Wild Women Don't Have the Blues
First screened in Spring 1998 / Most recently screened and reviewed in August 2025
Director: Christine Dall. Documentary about the African American female blues singers who propelled that music's peak period of cultural and communal prominents. In Brief:
Formally, it's just OK. But a major, zesty story, enfolding dozens of vivid threads, gets its due.
VOR:③
Doesn't push the medium into any highly original space, but assembling this valuable compendium from thick and thin archives took some doing.
Christine Dall's hour-long 1989 documentary Wild Women Don't Have the Blues doesn't blow the roof off stylistically. But within ten minutes the roof is already long gone, care of the gusty, crafty, sonorous African American blues women who are Dall's doted-on subject. At a time when this material circulated less pervasively in popular culture or in the academy, and despite the meager archive of photos or recordings that some of these singers left behind, Wild Women was an especially rousing and valuable portal into this rich cultural world. And in the same year when Michael Moore's Roger & Me became a critical and an unexpectedly commercial darling, with Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line having achieved something similar the year before, Dall's film was another energizing bellwether, albeit of lower profile, of the richer, broader, more publicly accessible ecosystem of U.S. documentary that was just around the corner.
Vinie Burrows's spirited but unobtrusive narration and the testimonies of gathered blues scholars and present-day practitioners do a lovely, piquant job of encapsulating the personalities and unique contributions of distinctive figures like Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters, Ida Cox, Bessie Smith, and Mamie Smith. One historian humorously but truthfully recounts how, for a while there, any woman with the surname Smith had a great shot at filling a blues hall via borrowed glory, even if her first name was in much smaller type on the poster outside. We also get a handy if necessarily streamlined narrative of major junctures in the 1920s efflorescence of women-led blues culture and of the forces that soon conspired against it. Engaging stories from across this period range from those of grim but resilient accommodation (the outdoor tent rivals were workarounds to the South's segregated performance venues) to top-flight personal pluck and guile (Alberta Hunter was promised payment at the end of a set, and she picked it off the dead body of her patron, who'd been murdered during the show!). Still, the crown jewels of the film are the snippets of song—particularly by the early-century legends, but don't shake any stick at their heirs apparent in the 1980s, such as Koko Taylor, who opens the film.
All in all, whatever its formal modesty, this is an hour nobody sensate and sensible would regret. Married editor Jeanne Jordan and cinematographer Steven Ascher would later be Oscar-nominated for Troublesome Creek, their memorably up-close chronicle of the late-century downfall of so many family farms, including the one on which Jordan was raised. It's a lingering shame that director Christine Dall had no further public credits after this 1989 mini-milestone—a slide into artistic obscurity too close for comfort to those of so many of her subjects. But it's hardly as if nobody noticed her work: Wild Women Don't Have the Blues still percolates on campus syllabi, and it's streamable on Kanopy for folks who have access through their schools or public libraries. Its IMDb page is currently languishing at just 20 user ratings, but maybe we can beef that up. So, check out the movie if this material piques your interest, and consider passing on the good, saucy word? Grade:B
(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd, where you can comment if you like.)
