Innate inside Columbus, Georgia, she first appeared around stage inside Columbus in "A Bunch of Blackberries" at a age of Fourteen. She so joined the traveling vaudeville troupe, the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. When hearing the blues song at the theater in St. Louis sung by a local girl in 1902, she started performing in a blues style. She claimed at that instance that she was a of these world health organization coined a title "blues" for the style that she specialized inside. Musicians & singers world health organization got sang & played in a style said there were there is no such origins & that the blues experienced universally been. The pioneer in the style, Bunk Johnson said that in a 1880s the blues experienced already been developed.³

She married fellow music hall singer William 'Pa' Rainey in 1904, changing her name to Ma Rainey and the pair toured with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels as Rainey & Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues, singing a mix of blues and popular songs. Inside 1912, she took a immature Bessie Smith into the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, trained her, & worked by owning her until Smith left around 1915.

Mthe Rainey was already a seasoned performing artist by using decades of touring sustaining African American shows in the U.S. Southern States when she made her first recordings in 1923. Rainey signed using Paramount Records and, between 1923 and 1928, she recorded 100 songs, periodically accompanied such jazz notables as Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, Fletcher Henderson, and others. Rainey was pleasantly popular among southern blacks in the 1920s, but a Great Depression and changing tastes ended her career by 1933, when she retired. Within 1939, Rainey died of a heart attack.