Social Class and Justice in Bessie Smith’s ‘Washwoman’s Blues’: How Jazz followed the Lower Class during the Harlem Renaissance.

By Amanda Schlicht

A rupture, a cultural fracture and a vocal disruption to the white voice; jazz embodies the subjectivity and integral expression of the Black body. Centred in Congo Square, the genre found movement in New Orleans as slaves gravitated toward their own markets and grounds of dance where the necessity of a moment to sing took hold. Decades later, the migration from southern plantations to northern cities facilitated the Harlem Renaissance. The movement’s emergence in intellect, the arts, and political scholarship shaped Black culture and, most importantly, the Black voice in its encounter with modernity and its afflictions.

“There is little social protest in the blues... There is complaint, but protest is stifled... The oppressive weight of prejudice is so constricting that it is not surprising to find little protest in the blues”. 

Charters’ study is hardly surprising as criticism became intrinsic to Black expression, yet it draws upon Fred Moten’s ‘Aunt Hester’s Scream’; the Black voice being commodified, stifled, unwilling, or impossible. Mutilated, their ‘protest’ of speech signals the lack of conveyance the Black voice is able to carry as Charters’ denotation of ‘complaint’ summarises societal treatment, ridding their identity of repression and indignation instead. Paul Oliver’s slew of targeted language adds to such harmful notions: “That the number of protest blues is small is in part the result of the [...] acceptance of the stereotypes that have been cut for him”.

Regarded as “The Empress of Blues”, Bessie Smith tonally situates her blues on “racism and economic injustice — crime, incarceration, alcoholism, homelessness, and the seemingly insurmountable impoverishment of the Black community”. Mirroring vocal disruption a century prior, Smith’s presentation of ‘Washwoman’s Blues’ consciously protests the ill treatment of Black women who were confined to domestic servitude; the scream of the slave was noted as a clear disruption to the racialized treatment that was enacted by slave owners as the only moment for the Black voice to be heard, which was in reaction to pain:

Lord, I do more work than forty-‘leven Gold Dust Twins

Got Myself a achin’ from my head down to my shins

Sorry I do washin’ just to make my livelihood

Oh, the washwoman’s life, it ain’t a bit of good.

Fraught with brash vocals, the emotion emulated parallels the physical suffering of domestic labour. The inflection of ‘achin’ suggests the desire for further opportunities and less economic stratification, or simply acts as a protest of hard, unforgiving labour in the domestic sphere. 

A further emphasis of this is present in the reference to ‘Gold Dust Twins’ which constructs the racialized connotation embedded in domestic labour. Earlier advertisements of the product also depicted African children with loose tongues and expressive eyes, captioned with ‘Do your work’ and ‘Roosevelt scoured Africa’. This portrays a primitive, animalistic nature of the Black self and allows Smith to intentionally protest domestic positions through jazz as, littered in bodily movement, the art form can become rife in moral interpretations. It was also imperative that Smith facilitated repetition alongside a cleaning product that littered cupboards across America, communicating how connectivity has its foundation in commonplace articles.

Touching upon Smith’s third stanza, social injustice shadows a satirical introduction of ‘sorry’ – an apology abundant in her servitude status marked by gender, race, and clear economic stratification. However, the tone which surrounds suggests a clear verbal attack on her inability to escape; a possible ‘complaint’ to outline frustration, anger, and resentment towards a woman’s designated duty in the form of a protest.

 Smith’s utilisation of expression, tone, the movement of her body and vocal assertions both delivers and represents the intention of jazz: the recognition of the Black self and its voice. Smith situates the Black construction of the self within a recognition of the body past a commodity and a rejection of class and economic discourse, until the fluidity of jazz created an evolutionary space for the Black voice to be heard.

Further Reading:

Samuel Charters, The Poetry of the Blues (1963)

Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003)

Paul Oliver, The Meaning of the Blues (1960)

Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998)

Edited by Isobel Edwards, MSc Gender and International Relations