06/18/2024
A Woman! That’s who.
Who First Recorded an Actual Blues Song?
🎶 Did Mamie Smith (and the Jazz Hounds)record the first (actual) blues song? I’ll leave that up for you to decide, but some folks believe so.
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“In 1912, when W.C. Handy published “Memphis Blues,” the fad for using the word blues was already several years old. Handy’s tune was in fact the third to use the word in the title. Hart Wand’s “Dallas Blues” has the distinction of being the first, while the second was Arthur Seals’s “Baby Seals’ Blues.”
“During the afternoon of Tuesday, August 10, 1920, clarinetist Johnny Dunn, trombone player Dope Andrews, clarinetist Ernest Elliott, Leroy Parker on violin, and Pianist Perry Bradford, a group of musicians collectively known as The Jazz Hounds were in the studio. They were about to play a song written by Perry Bradford, and to sing it with them was Mamie Smith. Called “Crazy Blues,” it is the first blues record.
Smith was not specifically a blues singer, but more a vaudeville and cabaret singer. Then again, at this time, there was no such thing as a blues singer. Smith was around 37 years old when she made history; certainly no youngster. Mamie had met Bradford in 1918 while she worked in his musical r***e, Made in Harlem, at the Lincoln Theatre in New York. She had already recorded for OKeh in February 1920, but her two earlier efforts were not blues songs.
“Crazy Blues” sold well; some claim 75,000 copies were sold in the first month, and a million in the first year. These numbers may well be inflated, but there is no underestimating its importance, nor the fact that it was a sizeable hit. Over the next three years, Mamie recorded some sixty sides for the OKeh label, although much of the material was closer to vaudeville than blues.” - Richard Havers (UDiscoverMusic)
🤔- John/Still Livin' the Blues
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📸- Donaldson Collection/Getty Images
