 Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (1886–1939), known as "The Mother of the Blues”, is credited as the first to perform the blues on stage as popular entertainment when she began incorporating blues into her act of show songs and comedy around 1902.Rainey had heard a woman singing about the man she had lost, learned the song, and began using it as her closing number, calling it “the blues".Rainey's example was followed by other young women who followed her path in the tent show circuit, one of the few venues available to black performers.