Audio Engineers Restored Hidden Notes and Revealed Lost Instruments in This New Treasure Trove of Songs by the Pioneering ‘Mother of the Blues’

The 118-track collection is the most complete set ever compiled of recordings by American blues icon Ma Rainey

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

July 30, 2026 4:14 p.m.

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Audio engineers and music historians have restored and compiled the most complete selection to date of the music of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey. An American blues icon from the early 20th century, her talent and powerful performances earned her the titles “Assassinator of the Blues” and “Mother of the Blues.”

Last week, this collection of remastered songs was released as a box set, Ma Rainey: Mother of the Blues: The Complete Paramount Recordings, 1923–1928, which features 92 songs Rainey recorded for Paramount Records. The set also includes newly recovered test pressings and never-before-issued alternate takes, bringing the total number of tracks to 118.

It’s a significant technical achievement because the original recordings were pressed onto cheap materials that didn’t fully convey Rainey’s voice to listeners, reports Emma Madden for the New York Times. “The first time people played these songs on a Victrola with a heavy steel needle,” restoration engineer Doug Benson tells Madden, the machine would “skip right past” Rainey’s loudest notes. But on the new release, those notes come through, as do hidden violin parts.

An accompanying book offers a history and images of Rainey’s life and career, plus track notes, lyrics and archival materials that offer insight about a pivotal performer who helped shape the genre we now call the blues.

“Two things are clear: Rainey fostered the blues idiom, and she provided a link between the classic style of Bessie Smith and the country style of streetcorner singers and guitarists such as Charley Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson,” wrote Chris Albertson in a 1990 essay honoring Rainey for her induction that year into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “Rainey introduced the earthy spirit of country blues to the stage, giving it a tinge of the polish that characterized the work of her female colleagues.”

Most sources say Rainey was born in 1886 in Georgia (although some records suggest she was born in 1882 in Alabama). She got married at age 18 and toured with her husband in minstrel and vaudeville shows. She later created her own performance company and named it “Madame Gertrude Rainey and her Georgia Smart Sets.”

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“When she started singing, the gold in her teeth would sparkle,” the pianist and composer Thomas A. Dorsey, who collaborated with Rainey on some of her most popular recordings, wrote in his unpublished memoirs, reported the New York Times’ Giovanni Russonello in 2019. “She was in the spotlight. She possessed listeners; they swayed, they rocked, they moaned and groaned, as they felt the blues with her.”

Rainey was a pioneer in several ways. Fans and historians speculate about whether she had romantic relationships with women, including fellow blues singer Bessie Smith. Rainey was one of the most-listened-to blues artists throughout the 1920s, thanks in part to her agreement with Paramount Records, which made her one of the first women to professionally record the blues. She had sharp business acumen and took credit for and maintained control of her music.

“According to registered copyrights, [Rainey] wrote or co-wrote at least a third of what she recorded—at a moment when almost no performer, and few women anywhere in the business, held that kind of control,” says a statement from Black Swan Records, the label behind the new box set.

The collection is “a treasure trove that fully lives up to both of Rainey’s famous sobriquets,” writes Pop Matters’ David Pike, who awards the box set top marks in his review.

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Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.