Historical overviews, observed through a contemporary lens, can serve to highlight how things have changed over time, and how they haven’t. This certainly applies to ones which focus on marginalised communities, as does Darryl W. Bullock’s Queer Blues – an involving, sometimes speculative history of American blues musicians whose LGBTQ+ proclivities defied the cultural taboos of that century-ago era.
The title is a case in point: in the 1920s, when most of the acts discussed here were at their peak, ‘queer’ was not yet in common circulation as a pejorative, let alone a reclaimed one, and so rarely appears in Bullock’s text. Various slang terms of the day perform an equivalent role, used as slurs by a deeply homophobic outside world and deployed with knowing love by those who attended the raucous buffet flats, speakeasies, rent parties and prototypical drag balls under pain of arrest (the concurrent era of Prohibition is a further confounding factor).
You won’t need a forensic knowledge of blues history to have heard of many featured names in Queer Blues, such as Bessie Smith: a national star in her pomp, lauded posthumously and scarcely inclined to hide her eye for the ladies. Others, like Porter Grainger, have been less well served by historians, but his genderfluid (to, again, use modern parlance) image runs counter to the gruff, macho aesthetic that’s often lazily tied to the genre. Much of this lore is misty and anecdotal, and so there are occasions where queerness is conferred by little more than an arguable interpretation of this or that lyric – but Bullock, whose previous books have also explored the last century’s hidden LGBTQ+ musical history, surely knows there’s a place for such theorising in this area.
Queer Blues: The Hidden Figures Of Early Blues Music, Darryl W. Bullock (Omnibus)
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words NOEL GARDNER