Question in-her
In her 1998 book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Y. Davis bases her analysis in part on recordings of songs sung in the 1920s by Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith. Davis focuses on how Rainey and Smith improvised the lyrics—replacing the original lines with mischievous jokes and wordplay. Davis’s work was particularly labor intensive because in order to transcribe, or write down, the lyrics as Rainey and Smith sang them, Davis had to listen repeatedly to the vinyl recordings, which weren’t very clear.
What does the text most strongly suggest about the songs sung by Rainey and Smith?
The songs have grown in popularity since Rainey and Smith first sang them.
There were more recordings made of Rainey’s songs than there were of Smith’s.
There were few, if any, reliable transcriptions of Smith’s and Rainey’s improvised lyrics when Davis began her research.
According to Davis, the songs sung by Rainey were more musically innovative than those sung by Smith typically were.