ite sightseers from downtown would check out her show as well.
Other blues singers delving into “the life” tried to keep it behind closed doors—and the lack of modern technology and online celebrity-gossip hounds made it possible to do so. In the ’20s, blues and jazz vocalist Ethel Waters, a lesbian, was involved with a dancer named Ethel Williams, as a couple known to friends as “The Two Ethels,” according to a 2007 biography of Waters by Stephen Bourne. They even lived together, a very disreputable act at the time, which Waters managed to keep out of all 20th century biographies about her.
Because she succeeded in the more refined European cabaret scene, blues singer and songwriter Alberta Hunter concealed and refused to speak about her lesbianism, according to Bonnie Zimmerman’s encyclopedia Lesbian Histories and Cultures. Hunter’s biographer Frank C. Taylor wrote that the vocalist, who lived with her long-term girlfriend, Lottie Tyler, would cringe every time a lesbian performer, like her friend Ethel Waters, would have a lover’s spat in public.
As Philipson explains,
What was occurring was occurring clandestinely or within urban settings that were more or less secret and difficult to penetrate. It was very much under the cover of night, because they could be prosecuted for same-sex activity. There were some open demonstrations of alternative sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance and in Greenwich Village in the late ’20s. Take for example, ‘the Pansy Craze,’ where Harlem drag balls were attended by sightseers and celebrities. There were also drag performers in cabarets, but that was very much the exception.
Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters all got their start singing and dancing on the turn-of-the-century vaudeville circuit. So it’s not surprising these women went on to revel in the saucy sexual innuendo of what became known as dirty or “hokum” blues. In Waters’ 1928 song “My Handy Man,” she sings,
He shakes my ashes, greases my griddle, churns my butter, strokes my fiddle. My man is such a handy man!
The lowdown dirty blues was a far cry from upright, ambitious lifestyle promoted by the leadership class of African Americans that W.E.B. Du Bois referred to as “The Talented Tenth” in 1903, who were establishing black colleges and assimilating in the world of white Edwardians. As Philipson says,
The black bourgeoisie, the aspiring post-Victorian middle-class blacks, were very hostile to homosexuality. They were not the majority of the black community, but they were trying to set themselves up as the leaders. Post-Victorian morals were that you have no premarital sex, you get married, you raise a family, you stay together all of your life, you go to church, and you raise proper Christian children who take their place in society and reproduce.
Clearly, these lesbian-leaning blues singers were forging their own paths in a shifting cultural landscape. “No time to marry, no time to settle down,” Bessie Smith sang on 1926′s “Young Woman’s Blues.” “I’m a young woman, and I ain’t done runnin’ around.”
(For more information on Robert Philipson and his documentaries, visit the Shoga Films site. Recommended reading: Eric Garber’s paper, “A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem”; Queer Cultural Center’s article, “Gladys Bentley: The Bulldagger Who Sang the Blues”; Bitch magazine’s article, “Adventures in Feministory: Gladys Bentley”; Chris Albertson’s paper, “Lesbianism in the Life of Bessie Smith”; Stephen Bourne’s book, Ethel Waters: Stormy Weather; Frank C. Taylor’s book, “Alberta Hunter: A Celebration in Blues; Bonnie Zimmerman’s encyclopedia, Lesbian Histories and Cultures.)
Images of Gladys Bentley, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters and Alberta Hunter record from Wikimedia Commons.
Crossposted from Collectors Weekly. See the full article here.