Escaping the Delta (5 page)

As for “Crazy Blues,” the song that opened up the Race record market and pushed the blues recording boom into high gear, it was typical of the sophisticated vaudeville style. While Cahill's “Dallas Blues” and Handy's early compositions were largely based on folk sources, “Crazy Blues” was well along the path to the sort of material that, aside from using the word “blues” in the title, had little to distinguish it from other Tin Pan Alley torch songs. This is not to say that it was a less genuine blues than the folkier songs, but only to reemphasize the fact that such categories are infinitely mutable, arbitrary divisions of a continuum that can be followed smoothly from “St. Louis Blues” through “Crazy Blues” to “Body and Soul.”

“Crazy Blues” was nonetheless an important breakthrough. Mamie Smith was a fine singer, she was backed by a hot band of black jazz players, and her success began a revolution that continues to this day. As the first African-American recording artist to be marketed specifically to a market of black consumers, she made an immediate, astonishing hit, and is rightfully hailed as a pioneer who forever changed the recording industry. My points are only that the history of blues as popular music is not the same as its history as black cultural expression, and that the evolution preserved on recordings is not representative of the music's evolution in live performance. Live, the music first emerged as a black, Southern style. On record, Mamie Smith followed a wave of white blues singers, and her style was closer to the white-dominated Northern vaudeville tradition than to the tent-show style of Ma Rainey.

Indeed, all of the black singers who recorded during the two years after Smith's breakthrough were established vaudeville artists, performing blues because the record companies demanded it. When “Crazy Blues” became a hit, there was a rush to follow up its success, and such African-American entertainers as Ethel Waters, Edith Wilson, Sara Martin, Lucille Hegamin, and Alberta Hunter cut hundreds of blues songs. This resulted in some excellent records, but there is no reason to think that these singers had specialized in blues before
this time, or chose to specialize in them now except for commercial reasons. In a pattern that has been repeated ad infinitum, black performers were ghettoized, and their access to the recording world was dependent on their singing “black” music, whatever their own tastes or the repertoire they may have featured in their live shows. In person, black vaudeville stars were performing as wide a range of material as their white counterparts, and it was racism and the vagaries of the recording industry that kept more of this from being preserved on wax.
¹⁷

Vaudeville singers, black and white, continued to have the blues record market to themselves until early in 1923, when Bessie Smith cut her first sides. Smith had also worked in vaudeville, and had first been known as a dancer, but her success had been largely in the South, and she was regarded as a Ma Rainey disciple as early as her teens. She sang Tin Pan Alley pop songs on occasion, but blues formed the cornerstone of her performances, and she was clearly most at home with that style.

Smith's first release, “Down Hearted Blues,” was an immediate sensation and opened the door to a new wave of Southern singers. And yet, as with “Crazy Blues,” its importance has sometimes been overstated, or at least described in misleading ways. The song was already an established hit, having been recorded with immense success the previous summer by Alberta Hunter (its cocomposer), and covered by Monette Moore and Eva Taylor. While Smith's version is usually described as a major breakthrough for “true” blues singing, a comparison of her record with Hunter's reveals a more complicated picture: Though Hunter's style can strike modern blues fans as overtrained and sophisticated, she sounds a good deal more comfortable than Smith did in this first outing. Smith has a magnificent voice, but she is a little tentative and lacks Hunter's eloquent command of the lyric. Furthermore, while Smith was a more distinctive singer than Hunter and would be far more influential, she clearly appreciated Hunter's work—at least if we can judge by the fact that she covered three of Hunter's hits among her first ten recordings, including the classic “Tain't Nobody's Business if I Do.”

Just as I suspect that there were record buyers who did not know
that Mamie Smith was black and Marion Harris was white, there is no reason to think that the average listener in 1923 drew the clear division that I and other historians have made between Bessie Smith's work and that of singers like Hunter and Ethel Waters. Smith was quickly elevated to the top of the blues pantheon, but this does not mean that listeners considered her a revolutionary or rejected the more urbane blues queens. Smith's material was similar—when it was not identical—to that of her competitors, and plenty of people continued to prefer the more sophisticated styles. Mamie Smith, dismissed in some blues histories as a minor artist who was briefly popular before the arrival of the “real” blues queens, continued to fill theaters throughout black America well into the 1930s, and was being described as “Still the South's Favorite Singer.”
¹⁸
In the Northeast especially, many people thought of the more “down-home” blues queens as old-fashioned, and even at the peak of her popularity, Ma Rainey rarely if ever appeared in New York.
¹⁹

Bessie Smith herself had been rejected by the first African-American-owned record label, Black Swan, as too “nitty gritty,” and even after she became a star, the Philadelphia-born jazz pianist Sam Wooding would say that she “didn't go over too big with New York musicians,” because they found her style lugubrious: “She would sing something like ‘Baby I love you, love you mo' and mo'.' I'd go to the bathroom, come back and catch the rest of the verse, ‘I hope you never leave me, 'cause I don't wanna see you go.' She had dragged out each word so that I hadn't missed a thing.”
²⁰

On the whole, though, audiences hailed Bessie Smith as “Empress of the Blues” in North and South alike. Her singing had a depth and soul that had not been heard before on record, and when it came to serious blues “moaning,” the Northern vaudeville singers sounded pale and cute by comparison. Her sales were so impressive that record companies immediately dispatched talent scouts to comb the South in search of other deep blues specialists, opening the door to such artists as Clara Smith, Ida Cox, and Sippie Wallace. By the end of 1923, things had come full circle, and Ma Rainey finally got a chance to record the music she had pioneered.
²¹

While what survives on record is the awesome power of their
singing, to understand the appeal of artists like Smith and Rainey it is important to remember that they were practiced professionals with many years of stage experience, and that they presented themselves not as pure, down-home blueswomen, but as successful stars. Their costumes were famously gaudy, and they were known for having uncanny control over their audiences. The mix of showbiz and soulfulness is nicely captured in the recollections of Thomas “Georgia Tom” Dorsey, who became Rainey's bandleader when her records catapulted her to a new level of stardom. On the one hand, Dorsey recalls the theatricality of Rainey's entrance:

On the other hand, Dorsey, who would go on to become the “Father of Gospel Music,” describes Rainey's effect on the audience as far more than mere entertainment. He considered her a sort of secular high priestess, inspiring deep spiritual fervor:

Anyone who has seen a great gospel show in a black church will feel the shock of recognition, not only at the power of the performer to move and speak for her audience, but at the way the truth and soulfulness is supported by broad, self-conscious theater. Working for a public that still has its roots in the world where Rainey held court, gospel stars continue to surround themselves with the flashing lights and rolling bass drums, and the gaudy array of gold and diamonds, which a more urbane performer might consider “cheap.”

The blues queens dressed like their audience's wildest fantasies—a tradition carried on by Little Richard and James Brown, Patti LaBelle and Dolly Parton—never fearing that the fans would mistake the rich trappings for an inappropriate sophistication. The message was that they were “country” but had made good. And that country sensibility was a big part of what set the second wave of black blues queens apart from the New York crowd. Rainey, in particular, had spent her life playing in tents across the rural South. She was no untrained hick, but country flavor was evident in much of her work. Her first sessions included songs about boll weevils and moonshine liquor (both shortly covered by Bessie Smith), and rather than relying on composers like Handy, Bradford, and Williams, she arrived with a proven personal repertoire honed over two decades. Younger singers like Bessie Smith occasionally wrote their own songs, but Rainey's material had deeper roots, and some of it almost certainly predates the earliest of Handy's compositions.

The rural orientation of Rainey's work was also reflected in her choice of instrumentation, and in this she helped pave the way for the singer-guitarists who would be the next wave of blues recording stars.
While she often used jazz bands, she also recorded two sides in the spring of 1924 with the Pruitt Twins, a guitar-and-banjo duo. A few months earlier, Sara Martin had recorded some songs with the guitarist Sylvester Weaver (one of which was advertised as “the first blue guitar record”),
²⁴
but piano and trumpet were still the norm for blues accompaniments. Rainey continued to record with guitarists throughout her career, including sides with Blind Blake and Tampa Red, and she clearly understood that there was an audience that favored such down-home, country sounds.

Before moving on to the male street singers who began recording in the mid-1920s, I want to emphasize yet again the extent to which blues history has been skewed in the popular imagination. Anyone hoping to understand the blues era must keep in mind that during the period when blues was at its peak of popularity, transcending all other black styles, the female singers I have been discussing were always the music's biggest stars. A glance through the
Chicago Defender
's record advertising in the early 1920s shows that jazzmen like King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton were considered minor figures compared to them. When the male guitarists arrived on the scene, some would match the queens in terms of record sales, but they never approached the same heights of the entertainment world. Ida Cox, Sara Martin and the various Smiths headlined large shows, often including two dozen musicians, dancers, singers, comedians, and assorted novelty acts.
²⁵
For many listeners, they continued to define the blues field right up to World War II. As far as I can find, New York's foremost black newspaper,
The Amsterdam News
, never so much as mentioned a blues singer who was not female and fronting a band until the 1940s, and any black person I have spoken with who was listening to music at this time, if asked to name the top names in blues, has reeled off a list of women, plus maybe one or two men. Obviously, there were some record buyers who would have produced a different list, but in my experience the one I heard from Honeyboy Edwards is typical: Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, Bessie Smith, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Lonnie Johnson.
²⁶

Today, going through the record bins, one finds that this situation has been turned on its head. Relatively few CDs attest to the dominance of the blues queens, while there are hundreds of overlapping
reissues of their male contemporaries. Even among the male performers, it often seems that modern-day acclaim is granted in inverse ratio to prewar popularity. I share many of the tastes and predilections that have led to this state of affairs, and am not protesting it, but it is vital to remember that the tastes of white blues revivalists do not in any way mirror those of black record buyers in the 1920s or 1930s, or even those of the early blues artists who are most admired by modern fans. As for white performers like Bernard and Harris, there has not been even the most cursory study of their work, and this leaves a fundamental gap in any understanding of early blues history, since they paved the way for Mamie Smith and Alberta Hunter as surely as Smith and Hunter paved the way for Bessie Smith and all that followed.