The History of Jazz Read Free Page A

Werley’s Minstrel Show, where her pay, at least initially, was as little as $2.50 per week. However, in 1923, Smith’s recording “Down Hearted Blues” boosted her to widespread fame; the record reportedly sold over a half million in copies in a few months, and soon Smith was recording regularly and performing for as much as $2,000 per week. She toured extensively, entertaining capacity audiences in large venues—tents set up on the outskirts of town as well as in downtown theaters—in the South and along the eastern seaboard.
    Smith, like the blues itself, had risen from the streets to the most spacious performance halls, a setting for which her talents were admirably suited. Her powerful voice could reach to the back row of the largest theater without the need for amplification, and her sure skills as a comedienne and entertainer, as well as her dominating stage presence, enabled Smith to captivate audiences who would have been put off by the troubled, introspective blues of a Robert Johnson or Son House. The poignant aspects of the blues here became tempered with humor and the use of sexual double entendre. Songs such as “Empty Bed Blues,” “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl,” “You’ve Got to Give Me Some,” and “Kitchen Man” expounded on, with varying degrees of subtlety, the subject of copulation. This openness to sexual themes helped, on the one hand, to sell records, while on the other, it led to the condemnation of Smith in particular and the blues in general among many social and religious groups, including much of the black middle class.
    Although Smith played a prominent role in the merging of blues and popular music, her ambitions could hardly have been realized without the complementary efforts of a host of songwriters, publishers, musicians, and record producers. This evolutionary process, still making its impact felt today, exerted an especially transformative influence on American music in the years between 1910 and 1930. Even before the first blues recordings were made, the blues idiom began filtering into the mainstream of American parlor sheet music, under the influence of Tin Pan Alley songwriters such as W. C. Handy. Alabama-born Handy drew on his experiences as a bandleader in Mississippi and his early apprenticeship with a touring minstrel troupe in his visionary efforts to expand the vocabulary of American popular song. His success in this regard is amply documented in milestone compositions such as “Memphis Blues” (1912), “St. Louis Blues” (1914), and “Beale Street Blues” (1916). Although his fame as “father of the blues”—as some have designated this composer—is an overstatement, Handy’s impact as an innovator and popularizer of this new genre justifies his prominent place in the annals of American music. After moving to New York in 1917, Handy was well positioned to champion African American popular music not only as a performer and songwriter, but also as a music publisher and owner of a record company. Many of the songs written by Handy and other blues-influenced songwriters became core components of Smith’s repertoire—a mutually beneficial collaboration in which Smith tapped the songwriting skills of the New York professionals and in which Tin Pan Alley profited in turn from the power and authenticity of Smith’s interpretations. At the same time, Smith’s work betrayed strong jazz ties, as demonstrated by her recordings with Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, James P. Johnson, Jack Teagarden, Fletcher Henderson, and others. These various links characterized an important evolution in the blues, from the idiosyncratic music of the Mississippi Delta to the syncretic music of the recording studios. This ability to evolve in tandem with changes in other spheres of popular music would continue to characterize the blues in ensuing decades.
    Yet the blues has also retained a primal core that has resisted assimilation and change. When we listen