The forgotten story of America s first black superstars
By Dorian Lynskey17th February 2021
In the 1920s US, glamorous, funny black female singers were the blues first – and revolutionary hitmakers. Why were they then relegated to the sidelines, asks Dorian Lynskey.
O
On Valentine s Day 1920, a little over a century ago, a 28-year-old singer named Mamie Smith walked into a recording studio in New York City and made history. Six months later, she did it again.
The music industry had previously assumed that African Americans wouldn t buy record players, therefore there was no point in recording black artists. The entrepreneurial songwriter Perry Bradford, a man so stubborn he was known as Mule , knew better. There s 14 million Negroes in our great country and they will buy records if recorded by one of their own, he told Fred Hagar at Okeh Records. When a white singer dropped out of a recording session at the last minute, Bradford convinced Hagar to take a chance on Smith, a
He Was An Architect By Ashon Crawley | NPR
Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images
In my undergraduate studies I was able to take two courses from the architecture major. We learned a lot about design, cultivated attention to the built environment. My professors emphasized imagining things as they
could be, if only we had the fortitude and verve to bring those things we sensed with our imagination into being. I loved it. One of my favorite parts of those classes was creating section drawings of imagined spaces. As Frank Ching writes in his hallowed reference text
Architectural Graphics, A section is an orthographic projection of an object as it would appear if cut through by an intersecting plane. It opens up the object to reveal its internal material, composition, or assembly.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
hide caption
Little Richard in the studio, circa 1959. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
In my undergraduate studies I was able to take two courses from the architecture major. We learned a lot about design, cultivated attention to the built environment. My professors emphasized imagining things as they
could be, if only we had the fortitude and verve to bring those things we sensed with our imagination into being. I loved it. One of my favorite parts of those classes was creating section drawings of imagined spaces. As Frank Ching writes in his hallowed reference text