Clara Smith recorded 122 tracks for Columbia Records, sang alongside Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson, was second only to Bessie Smith in blues record sales during the 1920s, and gave a 13-year-old Josephine Baker her first job in show business. Yet history has largely reduced her to a footnote, in part because she shared a last name with Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith, to whom she was entirely unrelated. In this deep dive we pull her out of the footnotes, starting in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, where she was born in 1894, was never officially enrolled in school, and taught herself to read and write anyway.

We follow her from the traveling tent shows that passed through her hometown to the vaudeville circuit by 1910 and headliner status on the Theater Owners Booking Association circuit by 1918, playing the Lyric in New Orleans,  ...