly to the beat, as is the Negro custom. (147)