Crazy Blues
Mamie Smith was the first black person to cut a blues record. “Crazy Blues,” released in August of 1920, was composed by the Afro-American vaudeville performer Perry Bradford, and sung by Smith. “Authentic” is perhaps the most contested word anyone can use to describe a blues singer, especially one who is part of a long tradition riddled with posers and imitators, but here at least was a black woman singing a black composition in something like a blues idiom.
Mamie Smith was no Bessie Smith—the blues “Empress” who famously chased the Ku Klux Klan out of her tent show. Nor was she Ma Rainey, singing about the lonesome road and hard luck round the door, to crowds like roaring water and wind in the swamps (as the poet Sterling Brown put it, more or less). Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey are blues singers we associate with the image of earthy, gravel-voiced chanteuses from the early-twentieth century—“authentic” blues mamas. But the pretender, Mamie Smith, was no less radical in her confrontation of racism via the blues, and she was the first to lay it down on shellac.
“Crazy Blues” is ostensibly about love gone wrong, “the man I love/He don’t treat me right.” But the man who didn’t treat Mamie Smith right, or her composer Perry Bradford, is the Man. The first blues record produced by black Americans is also the first coded blues protest song, recorded in the wake of the 1919 Red Summer race riots.1
In the final verse of the original recording, censored in future versions, Mamie Smith sings about bad news giving her crazy blues—blues so crazy she might have to “get myself a gun…and shoot myself a cop.”2
This is pretty strong stuff, up there in the annals of militant resistance with Ida B. Wells’ call to arms, or NWA’s imperative to “fuck the police.” As if the Black Panthers cut a record, with Staggo Lee. For many years, of course, Americans heard the radio version, while the most incendiary verse of the record that Mamie Smith and Perry Bradford cut, was cut out.
What’s particularly interesting about the Mamie Smith story is, this radical record of symbolic violence is often regarded as less-than-authentic blues. Mamie Smith was less the mother of the blues, and more like a child of vaudeville. Her vocal style was arguably an imitation of white vocalists, who were in turn imitating black vocalists, imitating white ones… For now let’s say the snake is full from eating his proverbial tail, but this cycle of imitation rolls back indefinitely into the mists of American history.
The original blues form probably came out of the countryside, not the urban vaudeville stage. From the delta hamlets of Mississippi, as traditionally assumed, or maybe “out of Texas, loping like a mule,” as folklorist Alan Lomax thought. But the blues went mainstream in the city, thanks to mass productions like Bradford and Smith’s record, and thanks to traveling vaudeville and minstrel shows. The great female city-blues singers are often contrasted with their primitive male counterparts from the country; it is assumed that the former came out of the latter. But the female city blues evolved from the vaudeville stage as much as the country porch, and the blind men who often played there.
Three years before Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” sold a million copies, a Ukrainian-born Jewish singer named Sophie Tucker became the first person to record a million-selling blues record, in 1917. Tucker was one of the most popular entertainers in the first half of the twentieth century, and worked in the same milieu as Mamie Smith, vaudeville theatre. The two were friendly, and shared a chorus girl between them. It has even been rumored that Sophie Tucker was originally slotted to record Perry Bradfords’s composition, “Crazy Blues,” but she fell ill and Smith stepped in to fill the slot. At least one historian has pointed to the fact that Mamie Smith’s vocal stylings in “Crazy Blues” are similar to the vocal stylings of “the last of the red hot Mamas,” Sophie Tucker. And it makes sense that Smith might have wanted to emulate Tucker’s proven formula for success, on her own record. Whatever the true circumstances of this first Afro-American blues recording session—when Smith and Bradford laid down “Crazy Blues”—there is an undeniable connection between the first black blues recording artist, Mamie Smith, and the most successful white blues recording artist who preceded her to fame, Sophie Tucker.
Sophie Tucker’s forte was risqué humor, sexual innuendo and self-deprecating fat-girl jokes. She sang songs like “I Don’t Wanna Get Thin” and “Nobody Loves a Fat Girl, But Oh How a Fat Girl Can Love.” In this sense, she was a prototype for “Mama Cass” Eliot of the Mamas and Papas. Bette Midler also owes one of her stage personas, “Soph,” to the last of the red hot mamas, Tucker. Mae West, the Hollywood sex symbol—and husky contralto singer—also learned a thing or two from Sophie Tucker.
Like the successors she inspired, Tucker seemed to have been typecast as a woman whose saucy personality was more alluring than her looks.
Supposedly, she was told she was too large and ugly to be a professional singer, but that she would do as a blackface performer. She wasn’t fond of this role, however, and began to sabotage her own act by revealing the white skin under her gloves, and the blonde hair beneath her wig. A sort of racial striptease.
Sophie Tucker and Mae West both developed their sultry stage personas while watching black performers on the Theater Owners Booking Agency circuit (TOBA—aka “Tough On Black Asses”) that ran through Chicago. Tucker was copying the moves of black artists, like the blues and cabaret singer Alberta Hunter, and Alberta Hunter and singers like Mamie Smith were no doubt contemplating these imitations, and the financial success they could bring. It stands to reason they might’ve considered imitating their imitators, and their success.
So, we’re confronted with the possibility that a black female blues singer—the first black blues singer ever recorded, Mamie Smith—was imitating white women who were imitating black women like herself, and that Mamie Smith used this circular imitation of white and black women to present a black man’s message of militant resistance to racial terror: composer and lyricist Perry Bradford’s suggestion that the speaker of “Crazy Blues” should get herself a gun, and shoot herself a cop. The man I love, he don’t treat me right.
This is hardly the first time black Americans used song and dance, or imitation, as veiled social protest. One of the earliest imitative patterns that American musicologists point to is “the cakewalk,” an antebellum musical ritual in the form of a dance contest. In cakewalks, or “prize walks” on Southern plantations, slaves improvised dance moves to the tune of banjos and other instruments in the yard, for release and recreation. In interviews recorded by WPA researchers in the 1930s, former slaves recounted the cakewalk, and described these dance moves firsthand, as a parody of the high manners of white folks in the “big house.” Eventually, some of the folks in some of those big houses came out to watch their slaves dance, and to reward the most enthusiastic participants, who would take the “cake,” or prize. Why this subtle imitation, intended to mock the spectators without them ever getting wise and inflicting violent retribution on the participants, is now a euphemism for something easy which requires no skill, is anybody’s guess. The “cakewalk” was anything but.
After the rise of American minstrel theatre, white blackface performers appropriated the cakewalk as a stereotype, their interpretation of what they ignorantly considered a quintessential African American dance, one to be mocked. Cultural historian LeRoi Jones:
If the cakewalk is a Negro dance caricaturing certain white customs, what is that dance when, say, a white theater company attempts to satirize it as a Negro dance? I find the idea of white minstrels in blackface satirizing a dance satirizing themselves a remarkable kind of irony—which, I suppose, is the whole point…
Welcome to the American musical matrix…
Mimesis and Alterity
The history of American arts and letters frames the never-ending story of a cultural negotiation between transplanted cultures—particularly those of Europe and Africa, the central characters in this story—and between transplanted cultures and the ones indigenous to America. The twofold method to this exchange, from first contact to today, is imitation and differentiation. The basic process of cultural evolution is: copy, differentiate, repeat. More than just cultural exchange, imitation and variation are also how poetic influence and artistic innovation proceed. Every artist has role models, whom they emulate, and must subsequently distinguish themselves from. Nowhere is this imitative cycle more apparent than in American popular music.
Imitation is what the eggheads call, by its Greek name—mimesis: representation or imitation of the real world in art and literature. Mimesis also has a zoological application, which too means “mimicry,” but in this context, the imitation of other lifeforms within nature (as opposed to mimicry within human culture, or art). In other words, zoological mimesis is a predatory or defense mechanism (camouflage), or courtship mechanism (display), where one plant or animal imitates another. Consider, for example, an insect imitating a plant, the “walking stick,” or “walking leaf.” Or a plant imitating an insect, as in the petals of certain flowers, patterned like the insects they wish to attract for pollination. As the Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov pointed out, even in nature, mimesis sometimes assumes a weird exuberance exceeding pure biological function. It approaches the realm of something like art, straddling the line between nature and culture.
In addition to being the author of literature’s most infamous “jailbait” story, Lolita, Nabokov was an enthusiastic entomologist, who went slowly blind staring at the genitals of butterflies through his microscope. He was smitten by their capacity for imitation:
The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me. Its phenomena showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things […] When a certain moth resembled a certain wasp in shape and color, it also walked and moved its antennae in a waspish, unmothlike manner. When a butterfly had to look like a leaf, not only were all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes were generously thrown in. “Natural selection,” in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of “the struggle for life” when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception
—“Butterflies,” The New Yorker, June 12, 1948
Mimicry coupled with artistic impulse is inherent in human culture, in human nature, and perhaps even, according to Nabakov, in nature itself.
In human nature, mimesis is essentially how we learn and communicate. When a child is learning to speak, she imitates her parents. When two cultures make first contact, as when the Old World met the New, they communicate through improvised sign language—pantomime acting, basically—miming until they master one another’s verbal language. Until then, mimicry is their language. Miming, or “mirroring” is also the language of courtship, one mate imitating another’s body language, signaling interest.
Mimesis is not only how humans learn and communicate, it’s how we desire.
When a child suddenly desires a toy that he previously expressed zero interest in, merely because another child expresses interest in it, that’s a form of (subconscious) imitation, mimetic desire (as René Girard called it). The post-adolescent equivalent of this phenomenon is the basis of a thousand films, novels, and Shakespeare comedies: the cliché that young men chase the same girl merely because she is a hot commodity, because other young men chase the same girl. Accordingly, mimetic desire is the basis of advertising; mimesis sells. We all want the same things because clever people (Madison Ave) show us desirable people wanting them.
In 1950, when the founder of modern computer science, Alan Turing, devised a test to determine a machine’s capacity to exhibit intelligent behavior on par with human intelligence (now known as A.I.), he proposed the “imitation game.” Now known as the Turing test, Turing’s system for detecting artificial intelligence relied on a machine’s ability to imitate human thinking processes. Or, at least, to appear to imitate human thought. In other words, the Turing test equated a machine’s capacity for human-level intelligence with its capacity for mimesis.
An early version of Turing’s imitation game was based on a popular parlor game involving three people, where an interrogator, communicating with two unseen players by passing notes, tries to guess the gender of the other two players, a man and a woman, concealed in separate rooms. The interrogator asks the other two participants what are meant to be revealing questions by slipping notes beneath the door of each room, then attempts to judge their (gender) identity correctly, based on the written responses the interrogator receives in turn. The man’s role (A) is to trick the interrogator (C), while the woman’s role (B) is to help the “blind” interrogator choose correctly. The “Imitation Game.”
Turing’s variation of this parlor game would involve a computer’s ability to imitate the male “trickster” (the player trying to deceive the blind interrogator—in essence, a man imitating a woman). In its nascency, then, computer science was already concerned with twenty-first-century preoccupations like A.I. and transgender performance. Turing’s basic criterion for artificial intelligence was mimesis, the fundamental human capacity for imitation, applied to a machine—a computer’s ability to imitate a man imitating a woman.
In human culture, mimesis appears to be the behavioral bedrock of nearly everything—from ancient magic to advanced computing. Primitive justice systems (scapegoating), ancient medicine (homeopathic healing), religion, and art are all synonymous with “magic,” and magical thinking is fundamentally imitative. Some anthropologists believe (as I’ve said elsewhere), that the 20,000 year-old cave paintings in Lascaux, France were painted to summon the animals they represent, for food and resources. Others believe the Lascaux images were created to encourage the reproductive abundance of these animals. What’s more, the humans who periodically gathered to venerate these sacred images likely did so during the animal’s rutting period, and may have come together to do some rutting of their own, projecting human reproduction onto the animal mating season. Whatever the human intention behind these paintings, which were probably various, the production of these images most likely included a component of imitative magic—controlling human and/or animal behavior through mimesis. As superstitious as it sounds, sometimes this sort of magical thinking can be quite effective—the hunting “decoy” is an animal imitation, too, summoning the real thing. Like the fisherman’s lure, feeding visceral bellies with magical thoughts.
According to magical thinking, making copies of something invokes the real thing. Mimesis explains the basic psychology of the “voodoo doll,” imitative magic. The doll is a representational copy of the thing to be controlled. Rain dances imitate rain, hunting dances imitate prey. These are merely the clichés, and only begin to suggest the prevalence of imitative magical thinking in human behavior, even (especially) to this day.3
Primitive medicinal cures were created to imitate signifiers of good health, or expel signifiers of illness. Religious rites tried to influence spirits or ancestors through the manipulation of representational copies of them—imitative objects, images, sounds, movements, or words. Rather than controlling actual spirits, or the weather, or disease, of course, these rituals end up controlling the emotions of the participants. Repetitive rituals, then, are a psychological technique of exerting the illusion of control, in an uncertain and out-of-control world. Sigmund Freud suggests that all repetitive behavior, whether in art or neurosis, functions to exert illusory control, ultimately over life and death. Characteristically, the Viennese psychoanalyst would say we exert this illusory control and comfort by playing with the symbols we subconsciously associate with the source of life, and what the French call le petit mort or “little death”—sex.
In the right circumstances, controlling emotions by manipulating symbols can have empirical effects. Imaginary acts, mimesis, can have real world consequences. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the spectacle of religion or politics. Or social media—the word meme is partially derived from mimesis.
Mimesis has a sister concept in the social sciences, alterity. Other-ness. If mimesis, or imitation, is sameness, alterity is difference. Together, these corollary concepts explain the definition of in-groups and out-groups, and the construction of social and personal identity. In other words, we define ourselves by what we are not. We’re not savages. We are not communists. We are not terrorists. We’re not cannibals. There must always be an Other, a “Them,” for there to be an “Us.” Social and national identity are defined through alterity. We’re all of the same group if we share the same signifier of difference—this is the basic principal of scapegoating. Mimesis (sameness) is determined through alterity (difference), two sides of the same coin.
Since the early-twentieth century, linguists have claimed that signifiers (words) are defined not in themselves, but in relation to other signifiers. In particular, words and concepts are defined by their opposites—binary opposition. Anyone who’s attempted to define a word or concept for a three-year-old has experienced binary opposition: “What is darkness? It’s when there isn’t any light.” Words come in pairs: dark and light, black and white, hot and cold, up and down, male and female, yang and yin. The signifying potential of binary opposition is most profound in binary code: everything you see on your computer screen is constructed from two signs, binary opposites with no inherent meaning except for the difference between them: “1” and “0”.
Mimesis and alterity describe fundamental impulses in human nature, the basic building blocks of human cultural intelligence. These twin faculties also help to explain one of the most marvelously fraught, and culturally productive, imitative cycles in recent history, the story of American popular music. Heads and tails, this two-sided coin is our token to the American jukebox.
Daphne A. Brooks “A New Voice of the Blues: Mamie Smith becomes the first woman to make a phonograph record,” A New Literary History of America. I’m indebted to Ms. Brooks for the majority of the recording history of “Crazy Blues.”
Adam Gussow, blues historian
An example of mimetic thinking in modern artistic practices, which introduces one of the primary texts theorizing imitative magic: Frazer’s Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion.
For many modernist poets, imitative magic was most influentially expounded by Sir James George Frazer in The Golden Bough, a pseudo-anthropological study from 1890. T.S. Eliot’s exhaustive poem, The Waste Land, cites concepts from The Golden Bough profusely, while Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” is in turn a variable copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Which is all to say that artists employ their own form of “imitative magic” to summon success by imitating their influences, and ultimately, distinguish themselves as “originals” by altering the work of their predecessors.
Never shy about summoning poetic influences, Jim Morrison invoked two chapter titles from Frazer’s Golden Bough concerning taboo—“Not to Touch the Earth” and “Not to See the Sun”—replicating them in the title and opening lines of a Doors’ song, “Not to Touch the Earth.”
To say nothing of the author of this newsletter, and his influences.