Blues: Women in Blues

………..In history, women never got the credit they deserve for the impacts they had on everything. However, without women, somethings would not have happened or would have occurred much later. The women in blues impacted the world, the genre, and musicians today. 

……….Women like Mamie Smith and Ma Rainey were inspirations in their time. Mamie Smith is well known for being able to take charge and do the thing that people thought was impossible. She also was the first African American blues singer to record a song. She paved the way for more African American women, like Ma Rainey, to become significant in the blues genre. Ma Rainey was the first popular on-stage performer who sang blues. She is known as the “Mother of Blues.” She was also a fantastic vocalist and drew huge crowds because of it. Without these women, the whole blues genre we know today might have been different. Because of Smith’s bravery and Rainey’s incredible stage performance, African Americans gained confidence in themselves and became famous blues singers or players.

Even though women were proving time and time again that they were just as good or even sometimes better than men at somethings, they were still living in an unfair world where they were looked at as “below.” The stories that these women told in their songs brought that to light and started a new wave of feminism. Women began to focus on their voting rights and rights at work. This helped push the women’s rights movement and helped give women a sense of strength in unity. Without this, who knows when women would have realized they were worth more than they were being given. 

The impact blues women singers had on the genre, the world, and musicians today are so tremendous when one thinks about it. They helped push so many things forward so future generations could be better off. Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, and many other female blues singers and players deserve so much more credit for the blues genre being what it is today.