I was recently loaned the History of Rock & Roll Volume. This volume covers the years 1920 to 1963. I have just finished reading Chapter One: The Record Industry: Race and Country. The author, Ed Ward, does a good job of providing a thread to follow, but any curious person would want to know more about the people behind each song. I have decided to dive a little deeper into the records mentioned in this chapter. I may do the same for later chapters, but origins are always most interesting to me.
One of the earliest songs mentioned in the text is Crazy Blues by Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds. The song, penned by Perry Bradford, sold over a million copies in its first year. For context, Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, as performed by Bing Crosby, is one of, if not the best-selling singles of all time. It sold around fifty million copies. Taylor Swift’s Evermore, released December 2020, is the best seller of 2021, with approximately 415,000 copies sold. It should be considered that many people listen to Taylor Swift via streams, not via a purchase of a digital or physical copy of the album. Drawing a direct correlation is not possible, but it is still an anecdote worth mentioning.
Smith was the first black music superstar and the first black woman to record a secular song in the commercial music industry. Pullman sleeping car attendants would reportedly buy the records by the dozen at one dollar and resell them for two dollars at stops throughout the country.
Crazy Blues was not, however, the first record by a black performer. In 1890, the street performer George
Washington Johnson recorded The Laughing Song. This novelty song in which Johnnson laughs rhythmically through the chorus was also a popular record of its day. It reportedly sold fifty thousand copies by the mid-1890s. Because mass duplication was not possible with early recording technology, this meant that Johnson had to sing the song over and over again into a recording horn to make masters. Those masters would make three or four duplicates each.
The lyrics to the Laughing Song were pandering to white, racist audiences of the time, a requirement of this era of segregation if a black man wanted to record. It is, like most of American history, a sad reality.I will let anyone reading this decide for themselves if they want to hear the recording. The lyrics, while far from the worst of the era, are still difficult to hear. Johnson had to sing them over and over again for years. The laughing chorus starts to sound like the cry of a man gone mad, forced to relive the realities of a violently racist society, not only in everyday life but in his art as well.
Not much is known about his life. Hopefully, he was paid well until at least the early 1900s. By that time, record companies no longer needed a constant supply of masters to make duplicates. One or two would be sufficient for the rest of the pressing. He was most likely no longer paid after this as song royalties had not yet been established.
In Crazy Blues, the female protagonist is also driven mad, not just by her abusive relationship with a man, but by the same societal issues that plagued Johnson thirty years earlier. The year prior to the release of Crazy Blues was 1919, a year in which at least twenty-five major riots took place across the United States. The Red Summer forced thousands to flee their homes, and hundreds, mostly black, were killed.
African Americans had served in World War I in large numbers. This honorary position in society was rarely respected when they returned home. The south’s black cotton growers were starting to make enough money to buy houses and cars due to a worldwide demand for textiles. The Great Migration, in which African Americans moved north to large cities, allowed for more freedoms. Many unions would still not allow black membership. In other words, white society was threatened by all the changes, and a movement for equality was taking hold. While often reported as being incited by the black community, the riots were, in most instances, a result of white mob violence. I don’t think I need to point out how exactly this mirrors what we still see every day across this country.
Many music historians, including Ward, have been dismissive of the Crazy Blues as inauthentic blues. As a veteran of Vaudeville and the cabaret world of Harlem, Smith's connections to folk-blues traditions have long been questioned. In listening to the record, anyone can quickly point out its differences from the music of Blind Lemon Jefferson or Robert Johnson. She is backed by a jazz band, for starters. Does her history as a cabaret performer disqualify her from being a blues performer? Do the lyrics and delivery alone not qualify this as a blues recording? Take out the horns, all the instrumentation for that matter, and I think any historian would sing a different tune.
Consider the first two verses:
can't sleep at night
I can't eat a bite
'Cause the man I love
He don't treat me right
He makes me feel so blue
I don't know what to do
Sometimes I sit and sigh
And then begin to cry
'Cause my best friend
Said his last goodbye
Later she goes on to sing,
I went to the railroad...set my head on the track.
If these aren’t blues lyrics, I don’t know what is. Smith’s music and fashion sense would influence Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, artists who are never questioned in their authenticity.
Crazy Blues mainly focuses on her tumultuous relationship with her partner, but this frustration seems to merge with the events of 1919 in the final verse when Smith sings:
Get myself a gun
And Shoot myself a cop!
I ain’t had nothing but bad news,
Now I’ve got the crazy blues
She sings these lyrics almost seventy years before N.W.A. release Fuck Tha Police. Ice-T would release Cop Killer a few years after N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton. The song was publicly condemned by President George H.W. Bush and eventually removed from the album Body Count.
Not only was Crazy Blues an essential record in the narrative of the Blues genre, but also a compelling piece of social commentary. In 1935, Smith performed a version of the song titled Harlem Blues, in which “Kill a cop” becomes “blow my top.” I don’t think that Smith, N.W.A., or Ice-T are advocating for the actual murder of members of the police force. What they are more likely trying to do is point out injustice. With countless murders of black people carried out by police, I think it is more than fair to imagine a fictional reality in which revenge is played out. I regularly heard Eric Clapton’s version of Bob Marley and the Wailers 1976 song I Shot the Sheriff on commercial radio when I was a child. This song is allowed a pass, I'm assuming, because it is performed by a white singer. It is assumed that the song is merely a story, a harmless ballad. When Ice-T brings to life his own character, “The Cop Killer,” it is immediately condemned as inciting violence. The black singer is seen as a dangerous threat; the white singer is seen as nothing more than a performer. Smith and Ice-T are forced to censor themselves, and Clapton is rewarded with radio play.
Smith would later make appearances in several films, including Murder on Lenox Avenue in 1941. This was an example of a ‘race film,’ the visual equivalent to the more often discussed ‘race records.’ For years, her success allowed her to live a life of luxury, but she was reportedly penniless by the end of her life. Often billed ‘The Queen of the Blues,” she was buried in an unmarked grave at Frederick Douglas Memorial Park on Staten Island in 1946. In 2013, through a crowdfunding effort, her burial plot was finally given a proper headstone.
