RolloTreadwayThis week's theme for #TuneTuesday is #OldSkool. So I'm going very old.
This song is Crazy Blues by Mamie Smith. In early 1920, Smith became the first Black singer to have a record released - in the face of huge opposition from the wider music industry - with That Thing Called Love.
But her next release, Crazy Blues, had the biggest impact. At a time when songs called this-or-that Blues were invariably recorded by white artists, this was the first such release not just by a Black singer but with a Black band (That Thing Called Love featured the white Okeh Rags Orchestra, but Smith assembled her own all-Black band, the Jazz Hounds, before recording Crazy Blues) - and crucially, it was immensely popular. The huge numbers in which the record sold brought down the industry's colour bar, ending the insistence on Black music being exclusively performed by white musicians.
Perhaps the single most influential record ever released, maybe this isn't so much #OldSchool as #FirstSchool.
Iva Pashkuleva