Introducing Ma Rainey & Blues Music in the Indian Subcontinent

Before you understand the blues, you have to understand why somebody needed to sing it.

Imagine an Indian railway platform sometime after midnight.

Someone has missed the last train.

Someone has lost a lover.

Someone owes money.

Someone’s family refuses to understand them.

Someone has travelled a thousand kilometres looking for work.

Someone is drinking chai because going home doesn’t particularly appeal to them.

Now give one of them a guitar.

You are beginning to understand the blues.

Not historically.

Not musically.

But emotionally.

And perhaps that is the best way to introduce the Indian subcontinent to one of the great characters of early blues:

Ma Rainey.

I. Meet Ma Rainey

Gertrude Pridgett—better known as Ma Rainey—was born in Georgia in the American South around the end of the nineteenth century.

She became one of the earliest professional blues singers and eventually earned the title:

The Mother of the Blues.

She performed through the travelling entertainment circuits of the American South and later became an important recording artist.

Between 1923 and 1928, she made nearly one hundred records.

But statistics don’t adequately explain Ma Rainey.

Imagine instead a commanding Black woman entering a stage in early twentieth-century America.

Gold jewellery.

Extravagant clothing.

A powerful voice.

A personality capable of filling the room.

Behind the spectacle were songs about ordinary human complications:

love,

betrayal,

desire,

loneliness,

drinking,

bad relationships,

travel,

heartbreak,

and survival.

Ma Rainey didn’t need to pretend life was beautiful.

She could make music from the fact that sometimes it wasn’t.

That is the blues.

II. So What Exactly Is Blues Music?

A newcomer might hear the word blues and assume:

sad music.

That is only partially correct.

Blues developed within African-American communities, particularly in the American South, drawing upon traditions including work songs, spirituals, field hollers and other African-American musical practices.

Its historical environment matters enormously.

African Americans had endured slavery.

After emancipation came segregation, racist violence, disenfranchisement and severe economic inequality.

The blues emerged from this larger world.

But something remarkable happened.

Suffering did not produce only lamentation.

It produced style.

A singer could take betrayal and make it funny.

Take poverty and make it poetic.

Take loneliness and make it communal.

Take sexual desire and make it mischievous.

Take humiliation and transform it into performance.

The blues therefore contains a beautiful contradiction:

The subject can be miserable while the music makes you feel alive.

III. Why Might Indians Understand the Blues?

Because the Indian subcontinent knows melancholy.

We have entire musical traditions built around longing.

The lover waiting for someone who never arrives.

The migrant remembering home.

The devotee searching for the divine.

The poet drinking after heartbreak.

The farmer singing through labour.

The traveller singing across distance.

The woman singing what respectable society would rather she kept private.

From Punjabi folk traditions to Bengali Baul music, from ghazal to qawwali, from Marathi folk forms to Tamil traditions, from Kabir to Bulleh Shah, South Asia possesses countless examples of ordinary human difficulty becoming extraordinary art.

This does not mean these traditions are historically equivalent to African-American blues.

They aren’t.

Blues belongs to a particular African-American history and deserves to be understood on those terms.

But different peoples can independently discover a similar human technology:

When suffering cannot immediately be eliminated, sometimes it can be sung.

That is where the conversation becomes interesting.

IV. Ma Rainey Would Probably Understand the Indian Train

The railway is one of the great recurring images of blues.

Movement mattered.

People travelled looking for opportunity.

People left relationships.

People escaped circumstances.

People returned home.

People disappeared.

People waited.

And trains became symbols of possibility.

The Indian subcontinent understands this instinctively.

A railway station contains an entire civilisation compressed into a few platforms.

Migrants.

Students.

Soldiers.

Workers.

Families.

Runaways.

Newlyweds.

People carrying everything they own.

People carrying nothing except a backpack.

Indian blues would barely need to invent its imagery.

We already live inside it.

V. The Blues Is Also About Bad Romance

This may be the easiest entry point.

Human beings have apparently been terrible at relationships for quite some time.

Blues singers understood this.

People cheat.

People disappear.

People fall desperately in love with inappropriate people.

Someone wants commitment.

Someone wants freedom.

Someone drinks too much.

Someone lies.

Someone gets jealous.

Someone wakes up and decides:

Enough.

Ma Rainey’s music frequently dealt with adult relationships and sexuality with remarkable directness.

That frankness is part of what makes her interesting even a century later.

In much of South Asian popular culture, romance often becomes monumental.

Destiny.

Marriage.

Family honour.

Sacrifice.

Eternal love.

The blues offers another possibility.

Sometimes your lover was simply terrible.

Write a song about them.

Then charge admission.

VI. Ma Rainey Was More Radical Than That

Her significance also extends into queer cultural history.

Ma Rainey’s songs sometimes played with sexuality and gender expectations, most famously in “Prove It on Me Blues.”

This was the 1920s.

That fact alone should make contemporary audiences reconsider simplistic stories in which every previous generation was culturally identical.

Subcultures have always existed.

Queer people existed.

Rebels existed.

Women who refused conventional femininity existed.

People experimented.

People broke rules.

People created alternative communities.

History is considerably stranger than respectable history books sometimes make it appear.

VII. Blues Without Appropriation

If blues becomes more popular across the Indian subcontinent, one principle should accompany it:

Learn before borrowing.

Blues is not simply a guitar scale.

Its African-American history matters.

Slavery matters.

Reconstruction matters.

Segregation matters.

The Great Migration matters.

Black churches, travelling performers, juke joints, vaudeville circuits and recording industries matter.

People like Ma Rainey matter.

So do later giants including Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King and countless others.

Appreciating blues should therefore begin with listening.

Then reading.

Then understanding.

And only afterward asking:

What could we create from our own lives?

VIII. Don’t Copy Mississippi. Find Your Mississippi.

An Indian blues movement shouldn’t require musicians pretending they grew up in the Mississippi Delta.

That would be theatre.

The more interesting possibility is translating the function of blues rather than copying its historical costume.

What hurts here?

Migration.

Caste discrimination.

Class anxiety.

Unemployment.

Agrarian distress.

Urban loneliness.

Family pressure.

Religious conflict.

Gender expectations.

Bad marriages.

Impossible rents.

Examinations.

Corporate burnout.

Romantic rejection.

Pollution.

Traffic.

Debt.

Parents asking when you are getting married.

Parents asking when you are having children five minutes after you finally get married.

There is sufficient material for several centuries of blues.

IX. Imagine the Subcontinental Blues

Not one genre.

Hundreds.

Bengal Blues.

Poetry, intellectual melancholy, labour history and electric guitar.

Bombay Blues.

Rent, ambition, cinema, migrants and midnight trains.

Punjab Blues.

Migration, farming, masculinity, family and separation.

Delhi Blues.

Power, bureaucracy, status and heartbreak.

Bengaluru Blues.

Software engineers debugging production at 3 AM while simultaneously debugging their relationships.

Karachi Blues.

The sea, megacity life, contradictions, youth and longing.

Dhaka Blues.

Density, labour, modernity and enormous human energy.

Kathmandu Blues.

Mountains, migration, tourism, youth and changing traditions.

Colombo Blues.

Island life, memory, conflict, migration and the ocean.

None would need to imitate America.

They would merely need honesty.

X. Start With Ma Rainey

For someone in the Indian subcontinent encountering early blues for the first time, Ma Rainey is a wonderful doorway because she immediately destroys the stereotype that old music must be polite.

Listen for her personality.

Listen for humour.

Listen for innuendo.

Listen for defiance.

Listen for vulnerability.

Listen to how personal experience becomes theatre.

Then continue outward.

Listen to Bessie Smith.

Explore Robert Johnson.

Move toward Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.

Listen to B.B. King.

Then notice what happened afterward.

Rock and roll did not appear from nowhere.

Neither did much of rock.

Nor soul.

Nor rhythm and blues.

Nor many later developments in popular music.

Follow enough branches of twentieth-century music backwards and eventually you keep encountering African-American musical innovation.

The blues is one of the great roots.

XI. Then Put the Headphones Down

Because eventually cultural appreciation should become cultural creation.

Find a guitar.

A harmonica.

A tabla.

A sarangi.

A dotara.

A keyboard.

A cheap synthesiser.

A laptop.

Or merely your voice.

Don’t ask:

How do I sound American?

Ask:

What haven’t people around me been allowed to sing about?

There is your subject.

What happened in your family?

What happened in your neighbourhood?

What happened at the factory?

What happened after migration?

What happened when you fell in love?

What happened when your lover left?

What happened when society told you to become someone you weren’t?

What happened when you refused?

There is your blues.

XII. The Subcontinent Does Not Lack Pain. It Needs More Permission.

The blues cannot solve poverty.

A song cannot repeal discrimination.

A guitar cannot replace justice.

Music should never become an excuse for accepting suffering that could actually be prevented.

But human beings need something while justice is being built.

We need ways of processing what happened.

We need laughter.

We need nightlife.

We need community.

We need strange people.

We need stages where respectable society does not control every sentence.

And occasionally we need the ancient human pleasure of discovering that someone else has suffered exactly the kind of ridiculous heartbreak we thought belonged exclusively to us.

That is where Ma Rainey still feels astonishingly contemporary.

A Black woman singing in America a century ago cannot tell South Asia what its culture should become.

But she can demonstrate something universal:

Your pain does not have to remain silent.

Name it.

Sing it.

Laugh at it.

Transform it.

And if somebody tells you that respectable people shouldn’t talk about such things—

perhaps turn the amplifier up.

Welcome to the Blues.

Start with Ma Rainey.

Then Bessie Smith.

Then follow the music wherever it takes you.

And somewhere between Mississippi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Lahore, Dhaka, Kathmandu and Colombo, perhaps somebody will eventually create something that belongs completely to neither America nor the old South Asia.

Something new.

Something local.

Something rebellious.

Something painfully honest.

The blues doesn’t need the Indian subcontinent to imitate it.

It merely invites us to discover what we have been afraid to sing.

— Mahakali Tribunal

Intelligence. Justice. Wealth..