For Black History Month, we're sharing stories of overlooked entertainment trailblazers: those who made great strides and historic contributions to film, TV, music, literature and more.
Ella Fitzgerald. Billie Holiday. Beyoncé.
When most people think of historic Black female recording artists, these and other iconic singers likely come to mind.
But according to music historians, it's possible none of these women would have had the chance to achieve the soaring success they did without Mamie Smith blazing the trail before them.
In 1920, Smith gave a voice to Black female singers by becoming the first African American woman to make a blues recording. The record became a smash hit in Black communities across the country, revolutionizing the blues genre and opening the doors of popular music to Black female artists.
"Mamie Smith almost singlehandedly jump-started the popularity of blues music in American culture," says music journalist and author Jas Obrecht, who profiled Smith for Living Blues magazine in 2019. "I would argue everybody who loves music and performs blues music, whether they know it or not, they owe a debt of appreciation to Mamie Smith."
But the music industry moved on from Smith almost as quickly as it launched her: She died penniless in 1946, and her legacy today has been largely overlooked.
This is her story.
Mamie Smith made history with hit blues recordings
Born in Cincinnati in 1891, Smith forged a career in vaudeville and chorus lines before making her historic recordings. She met composer Perry Bradford after he spotted her singing at a cabaret.
Bradford had long dreamed of having Black singers record blues tunes for a mass market, but it was a tough sell for recording studios at the time.
"Back then, people didn't think Black people would buy records — period, end of story," Obrecht says. "But Perry Bradford… he had a feeling that Black people would buy records. And so that's why he had Mamie do those recordings. And he turned out to be correct."
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Eventually, Otto Heinemann, the president of fledgling OKeh Records, decided to take Bradford up on his idea — but Frederick Hager, the company's recording manager, wanted Sophie Tucker, a white singer, to record the songs. Because Tucker signed with another label, Bradford convinced Hager to take a chance on Smith.
At OKeh Records, Smith recorded the songs "That Thing Called Love," "You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down," "It’s Right Here for You" and "Crazy Blues," the latter of which became a smash success, selling 75,000 copies in less than a month in Harlem, New York, alone.
"If you walked through Harlem in late 1920, early '21, that song 'Crazy Blues' was coming out of every window," says Adam Gussow, a professor of English and Southern studies at the University of Mississippi. "It's almost unparalleled. It would be sort of like when the Beatles hit America."
And according to Daphne Brooks, a professor of African American studies and music at Yale University, "Crazy Blues" was more than just the catchy pop song of the day. It also spoke to racial violence and terrorism that broke out across the United States the year prior, a period known as Red Summer.
In addition to crooning about lost love, Smith sings near the end of "Crazy Blues" that she wants to "get myself a gun and shoot myself a cop."
"That is, in every way, tied up to that deeper history of what African Americans were facing with regards to the threat of lynching and domestic terrorism and racial violence," Brooks says. "The first African American recording of the blues is also our first recorded protest anthem.”
More importantly, the success of "Crazy Blues" proved to the music industry that Black women could make hit records — and that there was a thriving market for Black, popular music.
"Immediately after that, there was a huge rush among record labels to sign Black women who sang music, who sang blues songs," Obrecht says, adding that Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and other women came to dominate the blues industry in subsequent years. "It all comes back to Mamie Smith, because Mamie Smith starts it all."
Mamie Smith died penniless but left a rich legacy
Smith's popularity shot through the roof following "Crazy Blues," which netted her about $100,000 in royalties — a fortune at the time. Her stage appearances — characterized by her signature glam style of shimmering gowns, plumes and diamond tiaras — raked in up to $1,500 a week. She later appeared in films, like the 1929 theatrical short "Jail House Blues" and 1939's "Paradise in Harlem."
But the success didn't last.
"By late 1923, her sales are dropping off, and then it's like the good times are gone for her," Obrecht says. "That happened to a lot of the early female blues singers. It was a hit-and-run. They had their hits, and then the industry changed and moved on to something else."
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By the time of her death in 1946, Smith was reportedly penniless, without even a tombstone to mark her grave in Staten Island, New York. But what the singer lacked in material wealth, she made up for in cultural influence, Gussow says, setting the precedent for Black female artists to become pop music divas, from Ma Rainey all the way up to Beyoncé.
According to Brooks, Smith's legacy has ironically been overshadowed by the Black female recording artists who came after her — even though it was Smith who kicked off the classic blues women's era of the 1920s.
"So many people still don't know that the recorded blues was initially, and quite scandalously, an all-white affair," Brooks says. "Mamie Smith disrupted that whole kind of logic and economy by claiming the space behind the microphone for Black women entertainers and African American entertainers more broadly."
Obrecht says Smith "showed America that Black women singers had something special, beautiful, emotionally charged, heartfelt and inspirational to offer."
"I would argue she's just as important, just as groundbreaking a musician as Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Ella Fitzgerald and people like that, only she predates all of them," he says. "She's the first Black superstar, and that was a hundred years ago. We're still talking about her today. I can't help but feel she'd be delighted to know that if she could."
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Black trailblazers: How blues icon Mamie Smith paved way for Beyoncé
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