By the time Shuffle Along opened, black music had been irrevocably changed by yet another songwriter with a gleam in his eye. Perry Bradford had been scuffling for years on the minstrel and vaudeville circuits down South and through the Midwest, racking up some minor hits along the way as a songwriter. In 1917, he met a cabaret singer in New York named Mamie Smith and declared her the right singer for the new kind of songs he was writing.
After pounding the streets in vain for a chance to get Smith into a studio (not even a star as big as Williams could help him get a label exec’s ear), he finally struck paydirt in February 1920, when the Okeh label recorded Smith singing Bradford’s “That Thing Called Love”, backed by the white house band. The label had taken a huge chance recording an unknown black woman singing a style not readily familiar and barely lifting a finger to promote it. Still, sales were good enough for Okeh to try the Bradford-Smith team again that August, this time with a black band.
The result, Crazy Blues, is one of the most important records ever made. It’s generally considered to be the first blues record, although the word “blues” had been cropping up in song titles (“St. Louis Blues,” for example) for a while. Crazy Blues became a wildfire hit in black communities throughout the land (which means that perhaps it’s a good thing that Bradford’s original title, “Harlem Blues”, was changed).
All by itself, it launched the era of the classic female blues singers. Within the next three years, Ethel Waters, Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, and Bessie Smith would all make their recording debuts after years of performing in nightclubs and on the vaudeville road and collectively begin to change the face of American music. (It also proved that for the right products, even poor black folk would scratch up a couple of coins to have a good time, confounding virtually everyone in the recording industry.) Bradford and Smith had hit on a new thing, and black pop music – the art form, its audience, and the companies that made and sold it – would never be the same.
Many basic black music histories acknowledge the enormous impact of Crazy Blues. But they often present the song as something of a supernova, an isolated event that came out of the blue. It probably was exactly that for those not paying close attention to the growing black pop landscape. In fact, “Crazy Blues” has a definite and traceable lineage. As a recording, it is structurally in line with the musical theater/vaudevillian style of the day but is the first record from that scene to explicitly point towards what we now know as early jazz and blues.
As to its artistic background, its primary creators – Bradford and Smith – have their roots in the black performance world, both in New York and out on the black touring circuits. “Crazy Blues” is a musical achievement, but its heritage belongs to the black stage, the first manifestation of black pop – the world of Bert Williams, George Walker, and a talented, committed and proud group of brothas and sistas we barely even know of today.
In the wake of Crazy Blues and Shuffle Along, a thousand black pop flowers started blooming. Joe “King” Oliver and Louis Armstrong took Chicago by storm with hot jazz built from their New Orleans roots. Jazz scenes also sprouted in Los Angeles and Kansas City. Chicago welcomed waves of blacks from the South seeking a better life, and the music we now recognize as blues music began to take shape. Filmmaker Oscar Micheaux produced his first race movies, carting prints from town to town and hustling up screenings.
Back in the Apple, the bold young literary voices of the Harlem Renaissance began to emerge and attract critical white patronage. A song from the 1923 Miller-Lyles musical Runnin’ Wild — “Charleston” by James P. Johnson and Cecil Mack – sparked the dance craze of the decade. Black baseball players, frozen out of the major leagues by an odious “gentleman’s agreement,” found an outlet of their own in the newly minted Negro National League; other black leagues were launched later in the ‘20s.
And in 1923 the Harlem nightclub the Cotton Club opened, promising its all-white clientele an “authentic,” exotic black entertainment experience, featuring all the top black music stars. From 1927 to 1931, the house band was led by the former Washingtonian Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington. During his Cotton Club engagement, Ellington received valuable guidance in compositional technique from Will Vodery, a black composer and arranger who cut his teeth working on shows during the first wave of black musical theater, including taking over from Cook as musical director on the Williams-Walker show Abyssinia.
Of course, these events aren’t directly connected, and they each have backstories that reach deeper into the history of black culture, entertainment, and life than there’s room to delve into here. We haven’t even touched on the southern performing circuit, spawning ground for countless singers and comedians (not to mention the earliest forms of blues music), or ragtime, the dominant pop music strain of the day and precursor to jazz. All was not rosy by any measure: racism still dictated how and where blacks could work, and not all of the ventures begun during this era lasted much beyond it.
Taken together, they indicate that black cultural activity, which had been bubbling beneath the awareness of white America for years, exploded during the 1920s. By the end of that decade, modern black pop had established itself as a cornerstone of American culture. Somewhere up there, Bert Williams was probably looking down upon the whole crazy scene and smiling.
This multi-part look through some of black music’s back pages began with contemporary performers extracting new possibilities from older styles. We then looked at those who chronicled the growth of the blues and whether they did a properly thorough and respectful job of it. We met a figure long consigned to the file drawers, who offered us glimpses of a richness we never knew existed.
And now, we’ve turned the clock back a full century to acquaint ourselves with a legend whose name is probably better known than his work, if not by much. In the process, we’ve become more familiar with traditions that are not always acknowledged when the story of black music gets told, and crucial periods in the music’s development need greater understanding and appreciation.
We could have drilled back further to the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s or James Bland, the best-known of all the black minstrels of the mid-1800s, but the point’s been made. As much as we commonly know about black music, its major players, its defining moments, and even some of its obscurities, there is so much more to discover, so many amazing performances to hear for the first time, so many accomplishments to reconsider now that we’ve learned just a little bit more. For every hole in the music’s chronology this series has filled in; five new tangents are just waiting to be explored.
There are two options from here. You could succumb to the awe of such a vast legacy and obsessively seek to fill in every gap, leaving no plotline unresolved, until the precise sequence of how black American music came to be, from African drumming and chanting to those Jubilee Singers up to Lil Wayne, can be plotted out and made clear for all to understand. That’s completely doable if you make that your life’s work.
Or you can take a path far less comprehensive but possibly much more rewarding and enjoyable. Think of each tributary of the everlasting river of black music as a path to pursue, a road that will lead somewhere where there’s likely to be a fairly cool band or singer or DJ holding it down. Follow one strand of this amazing, ongoing tradition at a time and see where it leads. When you get there, find out who’s in town that night, and get there early to claim a good seat. Order refreshments, sit back, and listen as the music unfolds…
Further Reading and Listening
Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry 1890-1919, Tim Brooks (2004) – An indispensable encyclopedia of pioneers who recorded everything from comic routines to spirituals. Also seek out Archeophone’s two-CD companion set.
Spreadin’ Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters, 1880-1930, David A. Jasen and Gene Jones (1998) – In the world of musical theater, the songwriters were often the bigger stars than the performers; here they get their due.
Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot 1843-1924, David Wondrich (2003) – A chronology of American pop that lays out about 70 years of incremental innovations before Louis Armstrong showed up. Archeophone’s companion CD includes “Nobody”, “Crazy Blues,” and other songs referred to in these essays.
A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe, Reid Badger (1994) – A bio of the groundbreaking bandleader and composer. Several collections of his recordings are also available.
Reminiscing with Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, Robert Kimball (1973) – A rich excursion in the way-back machine.
Crazy Blues: The Best of Mamie Smith (2004) – Smith parlayed talent, hustle and one history-changing hit into a decade’s worth of recordings, collected on this CD.