Crazy Blues
Mamie Smith · 1920
’s 1920 recording — the first blues hit by a Black artist. Its sales to Black buyers showed labels a market they had ignored, and they answered with a segregated catalog they called “.”
Perry Bradford wrote the song; Smith recorded it for OKeh in August 1920. Major labels had treated Black artists as novelties and marketed almost exclusively to white buyers. Crazy Blues sold in huge numbers, many of them to Black customers, and OKeh — then Columbia, Paramount, and others — opened separate numbered series aimed at African American listeners. “Race records” was the industry’s name for that shelf, used from the early 1920s into the 1940s. In the Black press of the time, “the race” often meant “our people”; on a record label it still marked a Jim Crow product line. That segregated market is also the commercial door the country and city blues of the next decades walked through. Billboard retired the chart name in 1949 in favor of “rhythm and blues.” The 1920 Bradford sheet is public domain (IMSLP). This pass found no clean published transcription we will reprint — hunt again; do not invent a line.