Before Aretha Franklin, before Billie Holiday and before Ella Fitzgerald, there was another pioneering female artist whose work as a recording artist set a precedent for female artists of color, back in the day.
Her name was – Mamie Smith, and you don’t hear much about her by the masses and in popular culture of the present day and age.
Smith has been credited as the first African-American vocal blues artist to have made a recording in the year 1920.
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1891, Mamie started performing as a vaudeville singer and dancer from the age 10, and started performing in Harlem clubs from the year 1913.
On February 14, 1920, her first recordings took place and her name was forever etched in history. While there were continued threats from some fringe elements, Smith continued to make recordings, breaking the barrier and opening the door for other artists of color.
Her biggest hit from that time was ‘Crazy Blues’, also recorded in 1920, which sold a million copies in it’s first year and went on to be preserved by the Library of Congress Recording Registry and was also inducted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame, several decades after it premiered.
First to be deemed ‘The Queen Of The Blues’, Mamie Smith died in 1946 without a penny in her hand. She was 55 then and was buried at Frederick Douglass Memorial Park in Staten Island.
Although you don’t hear much about her, as you do with the artists that followed her, but Smith will always be credited as the first to break open that door and set path for others to follow her lead.