Dec 23, 2020
Ma Rainey wants her Coca-Cola. The microphones have been set up in the Chicago studio, her small band have rehearsed and taken their places, the two white men who run the label have the needle ready to cut the acetate, but Ma Rainey won’t sing until she gets her ice-cold Coca-Cola. Everyone pleads with her, but she won’t relent. So two musicians are dispatched to retrieve cold beverages for her while everybody else just waits. It’s a small scene in
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the new film adaptation of August Wilson’s 1982 play, but later Rainey (played with ferocious adamancy by Viola Davis) explains her reasons for delaying the session: If she has power, she is going to exert it. If she is going to let white men profit from her voice, she is going to exact as high a price as possible. Even if it’s just a Coca-Cola.
Ma Rainey
Check out this track! Ma Rainey’s ‘See See Rider Blues’, in which the primordial germ of rock ‘n’ roll lives.
Chicago blues
Heyday: 1950s and 1960s
Muddy Waters (Getty)
What is it:With US cities on the skids following the Great Depression, life was still tough. It’s no wonder the blues took a turn towards the dirt again. Unlike urban blues, this music was performed on the street and at so-called ‘rent parties’, where tenants would stage gigs to raise the money to pay their landlords. Though blossoming across the Midwest, the blues artists made Chicago the genre’s epicentre, and most of the most highfalutin’ names in US blues lived there. Their amplified, guitar-heavy vision of the blues set a template for popular music that’s still in action today.