Vaudeville blues
| Classic female blues | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins |
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| Cultural origins | Early 20th century, Southern United States |
| Typical instruments | |
| Other topics | |
| Blues | |
Classic female blues was an early form of blues music, popular in the 1920s. An amalgam of traditional folk blues and urban theater music, the style is also known as vaudeville blues. Classic blues were performed by female singers accompanied by pianists or small jazz ensembles and were the first blues to be recorded. Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and the other singers in this genre were instrumental in spreading the popularity of the blues.
Blues, a type of black folk music originating in the American South, were mainly in the form of work songs until about 1900.Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (1886–1939), known as "The Mother of the Blues”, is credited as the first to perform the blues on stage as popular entertainment when she began incorporating blues into her act of show songs and comedy around 1902. Rainey had heard a woman singing about the man she’d lost, learned the song, and began using it as her closing number, calling it “the blues". Rainey's example was followed by other young women who followed her path in the tent show circuit, one of the few venues available to black performers. Most toured through a circuit established by the black-owned Theatre Owners Booking Association (T.O.B.A.) on the East Coast and through the South as far west as Oklahoma.
A key figure in popularizing the blues was the composer W. C. Handy, who published the first of his blues songs in 1912. His compositions, notably "The Memphis Blues" and "St. Louis Blues", quickly became standards for blues singers. Songs modeled on Handy's were performed in black stage shows and were also performed and recorded by white vaudevillians, such as Sophie Tucker.
In 1919, Handy and the Harlem songwriter and music publisher Perry Bradford began a campaign to persuade record companies that black consumers would eagerly purchase recordings by black performers. Bradford's persistence led the General Phonograph Company to record the New York cabaret singer Mamie Smith in its Okeh studio on February 14, 1920. She recorded two non-blues songs, which were released without fanfare that summer and were commercially successful. Smith returned to the studio on August 10 and recorded "Crazy Blues", the first blues recorded by a black woman. The record sold over 75,000 copies in its first month, an extraordinary figure for the time. Smith became known as “America’s First Lady of the Blues”. In November 1920, the vaudeville singer Lucille Hegamin became the second black woman to record a blues song when she cut "Jazz Me Blues".Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, Mary Stafford, Katie Crippen, Edith Wilson, and Esther Bigeou, among others, made their first recordings before the end of 1921. Blues had become a nationwide craze, and the recording industry actively scouted, booked and recorded hundreds of black female singers.
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