In "Big Star Fallin' Mama: Five Women in Black Music," author Hettie Jones does more than profile Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Mahalia Jackson, Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin.
Through the stories of these five lives courses the history of African-Americans from the early 1900s to the 1980s, from minstrel shows to Motown soul, from the "race" records of the roaring '20s to the mostly segregated "R&B;" category of today.
Why read about music when so many other, supposedly more serious, subjects could be explored during Black History Month? Ms. Jones borrows an illuminating excerpt from an article by Phyl Garland:
The relationship of the black listener to the music that he regards as "his" always has been a very deep and personal one, quite often reflecting a great deal about his subordinate position in the society. In contrast to all the things the black man has not had in this country, he has always had "his" music.
Originally published in 1974, "Big Star Fallin' Mama" (Viking, $14.99, 144 pages, ages 12 and up) has been revised and updated. The exceptional bibliography and discography have been expanded to include recent paperbacks and compact discs, and Ms. Jones' afterword stretches into the 1990s. She writes that the disaffected generation that has created rap "is describing what Mahalia called the 'burden of being a colored person in the white man's world.' "
What Ms. Jones does best is to put in words the emotions that pulse through the blues like blood. Her first chapter traces the blues from their roots in Africa and their germination in slavery to their fruition in the 20th century.
In the early 1900s, black musicians were able to earn a living -- meager as it was -- for the first time, playing in traveling minstrel shows. And, for the first time, the audiences weren't all white. The minstrels played for the blacks in the crowd, "people whose seats in the balcony had been hard earned, people for whom the song you sing is what you mean to say," Ms. Jones writes.
Although she provides plenty of biographical facts and historical context, Ms. Jones never bogs down in scholarly self-importance. She doesn't lecture; she entertains with tales well told, illustrating them with stanzas of songs and quotes from these five artists and the people who knew them. One complaint -- the excerpts aren't footnoted, so we don't know song names, songwriters or sources for many of the quotes.
The author doesn't romanticize the singers' lives. Bessie Smith was a hard drinker who frittered away money. Aretha Franklin had three sons before she was out of her teens. Billie Holiday's heroin addiction is recounted in detail, as is her abusive childhood in Baltimore.
When she was 10, Billie was a truant, sent to a home for wayward girls. As punishment one night, she was locked in a room with the body of a girl who had died. Ms. Jones quotes from Holiday's autobiography: "It's terrible what something like this does to you. It takes years and years to get over it; it haunts you and haunts you."
Ms. Jones points out a mistake or two in the portrayal of Holiday in "Lady Sings the Blues," and she quotes Lena Horne on Holiday: "Her life was so tragic and so corrupted by other people -- by white people and her own people. There was no place for her to go, except finally, into that little private world of dope. She was just too sensitive to survive."
Above all, Ms. Jones captures the hurt of Billie Holiday, the ache of Bessie Smith, the exuberance of Ma Rainey and the faith of Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin.
On Ma Rainey's big heart: "You can hear it also in her voice, which comes on easily and without strain. She sounds like a lady who liked singing and liked living, and who did both with good humor and style."
On Bessie Smith: "There are different ways to consider a life: that she has been and gone is one thing, that she left us her soul is another."
And on Mahalia Jackson and gospel music: "Mahalia had always been people, as her people say, and if she was able to turn taverns into temples, so were they. . . . Church was a place where a person was no longer the maid or the handyman with only a first name, but a place where black men and women stood apart in their natural dignity, to save and nourish that precious possession, the soul."
Two other books to check out:
* "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," by James Weldon Johnson, illustrated by Jan Spivey Gilchrist (Scholastic, $14.95, 32 pages, all ages), is a striking tribute to the song that has been called the African-American national anthem. Illustrating the lyrics are paintings in colored pencil, gouache and watercolor that fill the double-spreads of 9- by 12-inch pages.
* "Jazz: My Music, My People" by Morgan Monceaux (Knopf, $18, 64 pages, all ages) pays tribute to 41 men and women -- from Buddy Bolden and Leadbelly to Thelonius Monk and Lena Horne -- who helped nurture jazz from its blues roots to be-bop. Mr. Monceaux's mixed-media paintings are gritty and fascinating.