Classic Female Blues

Classic female blues was the first blues idiom to reach record: the polished, theatre-bred singing of Black women vocalists, fronting pianists or small jazz bands, that dominated the race-record catalogues of the 1920s. Triggered by *Mamie Smith*'s "Crazy Blues" (1920), the style joined vaudeville stagecraft to the twelve-bar blues, with *Ma Rainey* and *Bessie Smith* as its defining voices; its songs treated love, infidelity, drink and female independence with a directness that made these singers the first recording stars of the blues.