Nobody sings the blues the way Mississippi women sing it—not Robert Johnson, not Muddy Waters, not B.B. King. Yet these Mississippi women, mostly Black women, have been largely left off the record.
W.C. Handy set the blues stage with mostly Black men after he first heard the blues in Tutwiler, Miss., in 1903. Handy listened to blues music throughout Mississippi, calling himself the “Father of the Blues.” One of the first historians and collectors of African American blues and work songs during and after slavery in Mississippi and Georgia was a white man named Harold Washington Odum. In 1925, Odum published his first book, “The Negro and His Songs.”
But what about “Her Songs?”
‘Ar’n’t I a Woman?’
Deborah Gray White, a renowned Rutgers University Professor on Women’s and Gender Studies, wrote in her 1985 book “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” that enslaved Black women lived “with the dual burden of racism and sexism.” After emancipation, they had to fight harder “to gain their rights, hold their families together, resist economic and sexual oppression, and maintain their sense of womanhood against all odds.”
Blues and jazz singer Albennie Jones, also known as Albinia Jones, was born in Errata, Miss., in 1914. Jones grew up singing in the choir at Mount Holy Baptist Church in Gulfport and then later launched a blues career in New York in the 1930s. Photo public domain
In other words, Black women had more to be blue about and still do.
Take blues and jazz singer Albennie Jones, also known as Albinia Jones. She was born in 1914 in Errata, Miss., but grew up in Gulfport where she sang in the choir at Mount Holy Baptist Church. Jones later moved to New York to launch a blues career in 1932. Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, saxophonist Don Byas and pianist Sammy Price played behind her voice—a voice one critic said was the first female voice that “fit in the rock ‘n’ roll bag” of the sixties.
Promoted as the “New Queen of the Blues,” she toured widely with Blanche Calloway, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, Tiny Bradshaw, and the Erskine Hawkins Orchestra, well-known and highly-regarded jazz and blues entertainers. Jones recorded with
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