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Mamie Smith
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Mamie Gardener began her career in show business as a dancer with the Four Dancing Mitchells. By 1910, Smith was touring the Midwest and East Coast with the Smart Set Company, a Black minstrel troupe. She married singer William “Smitty” Smith in 1912. The couple moved to New York where she began working as a cabaret dancer, pianist, and singer. Her first major break came in 1918, when she appeared in Perry Bradford’s musical “Made in Harlem.” Though technically not a blues performer, Mamie Smith notched her place in American music as the first Black female singer to record a vocal blues
Ma Rainey: Mother of the Blues, The Complete Paramount Recordings, 1923-1928
by C. Michael Bailey
Many music writers and historians consider Gertrude “Ma" Rainey the matriarch of American blues. Beginning her career in the dust of Southern tent shows and minstrel circuits, she became one of the first professional entertainers to bridge the raw, rural folk traditions of the deep south with the theatrical polish of vaudeville. Known for her commanding ...
The Philosophy Of Jazz
by Ian Patterson
The Philosophy Of Jazz Kevin Le Gendre 105 Pages ISBN: 978 0 7123 5503 2 British Library 2025 If you had to recommend just one book on jazz history to a neophyte, which would it be? Ted Gioia's The History of Jazz (Oxford University Press, ...
The Black Entrepreneurs of Early Jazz
by Karl Ackermann
Preamble: In 2020, I published A Map of Jazz: Crossroads of Music and Human Rights (WS Publishing), a book that looks at the culture of jazz on a timeline with cultures of the world. At more than 500 pages, the book is incomplete by necessity; there is no well-marked path, and the history is sometimes nebulous. ...
Ron Miles: Rainbow Sign Of The Times
by Ian Patterson
The title of Ron Miles' Rainbow Sign (Blue Note Records, 2020) carries great personal meaning for the Denver cornetist/composer and educator. The initial influence was The Carter Family song “God Gave Noah the Rainbow Sign," with its line 'No more water but the fire next time," which in turn gave James Baldwin the title for his ...
Cotton Pickin' Blues
by Martin McFie
Blues began with enslaved African peoples' work songs in the cotton fields of the Deep South of America. The Slave Narrative of Mr. Sam Polite, given at 93 years of age, chronicles that life. It was written on St. Helena, a cotton producing Sea Island in the Carolinas, where Mr. Polite was born into slavery. The ...
Jazz Comes to Records (1917)
by Russell Perry
This is the first in a series of programs that will play representative music from 100 years of jazz history. We will explore the broad sweep of that narrative; its representative and its idiosyncratic players; its durable movements and dead ends; its popular recordings and rarities. We hope you will join us over the next 100 ...
Memphis Fire – Matt Isbell and the Cigar Box Guitar
by C. Michael Bailey
"The past is never dead. It's not even past." --William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun Ghost Town Blues Band Hard Road to Hoe Self Produced 2015 Memphis, Tennessee: The American South's conflicted Mecca. For its size and location, Memphis should be much more than it ...
On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom By Dennis McNally
by C. Michael Bailey
On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom Dennis McNally 384 Pages ISBN: #978-1619024496 Counterpoint 2014 Since Samuel Charters The Country Blues (Reinhart) in 1959, beginning, effectively, the serious reportage of American Folk Music, in particular the blues, there have been two far-reaching trilogies that ...
China Moses: Crazy Blues
by Mehdi El Mouden
Pouring old wine into new bottles has become a specialty of vocalist China Moses and Pianist/Arranger Raphael Lemonnier. Rejuvenating classics with a pint of spirited innovation is a landmark of the duet, who, for their first encounter revisited the best of Dinah Washington, This One's for Dinah. For their second collaboration they pay tribute to great ...
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