Throughline - Pop Music's First Black Stars

Episode Date: June 27, 2024

Today, the U.S. popular music industry is worth billions of dollars. And some of its deepest roots are in blackface minstrelsy and other racist genres. You may not have heard their names, but Black musicians like George Johnson, Ernest Hogan, and Mamie Smith were some of the country's first viral sensations, working within and pushing back against racist systems and tropes. Their work made a lasting imprint on American music — including some of the songs you might have on repeat right now.Corrections: A previous version of this episode incorrectly stated that Jim Crow was a real-life enslaved person. In fact, Jim Crow was a racist caricature of African Americans. A previous version of this episode incorrectly stated that Thomas Rice, also known as T.D. Rice or Daddy Rice, was the first person to bring blackface characterization to the American stage. In fact, he was one of several performers of this era who popularized and spread the use of blackface. A previous version of this episode incorrectly stated that African American minstrel troupes didn't start to perform until after the U.S. Civil War. In fact, an African American artist named William Henry Lane was performing in the 1840s.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. A note before we get started. This episode contains racial slurs and discussions of racial stereotypes. It's 1832. You've just arrived at the Bowery Theater in New York City, the largest theater in the nation at this time, home to the best live entertainment performances happening throughout the country.

If you're at this show, it's likely you are a white man sitting down and looking around the 3,000 seats. Unlike at some of the city's other theaters, this is a mostly working-class crowd. You've seen other shows here, lots of Shakespeare, but tonight you came to see something new, something you might never have seen before, that's taking the nation by storm.

Blackface Minstrelsy. Come listen, all you gals and boys, I'm just from Cutler Hole. I'm going to sing a little song. My name's Jim Crow. This recording was produced by Warner Brothers in 1941, and it's a recreation of what an early blackface minstrel show would have sounded like. The watershed moment is the late 1820s

when a man by the name of Thomas Dartmouth Rice, who was Irish-American, did this performance called Jump Jim Crow. Jump Jim Crow. Later on, of course, Jim Crow would become the name for laws enshrining segregation across the U.S. But at this time, it was the title of what became a famous song, performed in blackface at the Bowery Theater in New York by Thomas Rice,

a white man also known as T.D. Wheel about and turn about and do just so Every time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow Wheel about and turn about and do just so Every time I turn around I jump Jim Crow I think those are the lyrics. And this became a nationwide sensation. It's like the first major viral sensation, we'll say.

Let's say it's viral, right? And from this humble beginning, there swept over the length and breadth of our nation a new era in the American theater, the burned old minstrel days. Through the blackface mask and doing this contorted dance that sort of mimicked or represented the stereotype disfigured black enslaved body, right? I am Matthew D. Morrison.

He's a historical musicologist and professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University. He's also the author of the book Black Sound, Making Race and Popular Music in the United States. And when Matthew first finished his book, he had his grandfather read it. And then like tells me later on

that he went to blackface shows. I was like, what? Yes. And then I'm like, I wrote the book already. Matthew Morrison was also my old college professor. This is Lawrence Wu, a producer on our show. And that class that Lawrence took has stuck with him since. We'll let him take it from here.

Matthew's class is where I learned about the history of blackface minstrelsy and its connection to the birth of the popular music industry in the U.S., what's now a multi-billion dollar industry. Blackface minstrelsy is the first original form of American popular commercial music. The sound of all these different genres, even country music, rock and roll, electronic dance music, all of it and the base of it, you can trace it back in some way quite often to a Black musical localized origin. There are famous names in early American popular music.

Scott Joplin is known as the King of Rad Time, Bessie Smith as the Empress of the Blues, Duke Ellington, a master of jazz. But they're not who we're talking about today. Today, we're going to focus on some of the artists whose names you might not have heard of, but whose work was essential to the music industry in those early years, and by extension, to the work we hear today. They made choices that weren't always popular, but they were in the industry from the start. In this episode, we're going to explore the landscape these Black artists navigated and how they made their own lanes in a society that was happy to commodify them and less than enthusiastic about valuing them. We'll hear some hard language, racial slurs that were used at the time by both white and black people,

including in the titles and lyrics of popular songs. But our focus is on the artists. We'll meet black performers who, after emancipation, formed their own blackface troops. They made money by playing on the same racist stereotypes as white blackface shows. And some of their performances subverted those same stereotypes. Later on, some of the earliest black recording artists built on that legacy, making their names with songs that some of their peers found racist, and making it possible for the successors to leave those tropes behind.

All of these artists made a lasting imprint on American music. Coming up, the forgotten black stars of the early popular music industry. Hi, this is Mirto from Oklahoma City, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com.

T's and C's apply. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, offering over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Hand-selected for their inherent craft, each hotel tells its own unique story through distinctive design and immersive experiences, from medieval falconry to volcanic wine tasting. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of over 30 hotel brands around the world. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Why do so many scary movies end with, The Devil Did It?

How has cannibalism on screen changed? Why do directors need to stop using scary service workers in horror? This month on the It's Been a Minute podcast, we are diving into horror tropes and what they reveal about our current culture. Listen to It's Been a Minute wherever you get your podcasts. Part One. The Mask. Hey, Skink! There is no show coming to town! This shop became a familiar trademark of the great shows that swung along, rain or shine, through the cities, towns, and villages of every state.

These were the traveling troubadours of the burnt court. So, 1830s, 1840s, blackface begins in earnest. Wearing and performing blackface meant depicting African Americans in racist caricatures. And T.D. Rice's blackface minstrel performance was in hot demand. T.D. Rice either was jumping Jim Crow in New York or in Ohio and Cincinnati. And this is like between opera acts. This is between Shakespeare in theater. This is how blackface gets introduced to the wider public.

But eventually, like as it became more lucrative and more sensational, it led to an audience, right? So we don't have American pop music and entertainment without an audience. And soon, blackface minstrel shows were springing up everywhere. Blackface entertainment in America becomes the dominant form of popular culture in the antebellum era, 1820s, 30s, 40s, you see a massive explosion. This is Daphne A. Brooks. I am professor of African American studies, as well as American studies,

women's gender and sexuality studies, and music at Yale University. It was the beginning of an industry. The popular music industry, which is one of the most central industries to develop out of the United States, right? Same as steel, oil, railroads, right? But in these early stages, Black people were largely left out. I mean, it's a really important point to emphasize that African Americans were barred from performing caricatures about African American life, okay? We need to just kind of sit with that. That tells you a lot about both the ways in which ideas about Blackness were held as kind of precious commodity, right? The fact that African Americans as enslaved peoples, you know,

had no ability to be able to narrate ideas about themselves in the popular domain is a heavy, heavy thing. But that changed in 1863. I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated states and parts of states are and henceforth shall be free. Before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, nearly 4 million Black people were held as slaves, accounting for the vast majority of the Black population in the U.S. And those newly freed people started participating in parts of life they'd been barred from before. And so in the wake of emancipation, following the Civil War, you do see African-American minstrel troops, Georgia minstrel troop being one of the earliest. After the Civil War, Black minstrel troops like the Georgia minstrels were allowed on stage more regularly.

The troop of colored minstrels, colored in the true sense of the term, opened in Smith and Nixon's Hall last night to a crowded house. Their entertainment was without a doubt one of the very best ever offered to a Chicago popular. This is a newspaper account from the Chicago Tribune in 1865. The troop is composed entirely of real colored men, all freed from the bonds of slavery during the recent war. The Georgia minstrels were made up of around a dozen black men, all freed from the bonds of slavery during the recent war. The Georgia minstrels were made up of around a dozen black men, and their show would be marketed as authentic blackface minstrelsy. The plantation scenes, songs, and dances are true to the life and in consequence all the more interesting and pleasing. And white audiences loved it. Among the best

things and all were good, the tapioca and dance of Fields, the banjo duet of Clayton and Hicks, and the dances of Master Neal, Messers, Booker, Slater, Roberts, and Miller. They gained overnight success and started touring around the country. You know, they were kind of claiming authenticity as formerly enslaved people. Then once they began to perform more, then the tide shifted because the idea before was that white people don't want to see black people on stage. They want to see white people doing blackness. Then it became when black people were doing it more, they were like, do we really want to see the white people here doing blackness? Now it's like both. We want to see white people doing it. We want to see black, like we just want, we just want it all, right? A number of these black troops even had black owners and managers. Some were so popular

that they even traveled to Britain to do tours. The Georgia Minstrels, a clever troupe of genuine darkies, are to give a performance every evening this weekend at Dodsworth Hall, New York. The Memphis Daily Appeal. We look upon the Georgia Minstrels as one of the rising troops in the country. Western Reserve Chronicle. You have even more black performers who are taking up blackface. But there was this kind of schism that happened when more black performers entered this phase because white performers couldn't duplicate

what they were doing in the same way in performance, right? And they were more visible, right? It became a little bit more of a sham at that point rather than like their authentic representation of what this thing was. We have often wondered that Yankee Cunning did not start an enterprise of this kind and organize a musical troupe of bona fide Negroes. Imitation is never as good as the original. Cleveland Leader. So you might be wondering if this rubbed anyone the wrong way.

And yeah, it did. The debasements and imitations, the Negro minstrel songs, a mass of music in which the novice may easily lose himself and never find the real Negro melodies. The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois. You know, people on the rise like W.E.B. Du Bois, you know, who had great anxiety and expressed great pain, great frustration with these kinds of constructions of Blackness. But some Black performers thought differently. For the entertainers themselves, they thought of it as a way to not only forge financial sustainability for themselves, but to, on their end, critique the entire project of Blackface.

These were black performers, some of whom may have just recently gained freedom through emancipation, performing a white interpretation of black life for segregated audiences. And even then, they found a way to make these derogatory performances their own in subtle ways. The subtleties are badass

and really important to keep in mind because people like Burt Williams and George Walker, you know, turned up the dial on producing these kinds of absolutely absurd ideas, you know, about African American in in humanity. Burt Williams and George Walker were a Black duo performing Blackface shows starting in the 1890s. In their acts, Black people weren't the butt of the joke. Instead, Williams and Walker focused more on their characters and the natural comedy that resulted from their dynamic. You know, highly spectacular, satirical renderings of, you know, racist ideas, you know, about Black folk, right?

And they did so with a kind of understanding on their end as performers, you know, leaning into the grotesque, the vulgar, you know, a way of being able to expressively critique the tragedy of blackface. And the duo would go on to bigger acts. The quaint witticisms of Walker and his teammate, Williams, with his clever lines and good singing and dancing,

took the house, the Worcester Spy. Williams and Walker were the two stars of a musical comedy called In the Homie, the first full-length musical written and played by Black people ever performed at a major Broadway house. The play was about two Black conmen from Boston who planned to move to Africa to colonize the Homie, a former West African kingdom.

After Broadway, the show crossed the Atlantic to London, where it ran for seven months, including a performance at Buckingham Palace. So it's crucial to underscore the fact that part of an entire generation of African-American artists who were seizing upon performance practices in order not only to, you know, to survive financially, but to open up the kind of imaginative life world of African-Americans in the wake of emancipation. Blackfeast minstrelsy's popularity peaked in the wake of emancipation. Blackface minstrelsy's popularity peaked in the 1870s, but its legacy lasted long beyond that, thanks to sheet music. So there were different publishing houses throughout the United States

that were publishing pop songs and blackface as well as opera and operetta, you know, dispersed throughout Chicago and Cincinnati and St. Louis and other places, right? But the real heartbeat of the music industry was in New York City. There, you know, develops an industry called Tin Pan Alley. At the time, if you wanted to replicate the music you heard in the theater, the way to do it was to buy the sheet music and play it yourself. And so blackface sheet music becomes one of the first sort of commercial styles of pop sheet music to circulate as sheet music becomes the main source of music property in

the 19th century. So you have both the performance of blackface and the sheet music of blackface that begins to sort of shape the aesthetic, right? And so if you are a publisher, the primary way that you're going to make your money is by getting the sheet music bought. And so as a performer, the primary way that you're going to make your money is by performing a popular song. And so then publishers and performers begin to realize, like, we need one another. And so that becomes really the sort of basis of the commercial industry. But something new was coming. A new technology that would change everything. An inventor across the water from New York City,

out in New Jersey, was hard at work on this invention that would revolutionize the music industry. It was called the phonograph. And it would make it possible for the first time to record and play back sound. I made the trek to New Jersey to see the original phonograph Thomas Edison created. My name is Lenny DeGraff, and I'm an archivist at Thomas Edison National Historical Park. This is the original sketch of the tinfoil phonograph

that Edison drew, roughly, because you notice that it's not, there's no measurements or anything like that. It's just a rough idea. Imagine a cylinder with basically a sheet of tinfoil wound around it that you turn by a hand crank. As someone sang into the device, a needle reacting to the vibrations would make markings on the tinfoil recording the sound. This is the earliest phonograph. You could record music on a cylinder and then you could play them back. In 1877, Edison finally turned his rough idea into reality.

And then he was like, wait. I've invented a machine that can record and store and reproduce sound. How can I turn this into something that people are going to want to buy. He eventually licensed his phonograph to a company that set out to find recording artists who could sell the idea of this new invention to the world. And one of the first voices that would come out of this machine would be that of a formerly enslaved man. So what we're looking at is a cylinder, two-minute cylinder, which means that it has two minutes of recording time on it,

of George Johnson's catalog number. What's the title? It's on the table. Coming up, the first black recording star. Hi, I just wanted to say that I'm a big fan of ThruLine and a long-time listener and a relatively recent subscriber, although I should have done that a lot sooner to support the great work you do. Please keep that up. Anyway, my name is Jim DeLeo.

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The Talking Machine. We're now in the 1890s, standing on the corner of West 28th Street and 6th Avenue in New York City. The musty smell of horse manure mixes with the sweet scents from nearby floral shops as piano notes ricochet between the brick-laid buildings and into the ears of passersby. This is Tin Pan Alley. It's not clear exactly why that name, Tin Pan Alley, got assigned to this place. This is Larry Waite. I am a senior instructor at the University of Oregon,

and I teach classes in popular music history. Tin Pan Alley's name might have had something to do with all the pianos clattering away. Or maybe it was a new marketing scheme the music publishers dreamed up, something called song plugging. There are different ways of song plugging, but one of the things they would do if it was a nice weather outside, they would put a little cheap upright piano out on the street and hire a pianist. And they'd play the hit songs of the day that the publishing companies were putting out. And often they would have tin cups or tin pans on the piano to accept tips from pedestrians walking by and sort of so that sound of coins going into a tin pan on top of the piano. Oh, and by the way, if you really like the song, the sheet music was available for purchase. There were a few music publishers

lined up in Tin Pan Alley competing for the public's attention. One of them was managed by three young brothers. They called their company M. Whitmark and Sons. Their dad, Marcus Whitmark, was a Jewish immigrant from Prussia. He immigrated to Georgia, where he became a successful businessman, eventually earning enough to buy a store and several enslaved people. And after serving in the Confederate army during the Civil War, he migrated north to New York City. So he got to New York, blew that money, which was like equivalent of like a million dollars almost like in our current times. While Marcus was the legal owner of the publishing company,

it was his underage sons, Julius, Isidore, and Jay, who ran the show. Julius was a performer who performed with minstrel troops from an early age on. And Isidore, you know, was both a musician but also a composer. And then the youngest was not musical, but he won a competition. And in the competition that he won, his brothers encouraged him to select the printing press. And then eventually they started printing music. Sheet music, still the main way to monetize music at this point. That is, until the invention of a new technology,

the phonograph, brewing across the river in New Jersey. And one of the first voices recorded on it is George Johnson's. George Washington Johnson is formerly enslaved, gained his freedom at a young age, and there's not a lot of literature on him. Even his exact birth date is unknown. What we do know is that he was born a slave in Loudoun County, Virginia in 1846. And early on in life, he was taken in by the farm's owner into their home to be a companion to their son, Samuel. While Samuel learned to play the flute, Johnson learned to whistle every tune he heard.

Eventually, Johnson was freed. It isn't totally clear what he did in the years after that, but he shows up in the New York City census of 1880 where he lists his occupation as musician. He was known to perform in ferry terminals not far from Tin Pan Alley. And one day, the story goes, a representative from a phonograph company shows up in the ferry terminal. Listening to Johnson sing, they decide to bring him back to their recording laboratory. He was paid like a flat fee, like 20 cents or something like that. The first song that he records is a whistling cone, and it was a coon song.

Coon songs were songs in the 1890s that emerged as timpanale began to really sort of grow into the primary engine of commercial pop music. Coon is short for raccoon. It was, and is, considered a racial slur. And the songs were as derogatory as their name suggests. Kuhn's songs were derived from sort of these stereotyped racialized minstrel-esque performances, usually using stereotypical Black dialect, stereotypical racist representations of Black people. Portraying them as violent, ignorant, over-sexualized,

prone to drunkenness, and gambling. Not unlike the original Blackface minstrel performances way back in the 1830s. And then the aesthetic sound of it was usually some kind of sanitized version of ragtime. Over the next few years, ragtime would emerge as the hot new musical fad of the era. It's a kind of upbeat, syncopated music typically for piano. Think Scott Joplin and The Entertainer. It didn't have a single sound. And Johnson put his own spin on it.

Things like whistling, infusing his own black performance aesthetics into this Michelin performance. Johnson also released another record called The Laughing Song. Both records charted number one for months, and it's believed they were the top-selling records of the 1890s. The song's lyrics were overtly racist, but Johnson was now cemented in history as the first Black recording artist. He apparently made tens of thousands of records. It's listed that he did 50,000 recordings.

Which was a ton of work for Johnson because he had to record them individually, one record at a time. Johnson would try to speed things up by singing in front of half a dozen phonographs. But even then, he still had to sing the same songs thousands of times, all the while being paid literal pennies for each one. The records sold for several times that much. These two songs became so sensational that it really helped music industrialists to realize that there was a market, right, for commercial music recordings.

George Johnson wasn't the only Black performer working and succeeding in the industry. Another was a Black musician from Bowling Green, I think I've had enough of my own. All through my loose again he's troubled. He's a-called my heart to hold him. And so Ernest Hogan himself, you know, makes the song All Coons Look Alike to Me, and it becomes a huge hit. All coons look alike to me. I've got another boy, don't you see? Hogan had spent years traveling with various minstrel groups,

performing in blackface at times, and was able to make a living off of it. He appeared in multiple adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin. He later lamented the use of blackface and the social impact of his hit song. But it catapulted him to a whole new level of stardom. He began to be known as the father of ragtime. And ragtime was everywhere by the early 1900s. Sheet music, phonograph records, theaters. It also became hugely popular in Europe as well. The genre known as coon songs had proven that there was a real lucrative market out there. So at the turn of the 20th century, there was an explosion of records in all kinds of genres. Classical music, opera.

Opera singers like Caruso. Enrico Caruso, an Italian opera singer of the era who many still consider one of the greatest. There were also these heinous recordings of lynchings. Reenactments of lynchings. They were marketing and selling, having listened to at exhibitions around the country. This was the Jim Crow era, a program of legal segregation named for a racist blackface song mocking a disabled enslaved black man named Jim Crow.

You know, Plessy versus Ferguson, separate but equal, the sort of clear demarcation of segregation between white and black and of these white supremacist structures that determined that, you know, black is basically subhuman. Some people were critical of Hogan and Johnson for popularizing these racist songs.

Elaine Locke, one of the architects of the Harlem Renaissance, a Black intellectual and artistic movement of the first part of the 20th century, called Coonsong performers pseudo-negros, and the Coonsong a relic of the worst minstrel days. But others saw them as making the best of a bad situation. If someone was going to profit off of these racist depictions, why not let it be black artists themselves? Here's what Ernest Hogan reportedly had to say about the success of All Coons Look Alike to Me. This song has caused a lot of trouble in and out of show business. But it was also good for show business because at the time money was short in all walks of life. With the publication of that

song, a new musical rhythm was given to the people. Its popularity grew and it sold like wildfire. That one song opened the way for a lot of colored and white songwriters. Finding the rhythm so great, they stuck to it. And now you get hit songs without the word coon. As the recorded music industry grew, more people began asking questions about how it worked, who got the money, and the credit. Coming up, the blues breaks through.

I ain't ever going to never fall into love no more Now or never and forever, love them and let them go They all are smart and act the part, I'm telling you what I know But once they start and hook your heart, you're never the same no more Every minute you're complaining and you ain't ashamed Complain so much, complain. My name is Robert Seaton. I'm from Brisbane, Australia.

You're listening to ThruLine on NPR. Thank you for the insights from the past into the current situations today. I'm Rachel Martin, host of NPR's Wildcard podcast. I'm the kind of person who wants to skip the small talk and get right to the things that matter. That's why I invite famous guests like Ted Danson, Jeff Goldblum, and Issa Rae to skip the surface stuff. We talk about what gives their lives meaning, the beliefs that shape their worldview, the moments of joy that keep them going. Follow Wildcard wherever you get your podcasts, only from NPR.

Part three, catching from NPR. Part 3. Catching the Crazy Blues. Sophie Tucker, one of the most famous vaudeville performers in the country, was in the middle of a card game in 1910 when the biggest break of her career marched into the room. Sophie Tucker's longtime friend and assistant, a Black woman named Molly Elkins, dragged Shelton Brooks, a young Black songwriter, into the room. And as he sang the song that he wrote, Tucker, the white Volville superstar, was left speechless by the power of the song.

She wrote about it later in her autobiography. The minute I heard, I could have kicked myself for almost losing it. A song like that, it had everything. Tucker took the song to the recording studio. Some of These Days. Some of These Days was our first true hit. It was a big break for Sophie Tucker and for Shelton Brooks. Tucker even used it as the title of her autobiography. The blues was very much as a recorded form of white-authored music.

The blues originated in the southern U.S. and African-American communities. But in the early 1900s, any recordings of that music were dominated by white artists. It's an African-American invention that was taken up by the dominant class and then commodified for profit. Black performers were in the music industry, but Black audiences weren't considered a market. The perception was that African Americans were not and could not be consumers of this nascent record culture.

That they wouldn't have the taste to be able to discern between popular recordings, to actually have the drive to want to purchase records. Some of what was outrageous about this was that there was seemingly no perception that perhaps African-American publics were hungry for being able to hear their own voices, interpreting their own culture, you know, on record. There were very successful Black recording artists, but they were expected to perform in a way that just kind of reinforced Blackface minstrelsy stereotypes. Some of them became very famous and very wealthy,

but they were kind of hemmed in stylistically. That was a tradition that held until 1920. When a man named Perry Bradford saw an opportunity to change that. Perry Bradford was a successful songwriter. He'd been writing for a number of different African-American musicians and also for Sophie Tucker. Perry Bradford was a Black musician and entrepreneur, and also a stubborn man. So stubborn that he earned the nickname Mule. And around this time, Perry focused that Mule-ishness on one aspiration.

I tramped the pavements of Broadway with the belief that the country was waiting for the sound of the voice of a Negro singing the blues. He very much had a vision of being able to try to transform blues culture. Bradford brought his idea to the big record companies like Columbia and was dismissed. He was laughed out of Tin Pan Alley. I was too stubborn to give up the idea because I had traveled all over the country singing and playing the blues and I knew that people were waiting for that sound on the record because it was the sound of America, Negro and white. Perry Bradford was

hungry, literally. Rent was coming due. His shoes were worn so thin they barely had soles. But he believed in this dream. And being the mule, all the no's he heard only fed the fire within him. In 1920, he got his shot. In a way, thanks to Sophie Tucker. Tucker had dropped out of a recording session at the last minute at a small record company called OK Records. Bradford pleaded with the recording manager to take a chance

and replace the white singer with a Black artist named Mamie Smith. Mamie Smith is not from the South. She is from Cincinnati, Ohio. She is a really gorgeous, vivacious, inventive, and as a vaudeville entertainer, she picked up all sorts of chops. She first recorded two blues songs for the label, and they did pretty well. So then, Perry Bradford cobbled together a jazz band. And on August 10, 1920, Mamie Smith, with the backing of the Jazz Hounds, recorded a song that would change the course of music history.

It's a classic tale of heartbreak, you know, love loss, desperation, agony. He don't bring me right loss, desperation, agony. Something that renders this song, you know, deeply unique is the fact that in the final verse, the protagonist, the heroine, actually declares that she's going to, you know, take up arms and shoot a policeman. Crazy Blues was an enormous smash hit.

Mamie Smith was the first Black artist to sing the blues on a record. It became a huge sensation and sold tens of thousands of records. 75,000 copies in the first month of its release. Success that many people attributed to the enthusiasm of Black consumers. It was a record with a reach of epic proportions. There's just nothing that compared to it at the time. Wow, there's a market for this stuff. People want to hear blues.

They want to hear it performed by Black blues singers. This was the breakthrough. This was the thing that the record labels had said all along could not be done. So they kind of tapped into a vein of unmet musical desire. Record executives realized, wait a minute, we can actually sort of really build an industry based around sort of targeting different markets and demographics of people, segments of population throughout the U.S., people who they didn't think necessarily had money for leisure entertainment, but did.

And in this case, especially coming out of the success of Mamie Smith's Crazy Blues, record executives saw the potential gains to be had if they were to appeal to Black consumers. So they started making moves. It just opened the floodgates for African-American musicians being able to record their own musical forms. So what did it mean for African-American artists to be able to record the blues? It meant that America could maybe get a little bit closer to the truth of what it was and what it is. Because of Crazy Blues, a whole new category of music emerged into popular culture.

Record companies dubbed it race records, records made by and for African Americans. And they were called race records from the beginning. It was this label, kind of an unfortunate label. Small record companies were the first ones to pounce on the emerging race records market. They often took risks that the big record companies steered clear of. And in race records, they saw the chance to market music that sounded new and fresh. If you bought a race record, you knew it was going to be a black performer singing in a black musical style.

So the race records allowed Black performers more room to get outside of those stereotyped performance conventions that were based on the Blackface minstrelsy style. What we're really talking about is American music and the birth of modern popular music. Crazy Blues was one of the first instances of a single record making someone's career. And it did for Mamie Smith. She, you know, was traveling the Northeastern seaboard to sold-out shows the first few years after Crazy Blues. It was, you know, a fast trip up and as fast a trip down in the sense that she did not have a long shelf life. Her breakout hit had opened the

door for other Black women to make their own records. But Mamie Smith herself was eventually eclipsed by artists like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Ethel Waters. But what she did changed the course of American cultural life, so she should not be forgotten. The race records industry also suffered from a boom and bust cycle. The Depression had a lot to do with the collapse of the race records industry. The powerhouse record labels, like Paramount Records, ends up collapsing by the mid-30s. But the explosion of artistic experimentation, you know, jazz musicking that's, you know, coming out of New Orleans and the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s meant that even as, you know, these dominant record labels were financially collapsing,

that these other, you these other forms of musical experimentation are laying the foundations for the evolution of popular music culture. After the overnight success of artists like Mamie Smith and the popularity of race records, there was no turning back. Record companies had to acknowledge that the compositions of Black artists sung in their own voices were in high demand. In the 1920s, race records sold 5 million copies annually. And it wasn't just the blues that came out of this period.

There was a whole slew of genres, including jazz and gospel. And in 1952, Big Mama Thornton, a black woman from Alabama, would record a song that would pave the way for the evolution of a whole new genre of popular music. But it wouldn't be her name that went down in history. Despite selling over half a million copies and helping kickstart rock and roll, Big Mama Thornton died in a boarding house with hardly a cent to her name. It's 2024 and she's finally being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Instead, it was Elvis, the hip-shaking, pompadour-wearing sensation

who the song became synonymous with. Elvis recorded his version four years after Big Mama Thornton. Elvis Presley, you know, learned directly from Black performers. You know, in a direct or indirect way, was a community with enough Black folks to pick up some stuff that made him appeal in a way that most of his white contemporaries did not. Influence is always going to be happening in back and forth exchange in different ways, but then you can't remove that from the larger context and system that the individuals and the communities they come from usually don't reap the benefits that those who sort of are in

the structural control, which is to force us as creators, as artists, as listeners, as producers, as executives, if you care, right, to really deeply consider how our own identities, our beliefs in ourselves and our communities and other people are heavily shaped by this exploitative industry that really kind of drive because of our uncritical consumption. I want us to kind of pause and think, like, what is lost? Because that then could potentially reshape how you engage with and consume and interrogate, you know, your own, like, listening practices that have political import.

But in terms of what's lost is life. And by that, I mean that very seriously in the sense of the continuous extraction has material consequences for the individuals in the communities who continue to sort of be the basis of these structures and systems. Even today, 88% of all the money in the music industry is going to people who aren't performing it and aren't writing the music. That means only about 12% of all the revenue in the multi-billion dollar music industry ends up in the hands of artists themselves. So it's like material life and ability to exist is what's lost.

And depending on where you sit on that structure, you know, you may not have like an individual ability to change that thing, but you're still part of it, right? Thanks to Matthew D. Morrison, historical musicologist and professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University. Many of the stories and analyses in this episode are drawn from his research and book

Black Sound, Making Race and Popular Music. And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced byteen Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and...

Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Katayama. Nick Nevis. Sarah Wyman.

Kiana Paklion. Rachel Horowitz. Irene Noguchi. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. This episode was mixed by Gilly Moon. Thank you to J.C. Howard, Jacob Gantz, Tony Cabin, Leonard DeGraff and the Thomas Edison National Historical Park, Johannes Dergi, Reese Walter, Micah Ratner, Ajani Daniel, Christian Benford, Kevin Jones, Kaiki Magyar, Devin Karayama, Zarina Divina Gracia, and Nicholas Neves for their voiceover work. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes...

Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. We would love to hear from you. Send us a voicemail to 872-588-8805 and leave your name, where you're from, and say the line, you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. And tell us what you think of the show. We might even feature your voicemail in a future episode. That number again is 872-588-8805. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. Thanks for listening.

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