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The era of the “Classic Blues” ended in 1929, when the Stock Market Crash and the ensuing Great Depression dealt a devastating one-two punch to record labels and recording contracts. women blues singers had been extremely successful, but many people had regarded them simply as popular entertainers and had associated them with sexuality and working-class urban vices more than with technical skill or acquired artistry.” (Ruth Feldstein, “‘I Don’t Trust You Anymore’: Nina Simone, Culture, and Black Activism in the 1960s,” Journal of American History 91 (March, 2005), 1356) Moreover, as a modern scholar points out, “In the 1920s. In fact, the 1920s, the “classic era” of recorded Blues, was dominated by women who lived, performed, and recorded in the cities. The decade of the the 1920s is also called the “Jazz Age.” Most of the Blues divas of the ’20s came from a vaudeville or cabaret background since few of them could play instruments, the members of their backup bands tended to be jazz musicians. The line between jazz and the Blues was fuzzy at best, in other words. Yet, the first Blues song ever recorded was “Crazy Blues,” by Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds, in 1920.
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Moreover, for most Blues fans, the stereotypical early Blues performer is a black man, playing and singing in a rural setting, perhaps the Mississippi Delta. Work reported that “Many times was asked what kind of song it was, and, one day she replied, in a moment of inspiration, ‘It’s the Blues.'” (Francis Davis, The History of the Blues, p.28) came to the tent one morning and began to sing about the ‘man’ who had left her.” Ma Rainey was so taken by the “strange and poignant” song that she learned it and incorporated it into her act, usually as an encore. According to folklorist John Work, Ma Rainey was performing in a tent show in a small Missouri town in 1902, when “a girl from the town. Well, it turns out that one of the “Blues divas” of the 1920s, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, had a similar experience a year before Handy’s epiphany. Handy’s first encounter with the music, in a railroad station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, in 1903. For example, the year 2003 was designated by Congress as “The Year of the Blues” to commemorate W.C. A funny thing happened when I researched the role of women in developing the Blues in the twentieth century: I found an alternative narrative that contained a few surprises.