Pouring Out the Blues: Gwen "Sugar Mama" Avery's Song of Freedom

I can remember . . . [seeing] Gwen perform- just herself at the piano with a microphone. She would just pour out The Blues. . . . I can remember feeling the hair on the back of my neck stand on end, because it was the real thing.

Linda Tillery

If I could write a-one song to sing to you It would be a song of freedom for you and me.

Gwen Avery, "Sad Song"

While preparing the introduction to my third submission of this article for publication, I was reading through Evelynn Hammonds's essay, "Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality," and I was struck by her illustrations of how black female sexuality is still so thoroughly invisible, unimagined, and unimaginable. I thought about how this article had been deemed inappropriate for a gay/lesbian issue of one journal because it "fell between two thematic stools-the 'ethnic' and the 'gay/lesbian" and rejected by a second journal because its interest was thought to be too narrow. Black women in general have tended to disappear into the cracks, effectively erased by the "either/or" thinking so pervasive in Western culture. What this type of thinking fails to account for is that black women are not either black or female; they are both black and female. The situation is compounded further for black lesbians who are black and female and gay. As Gwen Avery says on her 1993 recording Live at IMA: "You can't be a black lesbian woman! Yeah, it's bad enough, you know.... Geez! Let's really get these mixed up and then be crazy on top ofthat.... And you want somebody to understand you [laughs]. What won't they understand?" '

Historically, owing to the legacy of minstrel stereotypes that distorted their experiences and image, African American women have been used and abused for the dominant society's own purposes. If black female sexuality in general has been, as Hammonds writes, "absent yet-ever-present [and] pathologized," shaped by silence, erasure, and invisibility, it stands to reason that black lesbian sexuality has been doubly erased, and that black lesbians have been cast out as "traitors to the race." At the same time, black lesbians have been at the forefront of efforts to transform black women's relationships with the erotic. The writings of Audre Lorde and other black lesbian writers have been critical because they celebrate women's erotic power and foreground aspects of black female sexuality that have been suppressed.2

Long before writers like Lorde began theorizing black female sexuality, however, blues women were celebrating it on stage. From the beginning, blues performance has been a powerful vehicle for "theorizing" black female sexuality. In the 1920s when vaudeville blues women stood in the public limelight, African American women have used music as a way to assert a presence that has largely been absent from the dominant discourse. As Hazel Carby notes, blues women reclaimed black female sexuality and the black female body through song. Inspired by their vaudeville blues foremothers, many of whom had sexual relationships with women, contemporary black lesbian performers such as Gwen Avery, Gaye Adegbalola, and Faith Nolan continue the bold and impassioned expression of their pain and pleasure in the language and structures of the blues.3

This essay focuses on the work of Gwen Avery, a contemporary California Bay Area singer-pianist-songwriter who was active in the Women's Music Movement of the 1970s. Avery's music, included on the live compilation, Any Woman's Blues, was first recorded at a women's prison on December 31,1975, produced by the Women's Prison Concert Collective, and on the bold, outspoken compilation Lesbian Concentrate, released in 1977. More recently, June Millington, founder of the Institute for Musical Arts, an organization educating and promoting women in the music business, produced Live at IMA recording Avery in concert on her label, Fabulous Records. In November 2000, Avery released her first CD, Sugar Mama, produced by Linda Tillery and Emily Tincher. Although Avery has not achieved the recognition afforded some of her vaudeville foremothers like Bessie Smith and Alberta Hunter, her performances are of broader interest because they vividly illustrate both the ways in which traditional African American performance practices have and continue to be used to empower artists and audiences, and, more specifically, how performances by African American lesbians function as affirmation, healing, and subversion. Avery's Live at IMA concert provides an excellent resource for detailed analysis of these traditional practices and processes of empowerment at work.4

Live at IMA includes personalized versions of classic gospel, blues, and pop/soul tunes that Avery imbues with new meanings, along with original compositions that draw upon these traditions. Avery's music gives voice to the range of her experiences while resonating those of her audience. Her songs express a wide array of feelings from pain and suffering (in her moaning in "Trouble in Mind" and "A Sad Song"), to anger and jealous rage (in "C. C. Rider"), to childhood loneliness (in "Would You Come out and Play with Me?"), to joy, desire, and triumph (in the ecstatic shouting of "Shout It Out," "A Change," "Rock Me Baby," and "Sugar Mama"). Even in the songs of deepest despair there is hope, for through all of her music there is a sense of movement and a vitality that comes from being "out" with her feelings and from sharing a piece of her personal journey with others. In songs from "I'm Gonna Live the Life I Sing About" to "Rock Me Baby" and "Sugar Mama," Avery stimulates the audience to join her in "shouting out" her love of women and voicing her sexual desire and pleasure. She is a teacher and coach in the blues tradition, utilizing traditional means to empower herself while stimulating others to recognize their own power. As she sings in "Sad Song": "I sing it for you; I got to sing it for me" (7MA).