Viola Davis in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Photograph: David Lee/AP According to the New York Times, on one occasion Rainey was caught by police in a sexual dalliance with some of her female dancers in Chicago. She is also rumoured to have had relationships with women including Smith. Rainey is believed to have remarried, though little is known about her second husband. Like the blues is your story, she told her story.” It was just music point blank to your soul. They didn’t have all the bells and whistles and the amplifiers we have in music today. I read somewhere Thomas Dorsey said, ‘After performing and working with Ma Rainey there was nowhere else to go but to the Lord’. A lot of legendary people started with Ma Rainey or grew with Ma Rainey. Her full-throated vocals have inspired singers from Dinah Washington to Janis Joplin.ĭawkins says: “She laid the foundation. Rainey, who wrote her own songs, was a mentor to singer Bessie Smith and worked with the likes of Louis Armstrong and Thomas Dorsey, who was musical director on some of her recordings. Between 19 she made nearly a hundred records – one such recording session forms the basis of Wilson’s play – and had numerous hits. She signed with Paramount, a furniture company in Wisconsin that had got into the recording business, and became one of the first recorded blues musicians. She joined a wave of African Americans who quit the south to pursue dreams in desegregated northern cities such as Chicago. After the couple separated in 1916, Rainey launched her own touring performance company, Madam Gertrude Ma Rainey and Her Georgia Smart Set. She married singer, dancer and comedian William Rainey when she was 18 and, billed as Ma and Pa Rainey, they toured as performers for minstrel shows that travelled towns setting up their own tents and stages. By her own account, she was born Gertrude Pridgett in Columbus on 26 April 1886, although other records suggest she was born in Alabama in September 1882. Rainey – pioneering as a blues singer, businesswoman and liberated bisexual – grew up in the Jim Crow south in the late 19th century. “They don’t care nothing about me,” she says of her white record producers. Now Dawkins hopes that the release of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a film adaptation of August Wilson’s play starring Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman, will put it firmly on the map.ĭavis is magnificently caked in greasepaint and sweat and wears gold teeth and heavy padding, at once pantomime dame and tragic queen: she is capricious and domineering yet bears the weight of generational trauma.

Three decades and much fundraising later, the fixer-upper has flowered into a museum in Columbus on Georgia’s Chattahoochee River. It was like an explosion went off and we had to come and put a giant puzzle back together.” “The staircase was almost leaning out of the building,” Dawkins, 65, recalls by phone.

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