Abstract
Blues woman Ida Goodson remembered her parents making clear to her that “The Devil’s got his work and God’s got his work.” In the Goodson household, blues was definitely the devil’s work. Consequently, when growing up, Goodson had to hide from her parents the fact that she played blues on her piano.2 Mary Johnson tells of how she was torn between going to church and earning money, so from time to time she “would go back to the church [and] quit singin’ the blues.”3 Sippie Wallace recalls how she wavered between the church and blues. When, as a little girl, she determined she wanted to become a blues singer, she says she did not think she could do so because she “was in the church.”4 This tension between the church and blues followed Wallace throughout her career even after she left blues to become a church musician. Wallace was not unlike other blues women—or men, for that matter. Although many of the blues singers recognized the intrinsic relationship between spirituals and blues, and developed their singing talents in the church (especially black women), they also recognized that singing blues meant that they were condemned by the church.
“Ah, the Devil’s gonna get you, the way you carryin’ on”1
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Notes
Paul Oliver, ed. Conversations with the Blues (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 178.
Quoted in Paul Oliver, ed. Conversations with the Blues (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 177.
Quoted in Paul Oliver, ed. Conversations with the Blues (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 177.
Jon Michael Spencer, Blues and Evil (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 63ff.
“The Negro Church [Essay]” originally published in The Crisis in 1912 reprinted in Du Bois on Religion, ed. Phil Zuckerman (Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 2000), 45.
Milton C. Sernett, Bound For the Promised Land (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 87.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 176.
Gayraud Wilmore, Black Religon and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious Hisoty of African Americans, 3rd edition (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1998), 170.
Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves 1894–1994, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 72.
Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices (New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 1941), 135.
Benjamin E. Mays, Born to Rebel: An Autobiography (Athens, GA: University Georgia Press 2003, original copyright 1971), 13.
Ma Rainey, “Ya Da Do” Paramount, 1924. Reissued Ma Rainey: Mother of the Blues. JSP Records, 2007.
Ma Rainey, “Blues the World Forgot, Part 2” 1928. Reissued Ma Rainey Mother of the Blues, JSP Records, JSP7793D, 2007.
Bruce Cook, Listen to the Blues (New York: Scribner, 1975), 204.
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© 2012 Kelly Brown Douglas
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Douglas, K.B. (2012). The Devil’s Gonna Get You. In: Black Bodies and the Black Church. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137091437_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137091437_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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