Ma Rainey’s phonograph

Abstract

This essay engages a series of performance routines by the blues artist Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, as a way of critiquing the epistemological tenets of sound reproduction technology. Between 1923 and 1925 Gertrude “Ma” Rainey carried out an elaborate quasi-burlesque performance routine in which she sang while hidden inside a giant phonograph; this routine precisely references and troubles the legacy of black sounds and bodies and their conflicted forms of capture andembodiment through sonic technologies. I think about how black sounds and bodies have been rendered as documentary objects within sonic and visual performance contexts and how this history is both referenced and complicated in Ma Rainey’s performances. I argue further that Rainey’s performance illustrates how sonic technologies always require, what I term black documentary embodiment, through the sonic and the visual. To this end I illustrate how reducing black art to an evidentiary object was central to the phonograph’s material and epistemological construction. In addition to analyzing Rainey’s performance I briefly engage the contemporaneous visual culture of the blues as a means to trace the legacy of black documentary embodiment within a longer visual-sonic tradition.

Keywords:

• documentary embodiment
• black gender
• blues performance
• infrasensorily ontologized
• phonographic reproduction
• symbolic integrity
• dominance of the distanceless
• indexical captivity
• anindexical blackness
• phonograph

Notes on contributor

Jeramy DeCristo is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at UC Davis. Jeramy studies how sound, race-gender, and embodiment are realized in and as forms of mediation. Jeramy's current book project, Blackness and the Writing of Sound in Modernity, tracks and imagines a genealogy of black sonic experimentation, in artists ranging from Bessie Smith to Roscoe Mitchell, rooted in black music’s refusal and dissemblance of technological modernity’s legacies of embodiment and capture in representation. Jeramy is also a practicing artist working in sound, text, poetry, image, and movement. Their art can be found at http://jeramydecristo.com/.

Notes

1 The retelling of this performance is modified and duplicated from at least three different perspectives: in Chris Albertson’s expansive biography, Bessie (2003); Sandra Lieb. Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey (1981); and Paige A. McGinley. Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism (2013). My description here is a composite of these sources and Thomas A. Dorsey’s and Bob Hayes’ 1925 article in the Chicago Defender.

2 See Lauren Berlant’s treatment of the genre of subjects in Cruel Optimism (2011). For a discussion on blackness and unknowability to the subject see Ashon T. Crowley’s Black Pentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (2016).

3 For discussions on black women’s formal incongruity with the dominant binaries of Western genders of “(white) men” and “(white) women” in terms of work and labor, see Talitha L. Leflouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (2015); and Saidiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors” in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society (2016).

4 For a discussion of narrative’s reliance on “symbolic resources” as the unfolding terms for its recognition in time, see Paul Ricoeur’s contention that “If, in fact, human action can be narrated, it is because it is always already articulated by signs, rules, and norms. It is always already symbolically mediated” (1983, 57).

5 Here I am immeasurably affected by the work both on and off the page of Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (2015).

6 Derrida later refers to the invagination’s secondary eruption emerging from its previousness (its what-is-made-transgressive) as “unarrestable” and invoking “the commitment made no longer to give an account” (1980, 70).

7 This predicament is something like the ambivalence Angela Davis articulates in identifying Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, Billie Holiday and their contemporary black blues women as feminists and queer. Davis expresses this difficulty, of applying a term that historically (and even contemporaneously) may not have been available to these artists.

8 See Theodor Adorno’s attempt to argue for the perviousness of the artisanal mode of production to the industrial mode of production of music – and therefore always implicitly the mode of the subject for Adorno, in “The Curves of the Needle” in Essays on Music (2002b) and “Music and Technique” in Sound Figures (1999).

9 In his seminal work Stompin’ the Blues Albert Murray compares the blues to the dramatic craft of acting, suggesting that blues is constituted, as much, if not more by aesthetic artifice and performative technique than it is by some romantic “direct emotional expression in the raw.” Murray’s point here presages the work of McGinley (cited above) by trying to think about the performativity of the blues lyric, which I’ll explicitly track in this essay.

10 For a further exposition of gestell, see Hans Ruin. “Ge-stell: Enframing as the Essence of Technology” in Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts. Ruin discusses Heidegger’s deconstruction of the normative concept of being, by invoking the term Zuhandenheit “readiness-to-hand” (2009, 3).

11 Edison promised that the phonograph would capture “sounds that were heretofore fugitive … ” (1878, 530) what Edison later calls “fugitive sounds,” and in capturing such sounds would ensure “their reproduction at will” (1878, 534).

12 Von Kempelen’s “speaking machine” consisted of a wooden box with a puppet’s or doll’s head placed on top; the box was fitted “deceptively” with “a pair of bellows, a sound board, cylinder, and pipes” all of which imitated “the organs of speech.” Inside the hollowed out box sat either a “child or a woman” who would speak into a pipe, giving the audience the impression that the machine itself was speaking. This novel “speaking machine” gave way to more scientifically rigorous though no less uncanny inventions which used perforated reed pipes and anatomical replicas of human speech organs to imitate the vowel and consonant sounds of human speech.

13 See Karl Hagstrom-Miller’s Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (2010).

14 For a discussion of popular music’s “pre-digestion” as a mode of its resonance within the interiority of the subject, see Theodor W. Adorno’s essay “On Popular Music” in Essays on Music (2002a).

15 There are many texts discussing the sentimental and narrative valuation of the Blues, but in particular see Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues and Angela Davis’ Blues Legacies (cited above). Works, which have touted narratives of technological innovation with regard to the phonograph, are similarly plentiful, but see primarily Frederick Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999).

16 If as Theodor Adorno – well after Rainey’s performative theorizations – worried that listening in the twentieth century would be divorced from the materiality of musical form and instead become indistinguishable from the instrumental rationality of the commodity form, then Rainey’s performance critiques the representative economy that writes the nineteenth-century consumption (of supposedly non-commodified) listening; the very form of listening Adorno wants to defend from the twentieth century’s impending audio commodification in the phonograph.

17 See Toni Morrison’s Jazz (2004).