Search results
People also ask
Who was the first blues singer?
Who wrote the first blues song?
Who were the most popular blues singers in the 1920s?
Did 'Crazy Blues' Make History?
Who were the first jazz & blues artists?
Where did blues music come from?
Aug 10, 2024 · Mamie Smith recorded the first blues record on August 10, 1920, but the history around the first blues song is a relatively complicated one.
- 3 min
In a long interview conducted by Alan Lomax in 1938, Jelly Roll Morton recalled that the first blues he had heard, probably around 1900, was played by a singer and prostitute, Mamie Desdunes, in Garden District, New Orleans. Morton sang the blues: "Can’t give me a dollar, give me a lousy dime/ You can’t give me a dollar, give me a lousy ...
- Bessie Smith (1894-1937) Known as "The Empress of the Blues," Bessie Smith was the best and most famous female singer of the 1920s. A strong, independent woman and a powerful vocalist who could sing in both jazz and blues styles, Smith was the most commercially successful of the era's singers.
- Big Bill Broonzy (1893-1958) Perhaps more than any other artist, Big Bill Broonzy brought the blues to Chicago and helped define the city's sound. Born on the banks of the Mississippi River, Broonzy moved with his parents to Chicago in 1920, picked up the guitar, and learned to play from older bluesmen.
- Blind Lemon Jefferson (1897-1929) Arguably the founding father of Texas blues, Blind Lemon Jefferson was one of the most commercially successful artists of the 1920s and a major influence on younger players including Lightnin' Hopkins and T-Bone Walker.
- Charley Patton (1887-1934) The biggest star in the 1920s Delta firmament, Charley Patton was the region's E-ticket attraction. A charismatic performer with a flashy style, talented fretwork, and flamboyant showmanship, he inspired a legion of bluesmen and rockers, from Son House and Robert Johnson to Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
- 5 min
- B.B. King. Born Riley B. King, singer and guitarist B.B. King got his start in Mississippi on a plantation near Indianola. At twenty-two, King hitched a ride to Memphis to launch his musical career.
- Muddy Waters. Singer and legendary blues guitarist McKinley Morganfield was born in 1915 in Issaquena, Mississippi. By the early 1940s, he was a semi-successful traveling musician.
- Billie Holiday. Born in Baltimore in 1915, Eleanora Fagan knew from an early age that she wanted to be a singer. By 1929, she was playing jazz clubs in New York, where she adopted the stage name Billie Holiday.
- Ray Charles. The legendary Ray Charles was born in Albany, Georgia in 1930. When he was only six years old, Charles was rendered blind due to glaucoma.
May 21, 2024 · They were simply there to play a song written by Perry Bradford, and ready to sing it with them was Mamie Smith. Called “Crazy Blues,” it is the first evidence of recorded blues.
- 3 min
Feb 22, 2007 · Paul Oliver, probably the world's foremost scholar of the blues, first heard African-American vernacular music during World War II when a friend brought him to listen to black servicemen stationed in England singing work songs they had brought with them from the fields and lumber camps of the Deep South.
Jan 24, 2016 · By 1920, the African American community started to become a market in itself for recorded music., and Mamie Smith records a song called “Crazy Blues” for Okeh Records, and it becomes the first “Blues” hit and marks the beginning of the business of selling music to the growing African American community as what we now know as “Race ...
