 Jazz, Blues and the Black Audience
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Josephine Baker
Josephine Baker was well aware of the danger of beign caught up in white preconceptions about "primitive" art.
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Black blues singers emerged in the early twentieth century as popular and powerful celebrities. They were urban, secular singers who turned their rich experiences into social lessons for their audiences. They were usually bolder than white women singers. Performing before exclusively black audiences, they discussed sexual disappointments and the failures of love with great candor.
Ida Cox, the "Uncrowned Queen of the Blues," and Ma Rainey, the "Mother of the Blues," established the style that would be used, with spectacular success, by Bessie Smith, the "Empress of the Blues."
Within black culture itself music was perceived rather differently. Through the recording industry, the blacks' vernacular culture was made available to them as a result of mass production becoming part of the popular culture industry.
On 10 August 1920 (a day after Paul Whiteman's first studio session), Mamie Smith became the first black singer to record a "blues". Crazy Blues, her second record, was actually more of a pop vaudeville song but its commercial success revealed to the record companies the existence of an unsuspected market, and resulted in the so-called "race records" - labels recording and marketing blues, jazz, gospel and other, less readily definable styles for the black audience.
Bessie Smith was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and grew up in poverty. Untrained, she just began singing and at the age of 19, joined a traveling tent show to get out of Chattanooga. 2 She wrote most of the lyrics of her songs and eventually formed her own musical troupe. In 1923 she made her first recording for Columbia Records, "Tain't Nobody's Business If I Do." The double meaning of the words and the silky voice of the singer made the record a big hit. Her second record, "Down Hearted Blues," sold 780,000 copies in less than six months. Although the song was ostensibly a lament, she asserted that she had control of her world. Another hit song was called "You Gotta Give Me Some."
The blues sung by Bessie Smith could be sad or self-mocking, selfindulgent or assertive. Smith was a large woman, five feet nine inches tall and weighing over 200 pounds, but she moved gracefully across a stage. She was known to be hard drinking, frequently unhappy over her failed love affairs, and sometimes violent. In fact, her personal life, known to her fans, was often the source for her new songs. Music historian Donald Bogle noted that Smith"hit anybody who annoyed her or messed with her man or woman." 3 In the mid-1920s, at the height of her career, she earned $2,500 a week touring the black nightclubs of the South. From 1923 to 1929, her records sold between 5 and 10 million copies. Smith's interpretation of lyrics was dramatically effective, and the sound of her voice, smooth, melodic, and strong, made her a very popular entertainer.
A Time magazine writer later described Bessie Smith's interpretation of the blues as "a womanly wail that somehow remained proud of its woe." 4 The word "blues" appeared in the title of many of her songs: "Graveyard Dream Blues," "Any Woman's Blues," "Work House Blues," "St. Louis Blues," "Empty Bed Blues," and "House Rent Blues." But as she sang of empty bed blues, she also smiled at the woman's inevitable need for the irresponsible male and mused at the pleasures of sleeping alone occasionally. In the early 1930s, the records of Smith lost their popularity and her career waned. Things began improving a few years later, only to be ended tragically when she was killed in a car accident in 1937 near Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Whatever the particular style - from the guttural dialect of the Mississippi bluesman to the incipient star quality of Louis Armstrong - black music spoke to black society with a confident awareness of its distinctiveness. Immediacy, implicitness and the endless possibilities of the offbeat when removed from the grip of regular rhythm - these features were fundamental, but jazz and blues, in all their wide variety, were principally about emotional and social selfmanagement in American society. As elsewhere in this decade, however, it is a story marked by ambiguity. The music was grounded not in the purity of an oral tradition, but in the interplay between black- and white-derived elements.
Black music was based on a dynamic exploration of the tensions between rhythm and harmony, between performer and creator. White popular music's tendency, by contrast, was to assirnilate, compromise and thus to neutralize; black music indicated the possibility of a separate co-existence in which there can always be alternatives.
In spite of its distinctiveness, commercially recorded black music of the Iate 1920s was greeted with reserve by black, as well as by white, society. The greatest hostility came from the black middle class, who most aspired to the level of the white bourgeoisie and detested all manifestations of the subcultural status that might retard their upward progress.
Among black intellectuals opinion on jazz and blues was marked by considerable ambivalence. While same writers praised them, others preferred the piety of the spirituals. An important part of the target audience for this music was now to be found in northem cities close to the mainspring of American society.
However, white America' s familiarity with styles of black music, as performed for black society, remained very small. Blues singers such as Bessie Smith were known only to a select few, whose influence on popular taste was not great. Only those whites living in same kind of proximity to blacks in the south knew the more rural styles.
Among jazz musicians the names of King Oliver, Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines were gradually spread by the enthusiasm of popularizing performers such as Beiderbecke.
For most of the decade black bands could be heard in New York's Harlem nightspots (Duke Ellington' s stint at the Cotton Club from 1927 to 1932 being the most celebrated example), but this exposure, limited to a small section of society, did not spread the word very far. Those who frequented the clubs seldom bought the bands' records. The prevailing taste in record-buying was for Tin Pan Alley tunes in recordings by Broadway stars such as Al Jalson and Sophie Tucker and white dance bands such as Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians.
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