"A Bad Woman Feeling Good" by Buzzy Jackson (2005)

One good thing about this whole Corona business is that suddenly lots of things are available free online, including public library called "Open Library" where I found some titles that I wanted to read for a long time. So although I just finished one massive tome about music (not to mention that I have also many other books around the house - my own, borrowed from the library, what friends gave me) here I go reading about music again, unrepentantly. It might be predictable in a way, because obviously I do circle around certain subjects more or less, but it makes me happy so what. After this, perhaps I switch to something else.

Initially I thought that "A Bad Woman Feeling Good: Blues and the Women Who Sing Them" will be lightweight - judging the book by its gaudy cover, I expected something else completely but the writing style is actually quite serious and thoughtful. As expected, its analysis of women musicians who were pioneers one way or the other, starting with earliest Blues artists and what is the most surprising is that every now and than Buzzy Jackson comes with a interesting idea or a sentence where reader understands she really thought about this from various perspectives. I have read a tons of books about music and too often authors are either lost in a discography or blinded by the  inconsequential  gossip - not Jackson, who seriously approaches these lives with a respect and curiosity. Than again, it shows how far we traveled from the earlier music literature, where instead of slim fan booklet with nice pictures, nowadays we expect that author understand socio-political circumstances and atmosphere of the times. 

To illustrate how books differs from so many similar titles, it does not start with obvious - first Blues recording, Mamie Smith and "Crazy Blues" that got the ball rolling but with an undocumented (and to my knowledge unrecorded) artist who worked even before that, a certain Mamie Desdoumes who played piano around the bars of infamous red-light district Storyville in New Orleans. Way, way before other musicians could have been recorded, Desdoumes worked her way trough bordellos and bars, banging the piano long in the night with her hands from which two fingers were cut off. Apparently she was very good musician and no less than Jelly Roll Morton spoke very highly of her. From here we move on to 1920s Blues Queens, than swinging 1930s and right now I am reading about long twilight of Lady Day, where Jackson understands perhaps why was this celebrated and successful artists turning to drugs - "it calmed her nerves before performances and allowed her an emotional distance that afforded some relief from the chaos of her insecure financial situation, odd hours and abusive relationships."  Where so many other authors focused on Gardenias, this one actually understands why Lady chose this path.

Unfortunately, author lost the steam somewhere halfway trough - by trying to shoehorn later artists in the same Blues format, the book just evaporates somewhere along the way. Even if later generations of women like Etta James, Tina Turner or Janis Joplin had some connection with Blues, going so far to insist that Joni Mitchell or Madonna are actually spiritual descendants of earlier Blues queens was just too ambitious - they had to cut their own path in a world, but so does everybody. First part of the book was excellent, it lost me later, unfortunately.