Smith, Mamie (1883–1946)

African-American blues recording artist and actress whose 1920 recording of "Crazy Blues" began the post-World War I craze for blues. Born Mamie Robinson Smith on May 26, 1883, in Cincinnati, Ohio; died on October 30, 1946, in New York City; married William "Smitty" Smith, in 1912; married Sam Gardner, in 1920; married a third time in 1929.

Called the "Queen of the Blues," Mamie Smith recorded the first blues songs and influenced the style of many African-American singers who followed. She also enjoyed a career as an actress in film and on the vaudeville stage. Facts about her family and early life are obscure; she left her home in Cincinnati in 1893 to join a touring dance troupe, the Four Dancing Mitchells, and by 1912 was appearing as part of Tutt's Smart Set dance company. Her marriage to a singer William "Smitty" Smith that year soon ended. After 1913, Smith worked in nightclubs in Harlem, New York, as a dancer, vaudeville performer, and vocalist. Tall and beautiful, with an expressive contralto voice, Smith wore lavish costumes of sequined, velvet gowns on stage and was a very popular performer in Harlem by the late 1910s, during the early Harlem Renaissance. Her nightclub shows included trapeze acts, comedy, songs, and dancing. In 1918, she appeared at the Lincoln Theater in the musical Maid in Harlem. The musical's producer, Perry Bradford, a major New York composer and songwriter, was trying to find a record label to record black artists. Columbia turned him down, as did Victor Records after allowing Bradford's protégé and stage star Mamie Smith to make a test record of his pop tune "That Thing Called Love." When the record was bootlegged and became popular in New York, Bradford was finally able to convince the skeptical managers of Okeh Records (part of the General Phonograph Corporation) that blacks would buy records made by black singers. He encouraged them to record blues songs with Smith.

Thus in early 1920, at age 36, Smith made the first commercial recordings by a black woman, performing Bradford's pop tunes "That Thing Called Love" and "You Can't Keep a Good Man Down." The record's success led Okeh Records to bring Smith back to record "Crazy Blues" and "It's Right Here for You" in August. The first commercial blues record made, "Crazy Blues" was enormously successful nationwide, selling over 75,000 copies in its first month of release and over one million copies in its first year. Its success set off a recording boom in what were termed "race records" by record companies, which sought to record female vocalists with styles similar to Smith, now nationally known. This opened the way for many of the now-classic blues, jazz, and popular singers, such as Bessie Smith (no relation), to get their start in commercial recording, and made blues a standard part of American music. Smith considered herself a vaudeville and jazz performer rather than a blues singer, but she continued making blues records throughout the 1920s with her band, the Jazz Hounds. After leaving Okeh Records in 1923, she signed with Ajax Records in 1924, Victor in 1926, and Okeh again, recording for them from 1929 to 1931. She was at the height of her fame in the 1920s and 1930s while based in New York, earning up to $3,000 for an appearance. Crowds lined up at theaters for tickets to hear Mamie Smith. She was a wealthy woman who owed three New York mansions, with a new electric player piano in every room. Smith was in much demand in New York and toured the United States widely before the effects of the Depression greatly reduced her audience. Between 1932 and 1934, she toured in the musical Yelping Hounds, and in 1936 she was performing in Europe. She also appeared in several movies, including Paradise in Harlem (1939), Sunday Sinners (1940), and Murder on Lenox Avenue (1941). Smith was married two more times, about 1920 and in 1929, but information about her second and third husbands is sketchy.

Despite the high fees she earned, Smith was constantly in debt due to her extravagant lifestyle; when she fell ill in 1944, age 61, she had few resources and was living in an Eighth Avenue boarding house. Severely arthritic, she entered Harlem Hospital that year and died there in 1946, bankrupt. She was buried in the Frederick Douglass Memorial Park Cemetery on Staten Island. In 1964, a memorial concert was held in New York to raise funds for her re-interment under a headstone dedicated by her fans of Iserlohn, Germany, to the "first lady of the blues."

sources:

Carr, Ian, Digby Fairweather, and Brian Priestley. Jazz: The Essential Companion. London: Grafton, 1988.

Harrison, Daphne Duval. Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920's. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Herzhaft, Gérard. Encyclopedia of the Blues. Trans. by Brigitte Debord. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1992.

Smith, Jessie Carney, ed. Notable Black American Women. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1992.

Tirro, Frank. Jazz: A History. NY: W.W. Norton, 1993.

Laura York , M.A. in History, University of California, Riverside, California