Big Star Fallin' Mama: Five Women in Black Music

by Hettie Jones

Explores the contribuions of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Mahalia Jackson, Billie Holiday, and Aretha Franklin to the blues and popular music

Genres: Biography, History

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 21, 1974

About the author

Hettie Jones (born 1934 as Hettie Cohen) is best known as the first wife of Amiri Baraka, known as LeRoi Jones at the time of their marriage, but is also a writer herself.

While known for her poetry, she has received acclaim for her memoir, How I Became Hettie Jones (published 1990 by Grove Press).

Jones held various clerical jobs at Partisan Review and started the literary magazine Yugen with her husband. Jones is currently on the faculty in the graduate program in creative writing at The New School in New York City. From 1989-2002 she ran a writing workshop at the New York State Correctional Facility for Women at Bedford Hills, which included inmate Judy Clark as a student, and which published a nationally distributed collection, Aliens At The Border. Jones is a former chair of the PEN Prison Writing Committee and is currently a member of PEN's Advisory Council.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Stephani · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to this book, I learned about Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey when I was a kid. (I already knew about Billie, Mahalia and Aretha at the time.) The book gets four stars from me just for that.

[Benjamin Fasching-Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slim volume for some big voices: Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Mahalia Jackson, Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin. The first two giants of the classic blues era allow Hettie Jones to write mostly triumphant stories in a setting of overt racism. Mahalia Jackson's story is a little more complicated and I had the feeling that the famous gospel singer never quite got over childhood trauma. On the other hand, who would? It is amazing that this music has survived, evolved, and it is amazing what these individuals dealt with and defeated. But this isn't just the old, repeating African-American narrative, the black version of Horatio Alger: you know, first I was a slave then I escaped up North, now I drive a big car and wear gold chains instead of shackles... Hettie Jones is deeper than that and even here writing for young adults she doesn't stick to the formula. Things obviously don't go anywhere close to that way for Billie Holiday, but I had the feeling that that chapter was more or less a summary of Holiday's own book. The Aretha Franklin chapter, written in the heat of the moment, is short and maybe confusing. Aretha is expected to serve as a conclusion? Or as bait to interest (at the time) younger readers? Maybe the editors played with it so that the Aretha chapter comes across like, well now Black Women Singers have made it, no one is going to steal their music or deny them proper health care or whatever but Aretha can still sing the blues. Yeah, I wasn't sure what that chapter was really about.

My copy is a 1976 paperback and part of the fun was the ads for other books inside it. Apparently Dell had a whole series under the Laurel-Leaf imprint of progressive and minority biographies for young adults. Also an ad for "black experience" books... remember when they used to call it that?

[Bart Hill · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent overview of five women who sang the Blues.

[Mike Barat · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book sure had interesting stories about the five singers that I did not know before reading this book, which is what a nonfiction is suppose to have. I won't say what stories I found interesting so not to spoil anything for anyone who may read this book in the future. There are parts in this book where the writer could have given more details though. For example the writer Hettie Jones quotes people without saying who the person is, Also there's parts where she quotes from a magazine and we're not told the name however of the magazine. On the positive side Hettie Jones did a great job of showing the that if there's one thing that kept black people from losing there minds during a time period of incredible racism is was definitely gospel music. The book may have it's shortcoming, however I definitely recommend reading this book.