ABSTRACT
U.S. blues singer, born Gertrude Pridgett in Columbus, Georgia. She began singing in public at 12. In 1904 she married Will “Pa” Rainey and toured with him with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, Tolliver’s Circus, and other shows. She then established her Georgia Jazz Band. Rainey began to record in 1923 for Paramount, achieving great acclaim with “Boweavil Blues” (#12080) and “Moonshine Blues” (#12083). These early recordings convinced record executives that there was a market for blues music, and led to the signing of many other urban blues performers, many of them women, like Bessie Smith. Rainey was a mainstay of Paramount’s 12000 series of “popular race records,” with such hits as “Stormy Sea Blues”/“Levee Camp Moan” with the Georgia Jazz Band (#12295; 1925). Probably her greatest work on record was in “See See Rider” (#12252; 1924) and “Soon This Morning” (#12438; 1927). She was an influence on Bessie Smith and other later blues artists. Rainey retired in about 1933, and died in Rome, Georgia. The Austrian Document label has issued her complete recordings in chronological order on a series of CDs; other reissues have appeared on various blues specialty labels, including Yazoo, Biograph, and Milestone. [Lieb 1983 has a discography; Vreede 1971 is a Paramount discography with illustrations of Rainey advertisements.]
Polish/American soprano, born Raisa Burschstein in Bialystok, Poland. She studied in Naples, and appeared in Rome in 1912. The next year she made her opera debut in Parma, singing in Verdi’s Oberto. She then sang in Chicago, London, Paris, and Buenos Aires, and was for several seasons with La Scala. Her American performances were mostly in Chicago; when she retired in 1937 she remained in the city, opening a school for singers. Raisa died in Los Angeles.
