In 1920, vaudeville performer Mamie Smith became the first African American artist to make vocal blues recordings, and her Crazy Blues sold a million copies in less than a year. This episode draws on John Jeremiah Sullivan's archival research, which located her real birth certificate in 2018 and moved her birth from 1883 to May 26, 1891, in Cincinnati, along with OKeh Records studio logs and vaudeville reviews, to reconstruct how a girl who toured with a white act at age 10 became the hardened veteran who walked into a segregated New York studio on February 14, 1920.

We examine songwriter Perry Bradford's months-long campaign to convince OKeh executive Fred Hager to record a Black singer despite boycott threats, the grassroots distribution network of Pullman porters and Black-owned shops that carried Crazy Blues across the South, and the bi ...