COVID-19: ANGOLA REGISTERS 22 RECOVERIES, 11 NEW CASES

 The Angolan health authorities announced Wednesday the recovery of 22 patients, 11 new cases and two deaths, in the last 24 hours.

According to the Secretary of State for Public Health, Franco Mufinda, who was speaking at the usual updating session, amongst the new cases, eight were diagnosed in Luanda, one in Benguela, one in Huambo and one in Cabinda.

The new patients are aged between 7 months and 54 years.

The two deaths, according to the official, were registered in Huíla and Bengo, involving Angolan citizens.

Among those recovered, 10 reside in Luanda, nine in Huambo, two in Kwanza Sul and one in Bié.

The national data registers 20,400 cases, with 496 deaths, 18,951 recovered and 953 active.

Of the active cases, six are critical, eight serious, 71 moderate, 72 mild and 796 asymptomatic.

The laboratories processed 1,087 samples by RT-PCR, with a daily positivity rate of 1 per cent.

At treatment centres, 157 patients are under follow-up, 43 are in institutional quarantine and 1,647 contacts of positive cases are under medical surveillance.

Mass testing v lockdown: How France and Germany’s approaches to Covid radically diverged

 The neighbouring countries - currently engaged in a Covid-related border discussion - have taken very different approaches to the health crisis. Emma Pearson in Paris and Rachel Loxton in Berlin discuss the situation in their respective countries.

What’s the situation in both countries?

France emerged from its second nationwide lockdown on December 15th and at present the government is resisting pressure for a third. Cases in France are described as a ‘high plateau’ – they have been roughly stable at around 20,000 new cases a day since mid-December, although the past week has seen a small but steady fall. Pressure on hospitals is high but currently manageable with 65 percent of intensive care beds occupied by Covid patients.

Although France is not on lockdown, plenty of restrictions remain in place, including a nationwide 6pm to 6am curfew while bars, restaurants, cafés, gyms, theatres, cinemas, museums and tourist attractions have all been closed since October. However schools are open, meeting friends for dinner and drinks is allowed in their homes and outside (although caution advised) and during the February school holiday people can travel around France. Public gatherings are restricted to a maximum of 10 people and authorities only recommend private ones not exceed six (plus kids).

Germany went into a ‘lockdown light’ in November, closing restaurants, bars and cafes (except for takeaway), as well as gyms and cultural facilities. Contact restrictions were also tightened. Since then the measures have got progressively tougher, leading to the current situation (dubbed a ‘hard lockdown’ by German media) which includes the closure of non-essential shops.

Although households are allowed to meet one other person, people in Germany have been told to stay at home as often as possible, keep social contacts down to a minimum, avoid travel and work from home.

Schools closed in mid-December but are beginning to slowly open up again across states. Currently we’re seeing less than 10,000 Covid-19 cases a day, but there are still hundreds of daily deaths. The number of cases per 100,000 residents in seven days stands at around 50-60 – a huge improvement from just before Christmas when it was up at 200. Germany is aiming to get the incidence rate down to 35 before more things can open.

France v Germany: How have their responses differed?

Emma: So Rach, during the first wave and over the summer all we heard was how brilliantly Germany was handling everything, what happened?

Rachel: This is so true. Basically Germany had a really good handle on things, carrying out lots of free testing, including on returning travellers, and contact tracing was going well after the first spring lockdown. But the country dropped the ball near the end of summer when Covid cases started picking up. At this point no action was taken and that’s where things went wrong. In fact even Angela Merkel last week admitted that authorities had been too hesitant to bring in measures when the numbers started creeping up.

Then we got into a situation where exponential growth was happening and eventually the ‘lockdown light’ was brought in at the start of November. That was meant to last for a month and was billed as a measure to ‘save Christmas’. How wrong was that… numbers got quite out of control for a while (more than 30,000 cases a day at times) and we reached a peak just before Christmas, but now numbers are coming down.

Source: Our World in Data. Keep in mind that factors such as different testing means countries cannot be directly compared.

Didn’t France experience a similar out of control situation in autumn/winter?

Emma: Yes, we had a big second wave of cases and a second lockdown in October/November. While most of Europe was living a relatively free life we were back in lockdown from October 30th. This wasn’t quite as strict as our spring lockdown, schools stayed open and more people were able to continue working but it was still a ‘stay home’ order and we needed a form every time we left the home.

France had a peak of hospital patients in the spring and another in October

When we locked down, we had 50,000 new cases a day and hospital intensive care units were at 95 percent capacity, so we really had no choice. Our target was to get down to 5,000 cases a day before reopening. We didn’t quite manage that but the government decided to lift the lockdown on December 15th anyway, even though we were still at around 12,000 cases a day by then.

So what happens next in Germany? Do you have a roadmap out of lockdown?

Rachel: Well… yes and no. Current measures in Germany were recently extended until at least March 7th, but there are a few changes. Hairdressers can open from March 1st (because the government said they were needed for personal hygiene reasons and who are we to argue with that) and schools have already started reopening.

Merkel says that reopening public life and reintroducing more social contact will happen step by step so the situation will be monitored to watch for Covid-19 variants spreading. But we don’t know exactly how that will happen yet and which things will open up first. Personally I’m really looking forward to cafes, restaurants, gyms and cinemas opening again.

What about France?  Are you on your way to ‘normal’ life?

Emma: Hmmmm, it’s hard to say really. We have been on this ‘high plateau’ of around 20,000 cases a day for well over a month now. On the plus side it’s not getting worse so it doesn’t seem likely that we’re going back into lockdown unless something changes, but on the other hand it’s not really getting better either so we don’t have much of a plan to reopen.

This week has seen a small but sustained fall in cases – from about 20,000 a day to around 18,000 a day. If that continues, there is some talk about reopening cultural venues on a limited basis and we are having a couple of ‘experimental’ concerts in the spring, but there’s no talk of an imminent reopening of bars or cafés.

Personally I’m also a bit worried about the school holidays, which are happening right now and a lot of people are travelling. I hope this doesn’t lead to a post-holiday spike.

Emma: Testing seems to be a big difference between France and Germany. France’s mass testing rollout was comparatively late and even by the summer we had plenty of testing centres but people were waiting up to 10 days for results – kind of defeating the point.

But since then France seems to have really got itself together and testing is now widely available – either PCR tests at testing centres or the rapid-result antigen tests at the pharmacy. All tests are also 100 percent reimbursed in the French health system – apparently we’re the only European country apart from Denmark to offer totally free tests.

I’ve had three tests in total, each time before I travelled to another region of France or visited someone in a high risk group – and they really are very easy to access. In the week before Christmas France tested three million people, mostly people getting precautionary tests like me, and that was widely credited with avoiding a post-Christmas spike in cases.

Rachel: Wow, I’ve never had a Covid test! Germany has just announced it is going to ramp up its testing and bring in free rapid tests for all. This is a really big change of strategy after scaling back on testing through winter due to worries that labs couldn’t handle processing all the tests.

The hope is that more testing will allow some kind of normal life to return. Self-administered testing will also be brought in and that should be helpful for schools to detect outbreaks. I’m interested to see how this will all work and what impact it will have on our lives.

I’m hopeful it will allow us to travel a bit more and see people, as it seems like has been the case in France.

Emma: How’s Germany’s vaccine programme going? It’s fair to say that France hasn’t really covered itself in glory here, the start to our programme was painfully slow – we jabbed about 700 people in the first week.

Rachel: Well, in Germany it hasn’t been great either. We have shortages in vaccine doses until April and it’s led to vaccination centres lying empty. But they are getting a fair amount of people vaccinated. So far about 2.9 people (4.4 percent of the population) have been given a dose, with around 1.5 million receiving both doses.

Germany says every adult will be offered a vaccine by September 21st. Does France have an aim? I’ve also heard people are more sceptical about receiving a vaccine in France, is this true?

Emma: We’re speeding up a bit on vaccines now, so far 2.3 million people have had their first dose and 800,000 their second. In terms of second doses – ie when people are fully vaccinated – we’re actually about level with the UK, although they’re miles ahead of us on first jabs, around 12 million people. Looks like we’re also behind you guys.

Vaccine scepticism is certainly an issue in France, some polls show only 40 percent of people saying they will definitely be vaccinated. That rate seems to be falling a bit now though. In fact once it became obvious how slow the rollout was a lot more people seemed to be demanding the vaccine – leading some people to joke that the French government had done it deliberately, knowing that the one way to make the French want something is to tell them they can’t have it!

The target is that everyone is offered the vaccine by the end of August. I’m hoping that the French vaccine programme will be like the testing – a slow and shambolic start but impressive once it gets going. We’ll see.

Source: Our World in Data.

Emma: We should maybe talk about the border – is Germany really going to close its French border?

Rachel: Honestly I think they might if they believe the situation in France’s Moselle region is getting worse. Germany has really gone hard on travel bans and border closures recently. Major restrictions were just brought in to the Austrian and Czech Republic border. We also have travel bans against arrivals from other Covid-19 variant areas of concern, including the UK, Portugal, South Africa and Brazil.

Rachel: Does France have any bans in place against Covid-19 variant countries?

Emma: Yeah, loads. Travel to and from all non-EU countries (including the UK) is pretty much banned apart from a very short list of essential reasons. You can travel from within the EU, but most people still need a negative Covid test to enter.

I haven’t seen my family in the UK for more than a year now, I imagine it’s the same for you?

Rachel: Yes, it’s the same for me. I’m desperate to go back.

READ ALSO: The charts and maps that explain the state of the pandemic in Germany

Emma: How do Germans feel about the government response? Is there anger at the government or are people pretty accepting of the limitations?

Rachel: People are quite accepting overall but everyone is very weary of this lockdown situation.

It’s gone on for so long and everyone is very tired. The thing is, though, that people really trust Merkel and she’s a scientist. So usually if Merkel says something is a good idea, people will follow. I think Merkel admitting the government made mistakes and the slow vaccine rollout does make people feel a bit uneasy.

What do people think about the government in France?

Emma: Well, the French in general are not shy about criticising their government! I think Macron certainly doesn’t have the same kind of trust capital that Merkel does.

That said, I’ve actually been quite surprised how little mass protest there has been over the last year. I would not have predicted that the Dutch would riot over a curfew while the French (mostly) accepted it.

That said, I think if there is another lockdown or if the vaccine doesn’t speed up we will see a lot more dissent.

Emma: So when do you reckon Germany is likely to reopen properly? God, I could kill for an evening drinking beers with mates in a loud bar…

Rachel: Me too! I think a lot of things will have reopened by around Easter but some scientists in Germany are worried about a third wave due to the Covid variants so I’m crossing my fingers that doesn’t happen.

If all goes to plan then hopefully summer will be a good one as all vulnerable people should have been vaccinated by then. I have no idea when they will be able to allow big gatherings again. Maybe after everyone’s been vaccinated.

What about France?

Emma: I think summer too, most people in vulnerable groups should have been vaccinated by then and the summer holiday is culturally important in France. I feel reasonably confident I will get some time on the beach this summer.

Tanzania: Vice President Zanzibar’s Seif Sharif Hamad dies weeks after getting Covid

 The vice-president of Tanzania’s semi-autonomous islands of Zanzibar has died, nearly three weeks after his party said he had contracted Covid-19.

No official reason has been given for the death of Seif Sharif Hamad, popularly known as Maalim Seif, at the age of 77.

He was the most prominent politician in Tanzania to have openly declared that he had the virus.

Health experts have accused the authorities in Tanzania of downplaying the threat posed by Covid-19.

Tanzanian President John Magufuli has called for prayers and herbal remedies to counter it.

Mr Hamad was a senior member of the opposition ACT Wazalendo party, which has been critical of the government’s policy on Covid.

The BBC’s Aboubakar Famau looks back at Mr Hamad’s life.

Thousands of supporters of Mr Hamad would flock to political rallies in Zanzibar just to catch a glimpse of him.

His eloquence, charisma and obvious power while on the political stage made him a force to be reckoned with.

This former teacher – hence his name, Maalim, meaning “teacher” in Swahili – would attract both men and women, young and old, rich and poor, to his rallies. They would all be clad in party regalia, chanting political slogans.

“We are where you are,” they would shout in a demonstration of their unwavering loyalty and dedication.

But they regarded him as more than a politician. They saw him as a fatherly figure who relentlessly fought for their rights.

And they were loyal to him rather than to his party, which was evident last year when Mr Hamad decided to leave the Civic United Front (Cuf), in which he had served as general secretary since its formation in 1992.

Six unsuccessful presidential bids

His departure was over an internal wrangle and thousands of his supporters followed him to the ACT-Wazalendo party.

He started his political life as a member of the governing Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party, but was expelled in 1988 after falling out with the leadership.

While with CCM, he served as Zanzibar’s chief minister between 1984 and 1988. The position was later renamed vice-president.

In opposition, he ran unsuccessfully for president of Zanzibar six times. Some of the polls were marred by irregularities and gross human rights abuses.

The worst post-poll violence was in January 2001 where more than a dozen of his supporters were shot dead on the island of Pemba as they were protesting against the results of the 2000 election.

Nevertheless, it was obvious that time was running out as illness and age were both taking their toll on Mr Hamad.

Source: BBC News

Chad: At least 35 killed in herder-farmer clashes

 Clashes took place in Salamat province where farmers were attacked when they encountered a roadblock.

Thirty-five people have been killed in fighting between semi-nomadic herders and farmers in southeastern Chad in recent days, according to a senior official.

The deaths occurred in Salamat province where farmers were attacked when they encountered a roadblock, provincial secretary-general Mara Maad told AFP news agency on Wednesday.

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The farmer blamed local cattle herders and launched an attack on them on Monday, prompting authorities to send in troops who restored order the same day, Maad added.

The “inter-community clashes have caused 35 deaths, including a soldier”, Maad said.

Herders and sedentary farmers have a long and troubled history in southern Chad, where weapons exist in large numbers and violence often flares after cattle destroy crops.

Previous deadly incidents

In November last year, 22 people were killed in herder-farmer clashes in Kabbia, which is also in the south, while nearly 50 were killed in ethnic conflicts across Chad in the following two months.

In a speech on December 31, Chadian President Idriss Deby Itno said he was “distressed” and “dismayed” by deadly clashes that had occurred in recent months.

Political scientist Evariste Ngarlem Tolde told AFP news agency such clashes had taken on “worrying proportions” in recent years.

“Local authorities have a flagrant bias since they keep herds, which doesn’t help amicable settlement of these inter-community conflicts,” he said.

Nigeria: Bandits kidnap 42, kill one in boarding school ambush

 Gunmen have killed a school pupil and abducted 27 other children in a night-time raid on their boarding school in north-central Nigeria, state governor Abubakar Sani Bello has said.

Three members of staff and 12 of their relatives were also abducted, he added.

About 600 boys were asleep in their dormitories when the school in Kagara town in Niger state was raided, the principal Danasabe Ubaidu told the BBC.

The security forces have been deployed to help with rescue operations.

The motive for the attack is unclear, but criminal gangs often carry out kidnappings for ransom in parts of Nigeria, says the BBC’s Ishaq Khalid in the capital Abuja.

On Monday about 20 people who were returning from a wedding ceremony were abducted after an attack on their bus in Niger state. Their fate is unclear.

In December more than 300 schoolboys were seized in the town of Kankara in the north-western state of Katsina. They were later released following negotiations with the gunmen.

In the latest attack, the gunmen wore military uniforms and stormed the state-run boarding school for boys in huge numbers, before taking students into a nearby forest, the AFP news agency quoted an unnamed security source and an official as saying.

Troops with aerial support were trying to track down the attackers, AFP quoted the security source as saying.

Mr. Ubaidu told the BBC that some of the children had managed to flee into nearby bushes and were now returning.

An uncle of four children at the school said that all his nephews survived, but another pupil was killed.

“They told us that some people in military uniforms knocked at the doors of their dormitories and asked them to come out for morning assembly. But the students dispersed in different directions.

“One of them said his colleague was shot dead beside him by the gunmen as he tried to flee,” the uncle said in an interview with BBC Hausa.

Describing the attack as “cowardly”, Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari said he had deployed a team of security chiefs to co-ordinate rescue operations.

Mr. Buhari has been under intense pressure to tackle insecurity, including an insurgency by militant Islamists in the north-east. Those militants have also been involved in the mass abductions of schoolchildren.

Source: BBC News

US: Severe cold, power outages cause major water problems

 About 7 million people in Texas – a quarter of the United States’s second-most populous state – have been told to boil their water or stop using it entirely as homeowners, hospitals, and businesses grappled with broken water mains, burst pipes and power outages.

Winter storms during the past week in the Midwest, Texas and the South forced water service providers to scramble to manage flows as sub-freezing temperatures set in. Nearly 3.4 million customers around the US were still without electricity on Wednesday.

The Texas city of Kyle, south of Austin, asked residents on Wednesday to suspend water usage until further notice because of a shortage.

“Water should only be used to sustain life at this point,” the city of 45,000 said in an advisory. “We are close to running out of water supply in Kyle.”

In Memphis, Tennessee, the power and water company asked residents to reduce their water usage through Friday.

Memphis, Light, Gas & Water (MLG&W) said in a news release that it is experiencing reduced pressure across its distribution system due to freezing temperatures this week.

The utility also said it is seeing reduced reservoir levels at pumping stations and several water mains have burst.

Oklahoma City officials said on Twitter that power outages and extremely low temperatures had caused water service interruption and low pressure for customers. Crews helped turn off water for thousands of customers who had their private water lines break.

Three hospitals in Shreveport, Louisiana, lost water because of the storm, KSLA-TV reported. City fire trucks delivered water and officials were getting bottled water for patients and staff.

In the southwestern Louisiana city of Lake Charles, hospitals were faced with the possibility they might have to transfer patients to other areas because of low water pressure that followed a power outage, Mayor Nic Hunter said.

The cold snap, which has killed at least 21 people, is not expected to let up until this weekend. The deep freeze has also shut in about one-fifth of the nation’s refining capacity and closed oil and natural gas production across Texas.

The outages in Texas also affected power generation in Mexico, with exports of US natural gas via pipeline dropping off by about 75 percent over the last week, according to preliminary Refinitiv Eikon data. Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed the state’s natural gas providers not to ship outside Texas and asked state regulators to enforce that ban, prompting reviews.

The Mexican government called the top US representative in Mexico on Wednesday to press for natural gas supplies as power cuts hit millions in northern Mexico.

Major automobile manufacturers shut operations temporarily because they lacked sufficient natural gas to operate plants.

‘Nearing a failed state’

The weather also caused major disruptions to water systems in the Texas cities of Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Fort Worth, Galveston and Corpus Christi.

In Austin, residents were told Wednesday night to boil their water after the city’s largest treatment plant lost power.

The worst US outages by far have been in Texas, where 3 million homes and businesses remained without power as of midday on Wednesday.

Austin Energy, the local power company in the capital city of 950,000, said tens of thousands of area customers were also without electricity. Although they were able to start restoring power in some spots, it was not expected to stay on indefinitely.

Houston residents were also told to boil their water – if they had power to do so – because of a major drop in water pressure linked to the weather.

Beto O’Rourke, a former Democratic presidential candidate from Texas, told MSNBC television the situation in the Lone Star State was “worse than you are hearing”.

“Folks have gone days now without electricity. They’re suffering,” he said.

“So much of this was avoidable,” O’Rourke added.

“The energy capital of North America cannot provide the energy needed to warm and power people’s homes in this great state. We are nearing a failed state in Texas.”

Meanwhile, people criticised former Republican presidential candidate and Texas senator, Ted Cruz, for allegedly leaving the state on a family holiday.

“Cruz seems to believe there isn’t much for him to do in Texas for the millions of fellow Texans who remain without electricity/water and are literally freezing,” said journalist David Shuster  on Twitter.

SOURCE : NEWS AGENCIES

The forgotten story of America’s first black superstars

 On Valentine’s Day 1920, a little over a century ago, a 28-year-old singer named Mamie Smith walked into a recording studio in New York City and made history. Six months later, she did it again.

The music industry had previously assumed that African Americans wouldn’t buy record players, therefore there was no point in recording black artists. The entrepreneurial songwriter Perry Bradford, a man so stubborn he was known as “Mule”, knew better. “There’s 14 million Negroes in our great country and they will buy records if recorded by one of their own,” he told Fred Hagar at Okeh Records. When a white singer dropped out of a recording session at the last minute, Bradford convinced Hagar to take a chance on Smith, a Cincinnati-born star of the Harlem club scene, and scored a substantial hit. Bradford then decided to use Smith to popularise a form of music that had been packing out venues in the South for almost 20 years. On 10 August, Smith and an ad hoc band called the Jazz Hounds recorded Bradford’s Crazy Blues. Thus the first black singer to record anything also became the first to record the blues.

Rarely has the music industry’s received wisdom been upended by a single hit. By selling an estimated one million copies in its first year, Crazy Blues was like the first geyser of oil in untapped ground, instantly revealing a huge appetite for records made by and for black people. As labels such as Okeh, Paramount and Columbia rushed into the so-called “race records” market, they snapped up dozens of women like Smith, (“Queen of the Blues”), including Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (“Mother of the Blues”), Bessie Smith (“Empress of the Blues”), Ida Cox (“Uncrowned Queen of the Blues”), Ethel Waters, Sara Martin, Edith Wilson, Victoria Spivey, Sippie Wallace and Alberta Hunter. “One of the phonograph companies made over four million dollars on the Blues,” reported The Metronome in 1922. “Now every phonograph company has a coloured girl recording. Blues are here to stay.” The classic blues was African-American culture’s first mainstream breakthrough and, for several years, it was effectively a female art form.

A century later, however, it’s a different story. The reputation of Bessie Smith, the subject of a newly updated 1997 biography by Jackie Kay, was kept alive by prominent admirers such as Janis Joplin and Nina Simone, while Rainey’s was revived by August Wilson’s 1982 play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and, more recently, by George C Wolfe’s movie adaptation. The rest are largely forgotten. The history of the blues is dominated by men.

Mamie Smith, pictured with her band the Jazz Hounds, was the first black singer to make a record (Credit: Getty Images)

This eclipse is the result of a concerted effort by cultural gatekeepers, across several decades, to valorise certain aspects of the African-American experience while denigrating others. The female blues singers were on the losing side of a long, complicated argument about what the blues should be.

‘Life’s way of talking’

The man who published the sheet music for Crazy Blues was WC Handy, a songwriter, businessman and self-proclaimed “Father of the Blues”. In 1903, he recalled in his 1941 autobiography, he was sitting in a railroad station in Tutwiler, Mississippi when he heard a man playing “the weirdest music I had ever heard” on a guitar, using a knife blade as a capo. Handy’s anonymous musician now resembles the archetypal bluesman: a solitary, enigmatic vagrant, singing songs of “suffering and hard luck” to nobody but himself. In 1920, however, a loner with a knife wasn’t going to help the commercially savvy Handy break the music industry’s colour barrier. He turned instead to the flamboyant women who had honed their craft on the vaudeville and tent-show circuits, where the blues would be mixed up with comedy songs and dramatic routines – professional entertainers who knew how to delight a crowd.

One such woman was Gertrude Pridgett, aka Ma Rainey, who had been performing the blues for more than 20 years when she recorded her first session for Paramount in 1923 at the age of 37. Her journey from Georgia to Chicago in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom represents the Great Migration of hundreds of thousands of black people from the rural South to the urban North during that period. Those migrants craved music that built a bridge between their old and new lives. The classic blues, sometimes known as “vaudeville blues” or “city blues,” was a hybrid of rural folk and urban pop, southern roots and cosmopolitan panache. Broadly speaking, the playing was slick, the rhythms hot, the songwriting polished, the lyrics tough and ironic, the stagewear glamorous and the stars overwhelmingly female. As one 1926 study observed, “upwards of 75% of the songs are written from a woman’s point of view. Among the blues singers who have gained more or less national recognition there is scarcely a man’s name to be found.”

Gertrude “Ma” Rainey was one of several black women who dominated the classic blues – African-American culture’s first mainstream breakthrough (Credit: Getty Images)

August Wilson’s Rainey calls the blues “life’s way of talking”. For black, working-class women, the classic blues was an unprecedented new arena of self-expression which gave voice to overt sexuality, the peril of abusive men (like Bessie Smith’s husband), and even queer perspectives. Bessie Smith had affairs with several chorus girls while Ma Rainey sang, in 1928’s Prove It on Me, “I went out last night with a crowd of my friends/ It must’ve been women, ’cause I don’t like no men/ Wear my clothes just like a fan/ Talk to the gals just like any old man.” One musician even claimed Rainey and Smith were romantically involved at one point.

Smith’s versatile blues encompassed gallows humour (Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair), social commentary (Poor Man’s Blues), salty innuendo (Kitchen Man) and lusty good times (Gimme a Pigfoot). The Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes wrote that Bessie conveyed “sadness… not softened with tears, but hardened with laughter, the absurd, incongruous laughter of a sadness without even a god to appeal to.” In concert, Smith and her peers sang directly to the women who heard themselves in these songs and responded with cries of “Say it, sister!”

The scholar Angela Davis calls Bessie Smith “the first real ‘superstar’ in African-American popular culture” (Credit: Getty Images)

Like rappers decades later, the classic blues singers were flashy avatars of liberation and aspiration. “I feel my audiences want to see me becomingly gowned,” said Mamie Smith, who liked to perform in diamonds and furs, “and I have spared no expense or pains in frequenting the shops of the most fashionable modists in America.” Rainey performed in ostrich feathers and a triple necklace of gold coins. Bessie Smith earned more, and spent more, than anybody else. Hard-drinking, hedonistic, recklessly generous and sometimes violent, she sold a record-breaking 780,000 copies of her debut single, 1923’s Downhearted Blues, in just six months and bought her own Pullman railway car to travel in. The scholar Angela Davis calls her “the first real ‘superstar’ in African-American popular culture.”

The explosive popularity of classic blues discs was a democratic revolution. As Marybeth Hamilton writes in her excellent book In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions, “Once only encountered at house parties and barn dances, on street corners and the black showbiz circuit, the blues could now be heard pouring out of speakeasies, nightclubs, houses, apartments, drug stores and barbershops, hardware stores and funeral parlours, anywhere race records were played or sold.”

‘It just went down’

But many scholars of African-American culture, black and white alike, were horrified by the rise of the Victrola record player and the music it played. In their eyes, the mechanical reproduction of the blues symbolised the spiritual corruption of black people by cities, factories and commerce – in short, the modern age. For the writer Zora Neale Hurston, “His Negroness is being rubbed off by close contact with white culture.”

These scholars and folklorists saw the “real” blues, by contrast, as a vanishing oral tradition from the rural South that needed to be captured and preserved before it disappeared completely. “The songs may live,” wrote one critic in 1926, “but the best thing of all, the free impulse, the pattern of careless voices happily inventing as they go, if it dies it cannot be resurrected.” Whereas the likes of Ma Rainey travelled to the city to record their music, song collectors moved in the opposite direction, taking their recording devices to the South in order to capture what the leading folklorist John Lomax called “sound-photographs of Negro songs, rendered in their own native element”.

Some scholars and folklorists like Zora Neale Hurston saw these popular recordings as a spiritual corruption of the blues (Credit: Getty Images)

This preservationist instinct may have been valid but the assumptions that underpinned it were often paternalistic and segregationist: derived from the singing of slaves, the oral blues was the product of naive, untutored imaginations that would wither on contact with modernity, so they had to be protected, like rare orchids. While black people who migrated from the Jim Crow South were looking for a better future, the folklorists sentimentally fetishised the agony and mystery of the past they had left behind. This problematic assumption has since resurfaced in writing about soul music and hip hop: the sound of suffering is considered more powerful and real than the sound of defiant enjoyment; pain is more authentic than pleasure.

This obsession with the “genuine” black experience proved fatal for the classic blues. In 1926, Blind Lemon Jefferson became the first solo singer-guitarist to have a hit record (Paramount’s advertisement promised “a real, old-fashioned blues, by a real, old-fashioned blues singer”) and he set a new fashion for earthier “country blues,” followed by Blind Blake, Big Bill Broonzy, Lonnie Johnson and Furry Lewis. With no need for backing bands or stage costumes, the men were much cheaper, too. As Jackie Kay puts it in her biography, “These old bluesmen are considered the genuine article while the women are fancy dress.” At the same time, the classic blues singers were too working-class and sexually frank for some of the urban middle classes. Black Swan, the first black-owned record label, rejected Bessie Smith for being too vulgar, while a leading black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, complained that these “filth furnishers” and “purveyors of putrid puns” were “a hindrance to our standard of respectability and success”.

The classic blues singers were already in decline when the Great Depression finished them off. By 1933, record sales were just 7% of what they had been in 1929 and many of the theatres had closed or been turned into movie theatres. Urban listeners, meanwhile, were abandoning blues for the faster, more sophisticated sound of swing, represented in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom by Chadwick Boseman’s young, impatient Levee. They didn’t need that bridge to the South anymore. According to Thomas Dorsey, the gospel blues pioneer who used to play in Rainey’s band, “It collapsed… I don’t know what happened to the blues, they seemed to drop it all at once, it just went down.”

Erasing women’s voices

As a new generation of black female singers broke through in the 1930s – Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Memphis Minnie – some of the first wave sought refuge in other branches of showbusiness. Victoria Spivey appeared in King Vidor’s 1929 movie Hallelujah, one of the first studio pictures to feature an entirely black cast. Ethel Waters became, at one point, the highest-paid actress on Broadway. Only a handful were still making blues records in the 1930s. Mamie Smith retired in 1931. Rainey was dropped by Paramount in 1928 and returned to the Southern tent circuit, her stolen gold necklace replaced by imitation pearls. Bessie Smith recorded one last session in 1933, for one-sixth of the fee she used to command, before she died after a car crash in 1937.

Some classic blues singers sought refuge in acting – Ethel Waters, pictured in 1943’s Cabin in the Sky, was at one time the highest paid actress on Broadway (Credit: Getty Images)

As if their enforced retirement weren’t bad enough, these women suffered the double indignity of being retrospectively sidelined. The “Blues Mafia” clique of record collectors (all white, all men) who established the blues canon after World War Two scorned the 1920s hits as commercial junk and sought out the obsolete flops that nobody else cared about. They sincerely loved this music but its unpopularity certainly enhanced its mystique, as did the murky sound that came from recording it on cheap equipment and pressing it on cheap plastic. It sounded like music from the margins, unloved and misunderstood. As the leading collector James McKune wrote, it was “archaic in the best sense… gnarled, rough-hewn and eminently uncommercial.” Delta blues singers such as Charley Patton, Skip James, Son House and Robert Johnson slotted into the post-war counterculture’s worship of untameable outcasts who lived tough, rootless lives a million miles away from bourgeois conformity. Like the man WC Handy spotted at Tutwiler station, their alienation guaranteed their authenticity.

Ironically, the records that the Blues Mafia dedicated themselves to rescuing from obscurity have become far more famous than the smash hits of the 1920s. Male country blues resonated with rock’s singer-songwriters in a way that the classic blues never could. While a few women, notably Victoria Spivey and Edith Wilson, lived long enough to return to the stage during the 1960s blues revival, the likes of Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones were far more interested in the hardbitten men of the Delta. “It is surely no accident that so many of the early blues performers that revivalists scorned as inauthentic were women; to them, authenticity had a male voice,” writes Hamilton.

The early blues women were sidelined by the “Blues Mafia” who championed Delta blues singers such as Robert Johnson, Skip James and Son House [pictured] (Credit: Getty Images)

For all its obsession with the “real”, the 1960s blues revival was built on a series of myths. It portrayed the Mississippi Delta as a land lost in time, closer in spirit to the slavery era than to modern America. It elevated flops while ignoring the music that black consumers had actually enjoyed. It imagined the performers as men who sang their pain without concern for attention or financial reward, even though, in reality, they would very much have liked both. Blues enthusiasts often spoke of these men as if they were revenants or creatures from folklore rather than real people, hence the old myth that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil. The qualities represented by the classic female blues singers – resilience, solidarity, community, fun – could not compete. As George Melly, one of the few critics to take the classic blues seriously in the 1960s, wrote, “there is a proportion of the worthless, the mechanical, the contrived, but there is also a gaiety, a vitality, a sense of good time.”

Every form of historical revisionism has its winners and losers. In rejecting the blues’ relationship to big-city showbusiness, the conventional narrative all but erased women’s voices and experiences. Jackie Kay’s book and George C Wolfe’s film are important reminders of the period when the blues was mass-market party music and its reigning stars were women, proud and majestic in feathers and gold.

BBC