She Sang First: The Unsung Women Who Gave American Music Its Soul

There's a version of American music history that gets told over and over — the one with Robert Johnson at the crossroads, Louis Armstrong lighting up New Orleans, and Elvis bringing the blues to the suburbs. It's a good story. It's just not the whole story.

Because before most of those names ever touched a microphone, there were women. Black women, specifically, who stood up in juke joints and vaudeville halls and recording studios and wailed — with a kind of raw, unfiltered truth that stopped people cold. These weren't backup singers or novelty acts. They were the architects. And somehow, history keeps leaving them off the blueprint.

Let's fix that.

The Record That Started Everything

If you want to talk about ground zero for recorded American popular music, you have to start with Mamie Smith. In August 1920, she walked into a New York recording studio and cut "Crazy Blues" for Okeh Records — and within a month, it had sold 75,000 copies. That number might not sound wild by today's streaming standards, but in 1920, it was nothing short of seismic.

Mamie wasn't supposed to be there. The session was originally planned for a white singer named Sophie Tucker, but scheduling fell through and Mamie stepped in. What followed wasn't just a hit record — it was the birth of what the industry would call "race records," a whole commercial category built around Black artists performing for Black audiences. The entire blues and R&B recording industry that followed? It has Mamie Smith's fingerprints all over it.

And yet, ask most casual music fans who she is, and you'll get a blank stare.

Ma Rainey: The Mother of the Blues Wasn't Just a Title

Gertrude "Ma" Rainey earned her nickname the old-fashioned way — by being so foundational to the blues form that everyone else was essentially her student. Born in Columbus, Georgia in 1886, she was performing professionally by her early teens and spent decades touring the South with tent shows and traveling revues before she ever made a record.

When she finally did start recording in the early 1920s, the results were extraordinary. Songs like "Bo-Weavil Blues," "See See Rider," and "Prove It On Me Blues" weren't just musically powerful — they were statements. "Prove It On Me Blues" in particular was openly queer in its imagery, with Rainey singing about preferring women's company and dressing in men's clothes. In 1928. Let that sink in.

Ma Rainey didn't perform with a wink or a whisper. She performed with authority. She wore sequined gowns and gold teeth and a necklace made of gold coins, and she commanded every room she walked into. She mentored a young Bessie Smith, essentially handing the next generation a template for what a powerful Black woman in American music could look like.

Bessie Smith: The Empress Who Still Reigns

If Ma Rainey was the foundation, Bessie Smith was the cathedral built on top of it. Known as the "Empress of the Blues," Bessie became the highest-paid Black entertainer in America during the 1920s — a fact that gets glossed over in most music textbook timelines.

Her voice was a force of nature. Powerful, precise, and emotionally devastating, it could fill a theater without a microphone at a time when that was the only option. Her recordings — "Downhearted Blues," "Gulf Coast Blues," "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" — remain some of the most emotionally complete performances in American recorded music. Full stop.

Bessie also didn't take nonsense from anyone. There are documented accounts of her physically confronting Ku Klux Klan members who tried to disrupt her tent shows in the South. She ran her own touring operation, negotiated her own contracts, and lived on her own terms in a time when Black women were afforded almost none.

Janis Joplin idolized her. Billie Holiday learned from her. Columbia Records eventually reissued her catalog after her death in 1937, partly because white artists like Joplin made her influence impossible to ignore. It shouldn't have taken that.

The Ones Just Behind the Spotlight

Smith and Rainey are at least somewhat known. But the next tier of blues women deserves just as much attention.

Alberta Hunter sang with Louis Armstrong and recorded prolifically in the 1920s, then pivoted to a nursing career for decades — only to return to performing in her 80s, still sharp and still stunning. Sippie Wallace brought a Texas blues rawness to her recordings that influenced generations of players. Ida Cox ran her own touring company and wrote most of her own material at a time when that was almost unheard of for any artist, let alone a Black woman in the Jim Crow South.

These women were entrepreneurs, performers, and cultural ambassadors all at once. They carried American music across state lines and into living rooms via radio and record players, planting seeds that would eventually bloom into jazz, R&B, soul, and rock and roll.

Why the Gap Still Exists

So why don't we talk about them the way we talk about their male counterparts? The honest answer is a combination of racism, sexism, and the way music history has historically been written — mostly by white men focused on white male artists, with everyone else in the footnotes.

The blues women of the 1920s also existed at an intersection that made mainstream recognition complicated: they were Black, they were women, many were openly queer, and they were unapologetically themselves at a time when American society was deeply hostile to all of those things simultaneously.

But the music world is slowly catching up. The Grammy Museum has hosted dedicated exhibits. Scholars like Angela Davis have written serious academic work on blues women's cultural significance. Broadway's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom — adapted from August Wilson's play — brought Rainey's story to a massive new audience.

It's a start. But at Jaxx Liberty, we'd argue the real work is simpler: just listen. Pull up Bessie Smith's "St. Louis Blues" on a quiet evening. Queue up Ma Rainey's "Moonshine Blues" and let it wash over you. Find Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" and remember that this is where the whole thing started.

American music didn't come from nowhere. It came from them.

Give Them the Billing They Earned

Every time a blues guitarist gets celebrated for his "raw authenticity" or a rock legend gets credit for "bringing emotion to music," there's a woman — usually a Black woman from the early 20th century — who did it first, louder, and with less recognition and fewer resources.

The soul of American music isn't a mystery. It has names. Gertrude. Bessie. Mamie. Alberta. Sippie. Ida.

Say them out loud. Put them on your playlist. Tell somebody about them.

That's how legacies survive.