While listening to the album Sweet Petunias, released by Rosetta Records in 1986, I was struck by the frequency in the references to different kinds of flowers. Indeed, the name of the album itself refers to a floral variety. Once I began digging through the material Rosetta Reitz collected regarding the Sweet Petunias album, I began to think about the significance of blues songs that have ecological underpinnings. I became more aware of Reitz’s purposeful curation: the blues women on this album were included because their songs were constructing a “language to represent them as they interpret and reshape their worlds,”[1] one that comprehensively captured who they were as singers and as people by way of signifiers that relate to non-human life.
In her liner notes for Sweet Petunias, Reitz described many of these songs in relation to the earth, cognizant of “the unusually fertile terrain of these songs.”[2] She was particularly interested in flowers being able to communicate meaning:
There is a language of flowers, called floriography, which was in vogue in the United States at the turn of the century and was even more popular in England. […] Petunia, in that vocabulary means: never despair of me. A fitting definition for an album of independent songs, who turned potential despair into affirmation.[3]
In its original context, floriography was a coded language that allowed Victorians to express their feelings in a society that was governed by strict rules regarding showing one’s emotions.[4] Flowers were used as a language to talk about various aspects of human life, such as joy, sadness, jealousy, or friendship, but in a way that allowed the message or the emotion to remain in coded form.[5] Various art forms have been known to communicate hidden meaning through flowers: Reitz herself contextualizes her interest in floral imagery by juxtaposing her discovery of the petunia on the cover of Lucille Bogan’s “race record,” Sweet Patunia, alongside of one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings of a purple petunia, likely from the mid-1920s, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. By way of the connotations of the petunia, “women from such disparate cultures” were able to partake in “some female collective unconscious or memory” that tied all women together.[6] Reitz notes that this “augur[s] well for human harmony”[7]—the flower is an object that could transcend lines drawn by race, social class, and geographical region.
Yet the opening of the liner notes to Sweet Petunias also reveals a tension between the numerous meanings of a flower. Reitz points to the history of the petunia in blues songs: though the petunia can mean “lovable and sweet,” it still “insists upon…dignity.”[8] It also commonly refers to “sex” or even a “sweet soul.”[9] The discrepancies between these definitions do not invalidate the other meanings; floriography allows meaning to be multiple.
I became particularly interested in the song “Sweet Pease”[10] (1937) due to the flowers embedded within the song and the title itself. However, as I began to do more biographical research on Victoria Spivey, the writer and singer of “Sweet Pease,” I realized that following Reitz and conceptualizing the blues women on this album as flowers themselves could productively complicate our understandings of them. Originally from Houston, Spivey went to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1926 and signed with “race records” label Okeh Records. Her songs explored unconventional themes, such as the more risqué topics of sex and drugs or the “eerie” matters of murder and blood.[11] In terms of her sound, Spivey is known for a “nasal quality” in her voice: she used a technique which people have called a “tiger squall,” a way of tightening or restricting the vocal tract.[12] She toured widely, playing with renowned musicians such as Lucille Hegamin, Hannah Sylvester, Pat Blackman, Jackie Lynn Wilson, Sippie Wallace, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe until the 1960s.[13] Her relationships, personal and professional, became especially interesting as I considered her biography through themes and images introduced by the sweet pea. Blues women’s worth has often been tied up in their stage presence, so I used the floriographical method as an opportunity to look to Spivey as not just a singer, but a human navigating the music industry, and the world outside of it as well.
LASTING FRIENDSHIP
One meaning typically attached to sweet peas is that they are a sign of lasting friendship. The song “Sweet Pease” could thus be read as an ode to Spivey’s sister, Addie, a singer whose nickname was Sweet Pease. In Reitz’s liner notes for the Sweet Petunias album, she writes that the song is “a love song from one sister to another,”[14] a testament of Victoria’s affection for her sister, Addie.
“Sweet Pease” can also be read as an extension of the singer’s own lived experience. The song describes a challenging world made slightly less so through close female friendships: Spivey can look out for other blues women singers while also being looked out for. There are a few ways this manifests itself in Spivey’s life. The blues industry was notorious for scamming Black women out of their royalties and the rights to their songs, and Spivey found ways to take care of her sisters, Addie and Elton (also known as the Za Zu Girl), amid this fraught landscape. When switching from Okeh Records to Victor in 1929, Spivey negotiated a recording contract for her sister with members of Louis Russell’s band.[15]
Spivey also relied on what might have been called her “found family” of good friends to navigate the blues industry. Notably, she was mentored by Ida Cox. After being impressed by one of Spivey’s performances at a house party in Texas, Cox invited Spivey to tour with her.[16] Though Spivey turned this opportunity down, Cox’s belief in her musical capabilities gave the younger singer the motivation to travel to St. Louis in search of bigger opportunities. Cox’s influence is also musical and can be heard in the guttural quality of Spivey’s voice and the themes of sexual liberation, women’s independence, and the supernatural that appeared in her music. In this way, Spivey, Cox, and other blues women whom these two singers inspire are part of their own lineage, paying homage to each other in physical and musical ways.
Spivey returned the favor to others: Among the materials in Spivey’s archive at Rutgers is a registration form for Lucille Hegamin’s unpublished song “Black Snowflakes.”[17] In addition to proactively trying to copyright her own songs, Spivey worked to help other blues women artists copyright their songs.[18] She remained persistent in a time when record companies were trying to cheat Black musicians out of their royalties, authorship credit, and the rights to their songs.
RESILIENCY
The sweet pea is adaptable and able to bloom in any environment. In 1964, Spivey’s family home was sold to the state because the Texas Highway Department wanted to build a highway through the middle of the neighborhood.[19] She searched for ways to retroactively rectify this fraudulent sale as her brother was coerced into selling it.[20] Spivey demanded rightful compensation for the house as she received about a third of what she should have.[21] There were numerous roadblocks during this process: the state government tried to make her case invalid by requesting documentation that was hard to locate.[22] Overall, this example, and the earlier example regarding her copyright process, convey how Spivey was pushing back against the ways the government and the music industry were trying to deprive her of what was rightfully hers.
I understand these situations to be representative of the everyday kinds of struggles the women on the Sweet Petunias album, as well as other blues women, may have faced, on and off written records. They were not only having to navigate the challenges of being a Black woman in a racist and sexist industry, but also having to deal with other everyday problems as well. A floriographical reading allows this version of Spivey—as someone resilient and thoughtful—to exist alongside the very different Spivey personae that appear on stage.
REJECTION OF ASSIMILIATION
The seed of the sweet pea is toxic to consumption. I read this to be a kind of self-imposed defense mechanism that protects the flower’s reproductive capabilities, thereby extending the longevity of its existence. Like the sweet pea, Spivey refused to be swallowed up: she fought for visibility and gave others the platform to do the same. In 1962, Spivey and her husband, Len Kunstadt, started their own record label, Spivey Records. The label not only recorded well-known veteran Black musicians like Muddy Waters, Louis Armstrong, and Koko Taylor, but also positioned itself as a label that recorded up-and-coming performers alongside these veterans.
Self-determined projects such as Spivey Records rejected the ways that whiteness visibly and invisibly controlled Black musicians’ involvement in the blues industry. By starting her own label, Spivey could provide other Black musicians the space to create their own music as they envisioned and specifically give younger musicians a space to flourish and be mentored. The label existed even after Spivey’s death and continued producing music until the mid 1980s. This label was also a place for Spivey to re-record some of her earlier songs and take control of the creative process so that “her taste and style would not be compromised.”[23]
WHY IS FLORIOGRAPHY IMPORANT?
Overall, the Sweet Petunias album reflects a tension between the persistent use of floral illustration on the album cover—as visual cue of traditional femininity—alongside the complex, norm-breaking definitions of the petunia. Loosely adapting the traditional tenets of a floriographic reading of symbols—and turning it into a vehicle to make sense of cultural history—allows me to theorize how Spivey rejects the traditional feminine connotation of the petunia while still relating to the flower by way of its other floriographical definitions. Examining Spivey through this lens informs a broader understanding of the album as a whole. The language of flowers helps us see how the women of Sweet Petunias “interpret and reshape their worlds,” which kept them “surviving in it.” [24] In the words of Reitz:
“these songs are an affirmation of lucid, humane intelligence in the face of a racist, sexist world.”[25]
The various connotations of the flowers offer different points of entry to this rich body of work. Again, I turn to Reitz: “[These] songs can be viewed as a bridge between the world of words and the world of feeling, giving us a better understanding of the women, the world, and ourselves.”[26] A more expansive and socially engaged usage of floriography allows listeners to understand the women on the Sweet Petunias album through the image of the petunia, as did Reitz—but not because they buy into a stereotypical feminine reading of the flower and its “sweetness.” Instead, they are petunias because they are sweet, sexy, resilient, and loving— and they can be all of these at once.
Trisha Santanam is a junior (Trinity ’26) majoring in English and minoring in Music.
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End Notes
[1] Rosetta Reitz, Sweet Petunias cassette notes, Rosetta Records RR 1311, 1986, cassette, 1.
[2] Rosetta Reitz, Sweet Petunias, Box 4, Rosetta Reitz papers, 1929-2008, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, NC.
[3] Reitz, Sweet Petunias cassette notes, 1.
[4] Emma Flint, “The secret Victorian Language that’s back in fashion,” BBC, October 13, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20221012-the-flowers-that-send-a-hidden-message.
[5] Jessica Roux, Floriography: An Illustrated Guide to the Language of Flowers (Kansas City, Missouri: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2015).
[6] Reitz, Sweet Petunias cassette notes, 1.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] The spelling of the song title varies. Some records of the song spell it “Sweet Peas,” while others spell it “Sweet Pease.” Most consistent and frequent is the latter spelling. For the sake of my argument further in my paper, I will be using “Sweet Pease.”
[11] Daphne Duval Harrison, Black Pearls (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 155.
[12] Harrison, Black Pearls, 148.
[13] Lawrence Davies, “The Victoria Spivey Collection: An Overview, with a Supplementary Bibliography of Spivey’s Jazz Criticism,” Journal of Jazz Studies 14, no. 2 (2023): 212.
[14] Rosetta Reitz, Sweet Petunias cassette notes, 3.
[15] Harrison, Black Pearls, 157.
[16] Rosetta Reitz, “Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues” liner notes for Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues, Rosetta Records RR 1304, 1981, LP, 3.
[17] Lawrence Davies, “The Victoria Spivey Collection: An Overview, with a Supplementary Bibliography of Spivey’s Jazz Criticism,” Journal of Jazz Studies 14, no. 2 (2023): 205.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Davies, 215.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Davies, 216.
[22] Davies, 217.
[23] Rosetta Reitz, “Red, White, and Blues” liner notes for Red, White, and Blues, Rosetta Records RR 1302, 1980, LP, 4.
[24] Rosetta Reitz, Sweet Petunias, Box 4, Rosetta Reitz papers, 1929-2008, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, NC.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid.
Bibliography
Davies, Lawrence. “The Victoria Spivey Collection: An Overview, with a Supplementary Bibliography of Spivey’s Jazz Criticism.” Journal of Jazz Studies 14, no. 2 (2023): 202-228.
Flint, Emma. “The secret Victorian Language that’s back in fashion.” British Broadcasting Corporation. October 13, 2022. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20221012-the-flowers-that-send-a-hidden-message.
Harrison, Daphne Duval. Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988.
Parker, Donna P. “Spivey, Victoria Regina,” Texas State Historical Association. June 23, 2017. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/spivey-victoria-regina.
Reitz, Rosetta. Rosetta Reitz papers, 1929-2008. David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, NC
Roux, Jessica. Floriography: An Illustrated Guide to the Language of Flowers. Kansas City, Missouri: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2015.
