Read chapter 1 of “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism”
Angela Davis starts her first chapter off by saying that “What is distinctive about the blues, however, particularly in relation to other American popular musical forms of the 1920s and 1930s, is their intellectual independence and representational freedom” (3). In what ways do you see this as being true in regard to the information Davis presents later in the chapter and to the music of Rainey, Smith, and Holiday? How do you see this as relating to blues as we know it today? (Davis says in the introduction that “the scope of black music and its historically broad cultural implications can no longer be confined to African-American communities” because of the global music economy [xviii].)
