Vaudeville-Urban Blues
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Vaudeville-Urban Blues is the professional stage-and-recording blues of singers backed by pianists, theater bands, and jazz ensembles. Its sound is projected, theatrical, often brassy, with clear enunciation, composed verses, comic or tragic monologues, stop-time effects, and blues feeling filtered through cabaret and touring-show craft.
History
The style came from Black vaudeville, minstrel-derived theater circuits, tent shows, cabarets, and the new race-records market opened by Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" in 1920. Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Clara Smith, Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, and Victoria Spivey turned blues into a national urban entertainment form, often recording in New York or Chicago with prominent jazz musicians. Vaudeville-Urban Blues fed classic female blues, jazz vocal blues, torch singing, blues revues, and the professionalized front-person model later inherited by R&B and soul.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Daphne Duval Harrison, Black Pearls
- Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism
- Paul Oliver, The Story of the Blues
- AllMusic