By the end of 1923, her "Downhearted Blues" had sold an unbelievable 750,000 copies, and throughout the rest of the 1920s Bessie Smith was a huge star touring the nation in her own railcar. She teamed with Louis Armstrong for "St. Louis Blues," pleaded with the judge to "Send Me to the 'Lectric Chair" for murdering her lover, and cut her mournful masterpiece, "Empty Bed Blues." Her passion, diction, and phrasing have influenced imitators from Dinah Washington to Janis Joplin. But her enduring legacy--begun with "Downhearted Blues"--is simple: She was the greatest blues singer of all time. (Britt Robson)
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Fletcher Henderson
Fletcher Henderson & Blues Singers (volumes 1 and 2)
Document
LESS THAN A decade after the first poster advertising a "jass" concert appeared on a New Orleans lamppost, the music had begun moving into the American mainstream. Paul Whiteman, a white acolyte-cum-bandleader billing himself as the "King of Jazz," took the music to the masses in a way no black bandleader possibly could.
Meanwhile, in New York, a Georgia-born piano player named Fletcher Henderson was putting together an orchestra of improvisers that would include Coleman Hawkins (who joined in 1923) and Louis Armstrong (who came on a year later). In early 1924 Henderson's band would replace the society dance band at the Roseland Ballroom on 52nd, and by the '30s his orchestra would be the dominant black-led band in the country, paving the way for every self-supporting African-American band to come in its wake. But in 1923, at age 26, Henderson was still finding himself as a player, working a part-time job at the less prestigious Club Alabam while honing his skills studying James P. Johnson's piano rolls and those of his protégé Fats Waller.
By all rights Fletcher Henderson shouldn't have been a jazz player at all. Born in 1897 to middle-class parents, he studied classical piano as a teen and chemistry at Atlanta University. Arriving in New York in 1920 he began searching for a job as a chemist, before signing on as the house pianist and chief arranger for Black Swan records, a black-owned independent label that recorded both "legitimate" vocalists and blues singers including the legendary Ethel Waters.
Document's two discs present Henderson playing with a list of now-forgotten female singers whose vocal styles are steeped in the vaudeville and minstrelsy that marked the emergence of a new kind of hybrid pop singer. Inez Wallace's 1923 jaunt through "Aggravatin' Pappa" and "Radio Blues" is pure vaudeville, even if Henderson's playing is straight out of Harlem. Hannah Sylvester's darker "Down South Blues" and "I Want My Sweet Daddy," aided by Coleman Hawkins's rambunctious sax, moves a step further, using the blues as a springboard for the kind of brash improvisation that would make Henderson's bands of the '20s and '30s standard-bearers for bop and beyond. (Jon Dolan)
