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The forgotten story of America's first black superstars

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(Image credit: Getty Images)

By Dorian Lynskey 17th February 2021

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In the 1920s US, glamorous, funny black female singers
were the blues' first – and revolutionary hitmakers. Why
were they then relegated to the sidelines, asks Dorian
Lynskey.
n Valentine's Day 1920, a little over a century ago, a 28-year-old singer

O named Mamie Smith walked into a recording studio in New York City and
made history. Six months later, she did it again.

The music industry had previously assumed that African Americans

wouldn't buy record players, therefore there was no point in recording black artists.
The entrepreneurial songwriter Perry Bradford, a man so stubborn he was known as
"Mule", knew better. "There's 14 million Negroes in our great country and they will buy
records if recorded by one of their own," he told Fred Hagar at Okeh Records. When a
white singer dropped out of a recording session at the last minute, Bradford convinced
Hagar to take a chance on Smith, a Cincinnati-born star of the Harlem club scene, and
scored a substantial hit. Bradford then decided to use Smith to popularise a form of
music that had been packing out venues in the South for almost 20 years. On 10
August, Smith and an ad hoc band called the Jazz Hounds recorded Bradford’s Crazy
Blues. Thus the first black singer to record anything also became the first to record the
blues.

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Rarely has the music industry’s received wisdom been upended by a single hit. By
selling an estimated one million copies in its first year, Crazy Blues was like the first
geyser of oil in untapped ground, instantly revealing a huge appetite for records made
by and for black people. As labels such as Okeh, Paramount and Columbia rushed into SIMILAR ARTICLES
the so-called "race records" market, they snapped up dozens of women like Smith,
("Queen of the Blues"), including Gertrude "Ma" Rainey ("Mother of the Blues"), Bessie MUSIC
Smith ("Empress of the Blues"), Ida Cox ("Uncrowned Queen of the Blues"), Ethel
Waters, Sara Martin, Edith Wilson, Victoria Spivey, Sippie Wallace and Alberta Hunter. 1 The greatest 'lost tapes' ever
found?
"One of the phonograph companies made over four million dollars on the Blues,"
reported The Metronome in 1922. "Now every phonograph company has a coloured MUSIC
girl recording. Blues are here to stay." The classic blues was African-American culture's
first mainstream breakthrough and, for several years, it was effectively a female art
2 The most iconic 21st-
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3 Pop's most underestimated

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The female blues singers were on the losing side of a long,
MUSIC
complicated argument about what the blues should be
4 How pop stars can be truly
provocative
A century later, however, it's a different story. The reputation of Bessie Smith, the
subject of a newly updated 1997 biography by Jackie Kay, was kept alive by
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prominent admirers such as Janis Joplin and Nina Simone, while Rainey's was revived
by August Wilson's 1982 play Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and, more recently, by George
C Wolfe's movie adaptation. The rest are largely forgotten. The history of the blues is
dominated by men.

Mamie Smith, pictured with her band the Jazz Hounds, was the first black singer to make a record (Credit: Getty Images)

This eclipse is the result of a concerted effort by cultural gatekeepers, across several
decades, to valorise certain aspects of the African-American experience while
denigrating others. The female blues singers were on the losing side of a long,
complicated argument about what the blues should be.

'Life's way of talking'

The man who published the sheet music for Crazy Blues was WC Handy, a songwriter,
businessman and self-proclaimed "Father of the Blues". In 1903, he recalled in his 1941
autobiography, he was sitting in a railroad station in Tutwiler, Mississippi when he
heard a man playing "the weirdest music I had ever heard" on a guitar, using a knife
blade as a capo. Handy's anonymous musician now resembles the archetypal
bluesman: a solitary, enigmatic vagrant, singing songs of "suffering and hard luck" to
nobody but himself. In 1920, however, a loner with a knife wasn't going to help the
commercially savvy Handy break the music industry's colour barrier. He turned instead
to the flamboyant women who had honed their crae on the vaudeville and tent-show
circuits, where the blues would be mixed up with comedy songs and dramatic routines
– professional entertainers who knew how to delight a crowd.

For black, working-class women, the classic blues was an

unprecedented new arena of self-expression, which gave
voice to overt sexuality, the peril of abusive men, and even
queer perspectives
One such woman was Gertrude Pridgett, aka Ma Rainey, who had been performing the
blues for more than 20 years when she recorded her first session for Paramount in
1923 at the age of 37. Her journey from Georgia to Chicago in Ma Rainey's Black
Bottom represents the Great Migration of hundreds of thousands of black people from
the rural South to the urban North during that period. Those migrants craved music
that built a bridge between their old and new lives. The classic blues, sometimes
known as "vaudeville blues" or "city blues," was a hybrid of rural folk and urban pop,
southern roots and cosmopolitan panache. Broadly speaking, the playing was slick, the
rhythms hot, the songwriting polished, the lyrics tough and ironic, the stagewear
glamorous and the stars overwhelmingly female. As one 1926 study observed,
"upwards of 75% of the songs are written from a woman's point of view. Among the
blues singers who have gained more or less national recognition there is scarcely a
man's name to be found."

Gertrude "Ma" Rainey was one of several black women who dominated the classic blues – African-American culture's
first mainstream breakthrough (Credit: Getty Images)

August Wilson's Rainey calls the blues "life's way of talking". For black, working-class
women, the classic blues was an unprecedented new arena of self-expression which
gave voice to overt sexuality, the peril of abusive men (like Bessie Smith's husband),
and even queer perspectives. Bessie Smith had affairs with several chorus girls while
Ma Rainey sang, in 1928's Prove It on Me, "I went out last night with a crowd of my
friends/ It must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men/ Wear my clothes just like a
fan/ Talk to the gals just like any old man." One musician even claimed Rainey and
Smith were romantically involved at one point.

Smith's versatile blues encompassed gallows humour (Send Me to the 'Lectric Chair),
social commentary (Poor Man's Blues), salty innuendo (Kitchen Man) and lusty good
times (Gimme a Pigfoot). The Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes wrote that
Bessie conveyed "sadness… not soeened with tears, but hardened with laughter, the
absurd, incongruous laughter of a sadness without even a god to appeal to." In
concert, Smith and her peers sang directly to the women who heard themselves in
these songs and responded with cries of "Say it, sister!"

The scholar Angela Davis calls Bessie Smith "the first real 'superstar' in African-
American popular culture" (Credit: Getty Images)

Like rappers decades later, the classic blues singers were flashy avatars of liberation
and aspiration. "I feel my audiences want to see me becomingly gowned," said Mamie
Smith, who liked to perform in diamonds and furs, "and I have spared no expense or
pains in frequenting the shops of the most fashionable modists in America." Rainey
performed in ostrich feathers and a triple necklace of gold coins. Bessie Smith earned
more, and spent more, than anybody else. Hard-drinking, hedonistic, recklessly
generous and sometimes violent, she sold a record-breaking 780,000 copies of her
debut single, 1923's Downhearted Blues, in just six months and bought her own
Pullman railway car to travel in. The scholar Angela Davis calls her "the first real
'superstar' in African-American popular culture."

The explosive popularity of classic blues discs was a democratic revolution. As

Marybeth Hamilton writes in her excellent book In Search of the Blues: Black Voices,
White Visions, "Once only encountered at house parties and barn dances, on street
corners and the black showbiz circuit, the blues could now be heard pouring out of
speakeasies, nightclubs, houses, apartments, drug stores and barbershops, hardware
stores and funeral parlours, anywhere race records were played or sold."

'It just went down'

But many scholars of African-American culture, black and white alike, were horrified
by the rise of the Victrola record player and the music it played. In their eyes, the
mechanical reproduction of the blues symbolised the spiritual corruption of black
people by cities, factories and commerce – in short, the modern age. For the writer
Zora Neale Hurston, “His Negroness is being rubbed off by close contact with white
culture."

These scholars and folklorists saw the "real" blues, by contrast, as a vanishing oral
tradition from the rural South that needed to be captured and preserved before it
disappeared completely. "The songs may live," wrote one critic in 1926, "but the best
thing of all, the free impulse, the pattern of careless voices happily inventing as they
go, if it dies it cannot be resurrected." Whereas the likes of Ma Rainey travelled to the
city to record their music, song collectors moved in the opposite direction, taking their
recording devices to the South in order to capture what the leading folklorist John
Lomax called "sound-photographs of Negro songs, rendered in their own native
element".

Some scholars and folklorists like Zora Neale Hurston saw these popular recordings as a spiritual corruption of the
blues (Credit: Getty Images)

This preservationist instinct may have been valid but the assumptions that
underpinned it were oeen paternalistic and segregationist: derived from the singing of
slaves, the oral blues was the product of naive, untutored imaginations that would
wither on contact with modernity, so they had to be protected, like rare orchids. While
black people who migrated from the Jim Crow South were looking for a better future,
the folklorists sentimentally fetishised the agony and mystery of the past they had lee
behind. This problematic assumption has since resurfaced in writing about soul music
and hip hop: the sound of suffering is considered more powerful and real than the
sound of defiant enjoyment; pain is more authentic than pleasure.

This obsession with the "genuine" black experience proved fatal for the classic blues. In
1926, Blind Lemon Jefferson became the first solo singer-guitarist to have a hit record
(Paramount's advertisement promised "a real, old-fashioned blues, by a real, old-
fashioned blues singer") and he set a new fashion for earthier "country blues," followed
by Blind Blake, Big Bill Broonzy, Lonnie Johnson and Furry Lewis. With no need for
backing bands or stage costumes, the men were much cheaper, too. As Jackie Kay puts
it in her biography, "These old bluesmen are considered the genuine article while the
women are fancy dress." At the same time, the classic blues singers were too working-
class and sexually frank for some of the urban middle classes. Black Swan, the first
black-owned record label, rejected Bessie Smith for being too vulgar, while a leading
black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, complained that these "filth furnishers" and
"purveyors of putrid puns" were "a hindrance to our standard of respectability and
success".

The classic blues singers were already in decline when the Great Depression finished
them off. By 1933, record sales were just 7% of what they had been in 1929 and many
of the theatres had closed or been turned into movie theatres. Urban listeners,
meanwhile, were abandoning blues for the faster, more sophisticated sound of swing,
represented in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom by Chadwick Boseman's young, impatient
Levee. They didn't need that bridge to the South anymore. According to Thomas
Dorsey, the gospel blues pioneer who used to play in Rainey's band, "It collapsed… I
don’t know what happened to the blues, they seemed to drop it all at once, it just went
down."

Erasing women's voices

As a new generation of black female singers broke through in the 1930s – Billie
Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Memphis Minnie – some of the first wave sought refuge in
other branches of showbusiness. Victoria Spivey appeared in King Vidor's 1929 movie
Hallelujah, one of the first studio pictures to feature an entirely black cast. Ethel
Waters became, at one point, the highest-paid actress on Broadway. Only a handful
were still making blues records in the 1930s. Mamie Smith retired in 1931. Rainey was
dropped by Paramount in 1928 and returned to the Southern tent circuit, her stolen
gold necklace replaced by imitation pearls. Bessie Smith recorded one last session in
1933, for one-sixth of the fee she used to command, before she died aeer a car crash
in 1937.

Some classic blues singers sought refuge in acting – Ethel Waters, pictured in 1943's Cabin in the Sky, was at one time
the highest paid actress on Broadway (Credit: Getty Images)

As if their enforced retirement weren't bad enough, these women suffered the double
indignity of being retrospectively sidelined. The "Blues Mafia" clique of record
collectors (all white, all men) who established the blues canon aeer World War Two
scorned the 1920s hits as commercial junk and sought out the obsolete flops that
nobody else cared about. They sincerely loved this music but its unpopularity certainly
enhanced its mystique, as did the murky sound that came from recording it on cheap
equipment and pressing it on cheap plastic. It sounded like music from the margins,
unloved and misunderstood. As the leading collector James McKune wrote, it was
"archaic in the best sense… gnarled, rough-hewn and eminently uncommercial." Delta
blues singers such as Charley Patton, Skip James, Son House and Robert Johnson
slotted into the post-war counterculture's worship of untameable outcasts who lived
tough, rootless lives a million miles away from bourgeois conformity. Like the man WC
Handy spotted at Tutwiler station, their alienation guaranteed their authenticity.

Ironically, the records that the Blues Mafia dedicated themselves to rescuing from
obscurity have become far more famous than the smash hits of the 1920s. Male
country blues resonated with rock's singer-songwriters in a way that the classic blues
never could. While a few women, notably Victoria Spivey and Edith Wilson, lived long
enough to return to the stage during the 1960s blues revival, the likes of Bob Dylan,
Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones were far more interested in the hardbitten men of
the Delta. "It is surely no accident that so many of the early blues performers that
revivalists scorned as inauthentic were women; to them, authenticity had a male
voice," writes Hamilton.

The early blues women were sidelined by the "Blues Mafia" who championed Delta blues singers such as Robert Johnson,
Skip James and Son House [pictured] (Credit: Getty Images)

For all its obsession with the "real", the 1960s blues revival was built on a series of
myths. It portrayed the Mississippi Delta as a land lost in time, closer in spirit to the
slavery era than to modern America. It elevated flops while ignoring the music that
black consumers had actually enjoyed. It imagined the performers as men who sang
their pain without concern for attention or financial reward, even though, in reality,
they would very much have liked both. Blues enthusiasts oeen spoke of these men as
if they were revenants or creatures from folklore rather than real people, hence the old
myth that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil. The qualities represented by the
classic female blues singers – resilience, solidarity, community, fun – could not
compete. As George Melly, one of the few critics to take the classic blues seriously in
the 1960s, wrote, "there is a proportion of the worthless, the mechanical, the
contrived, but there is also a gaiety, a vitality, a sense of good time."

Every form of historical revisionism has its winners and losers. In rejecting the blues'
relationship to big-city showbusiness, the conventional narrative all but erased
women's voices and experiences. Jackie Kay's book and George C Wolfe's film are
important reminders of the period when the blues was mass-market party music and
its reigning stars were women, proud and majestic in feathers and gold.

Bessie Smith by Jackie Kay is published on 18 February.

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