Ma Rainey, Mother of the Blues

Gertrude Pridgett was born in Columbus, Georgia, on April twenty-sixth, eighteen eighty-six. Her parents were performers on the Black Southern minstrel circuit. Her grandmother had been a performer before them. Music was the family trade, and the city she grew up in was a stop on that circuit, an industrial river town with a Black community dense enough to support the touring companies that moved through the South each year.

At age fourteen, she appeared on the stage of the Springer Opera House, the grandest theater in Columbus, a Victorian pile on Tenth Street that had hosted Edwin Booth and Oscar Wilde, in a talent revue called A Bunch of Blackberries. Not long after, she joined a traveling show and began the career that would eventually earn her the title the Mother of the Blues.

She married a performer named Will Rainey in nineteen oh four and they toured together for years under the billing Ma and Pa Rainey. What Ma Rainey was doing on those stages in the first decade of the twentieth century was something no one had quite named yet, a rough, raw, deeply rhythmic vocal style that drew on the field hollers and spirituals of the rural South and pushed them toward something new. She was performing what would later be called the blues before it had a category or a recording contract.

By nineteen twenty-three, when she finally made her first commercial recordings for Paramount Records at about age thirty-seven, she was already a seasoned veteran of decades on the road. Between nineteen twenty-three and nineteen twenty-eight she recorded nearly one hundred sides. Her voice was a deep contralto, gravelly and controlled, with a range of barely an octave that she used with absolute authority. Bessie Smith, the other great early blues singer, was an alumna of Ma Rainey's traveling company. The lineage is direct.

Rainey retired to Columbus around nineteen thirty-five, after Paramount dropped her and the Depression shrank her audiences. She managed two theaters in Georgia and died of heart disease in nineteen thirty-nine at fifty-three. She was buried at Porterdale Cemetery in Columbus. Her former home on Fifth Avenue opened as a museum in two thousand and seven. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in nineteen ninety.