Mamie Smith

Well, you're listening to Jack Norton's Old Time Radio Show.

If you'd like to learn more about the show, uh, you can find me over at jacknortonmusic.com. And if you have a song or artist request, well, just email me, hello@jacknortonmusic.com. Coming up, I've got one of the greatest blues shouters of all time, Mamie Smith.

She's gonna be doing a tune called The Lure of the South, and then after that we're gonna hear Ella Mae Morse with Freddie Slack and his Orchestra, Get on Board Little Children.

See that steamboat coming, coming round the bend.

Dorsey's doing this at a point when it's just kind of out of time, out of sync with what's going on.

But then a big meteorite, a comet lands [clears throat] in the form of Mamie Smith's Crazy Blues, [clears throat] which is one of the first, it's not the first recording of a blues song, but it's the first recording of a blues song by a Black performer, and it's a massive seller, and immediately changes everything.

Suddenly there's a big market for this old-timey blues.

There's big interest in the cities.

Um, people like Mamie Smith are soon, she's soon followed up by people like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, who actually hires, Dorsey ends up getting hired by Ma Rainey and becoming her bandleader and, and a music arranger.

He gets this gig 'cause he, he's, gets some work at Paramount Records.

I'm kind of compressing the timeline 'cause we've already used half of our time and got a lot to cover.

And that was something he recorded for OK Records.

And obviously, the big record that they recorded in this period was Mamie Smith's Crazy Blues, which was the first time that an African-American artist had been paired with not technically a blues song, but something from the blues vernacular called a blues that was an enormous success and sort of epitomized the hit them where they ain't strategy that OK Records and Ralph Peer would build big careers on.

But before we get to any of that and before we get to his background, I have one big question, and this is the address in the book.

It's interesting to me that commercial recording really takes off in the 1890s, and yet this great body of American vernacular music doesn't really start getting recorded until the 1920s.

She said, seemed like whatever song I didn't like, what he said to do would be our biggest sellers.

Let's backtrack a little bit, though, because there's a really, really big song, and I mentioned it earlier when we played our first song snippet, that sort of defines the beginnings of, Ralph Pierce career, this is really where the starting line, starting gun is fired.

And I'm talking about Crazy Blues by Mamie Smith.

And Peer's role in that recording and the decision to record Mamie Smith and the decision to record that song has been much disputed.

... as a radio performer for a couple years before Ralph Peer comes along.

And, and I think it's just classic that Ralph Peer is the same guy who kicked off the Black blues craze with Crazy Blues and Mamie Smith.

He's the guy who discovered Louis Armstrong.

This was just another underserved ethnic market to him at a time when radio's capital cannibalizing, you know, the, the shellac market, the record market, and he stumbles across Fiddlin' John Carson, doesn't think he's gonna sell.

That does sell.

Okeh Records is in, in the business.

[lip smack] Ralph Peer then breaks away, goes switches to Victor Records and goes to Bristol, Tennessee looking for talent and, you know, the guy, this is the guy who discovered Louis Armstrong a little later after Mamie Smith, and he says, "You know, lightning was in a bottle," and boom, boom.

Not once, but twice, the Carter Family-

Fiddle and John Carson out of Atlanta, that there was a significant selling record that we would call country music today.

And then that didn't exactly open the floodgates, but between the success of Fiddle and John Carson and the much bigger success of Mamie Smith and Crazy Blues and the discovery that African Americans would buy records and white people would buy records made by African Americans, then they go all in on all kinds of ethnic groups.

And Southern whites are one of the ethnic groups that they recorded.

And they discovered pretty quickly that other white people all around the country would buy country records.

Yeah, and you start with the date February 14th, 1920, when, and this is sort of, I guess, one of the instances where they discovered a principle you call record it and see if it sells.

And, and so, uh, a Black singer named Mamie Smith had recorded a couple of tracks, sold a few hundred thousand, or, like, almost 100,000 copies of the first record, and they went back and recorded something called Crazy Blues that sold 75,000 copies of a month-

Right

... and a million copies in a year.

Ed just gave you the numbers, 75,000 sold in a month, a million in a year.

So let's hear what America was actually buying in 1920.

Mamie Smith, Crazy Blues on Okeh, produced by Perry Bradford.

Listen to it as a piece of pop music or jazz or blues, because that's what it is, and hold onto that.