Wild Women Don't Have the Blues

Where there's smoke there's fire exclaims this picture, but also illustrates Wild Women Don't Have the Blues

While white women sat in their parlors waiting for the fellow to meet their parents and have the young man hope to hold a gloved hand once parents gave their approval, black women were speaking out about sexuality, opening the door to women's emancipation that would continue to be reinforced by the rewards of pleasure and advancement.

Wild Women Don't Have the Blues is in some ways an affirmation of that woman being herself, showing herself as someone with needs, ideas, dreams of pleasure, sexual emancipation and all those things that make for a free person individually.

And Bessie Smith was at the head of the line in expressing woman's independence, the kind of woman that spoke up for herself and let folks know her personhood did not come from an association with a man but her own special ways instead.   A woman could be a bit wild and still be totally a woman of value.  Still Smith's affirmation, taking place as it did largely in the 1920's and 1930's took its time to get to the 1960's civil rights movements that swept women's rights along even as it made history with integration and the abolition of Jim Crow laws.

The song was written in 1924 by Ida Cox.  Wild Women Don't Have the Blues came along and expressed a feminist message and is a classic female blues song.