Female Blues Singers – Various Artists – Complete Recorded Works – Vol 4 C (1921-1930)

The majority of tracks on this volume are sung in a dramatic style. This style is heard often in the very early 1920s but was pretty much pass� by 1923. Some of the characteristics of the style of the early recordings may be due to the fact that these records were aimed at both white and black customers. The collection is made all the more interesting with the appearance of some fine jazz accompanists including James P. Johnson, Bob Fuller, Louis Hooper and Buddy Christian. The female blues singers who made records in the 1920s and early 1930 are often simplistically characterized as “vaudeville” artists. This series of fourteen, concentrating on singers who made only a handful of recordings and who mostly remain biographically obscure, reveals the true diversity of the female artists of this era.

While the vaudeville theatres and travelling tent shows were probably the main venues for most of them, some sang in cabarets and others in low-down barrelhouses. Some were vaudeville veterans whose careers stretched back to the teens or even earlier, while others were young new arrivals on the stage. Yet others sound as though they had just emerged from a rough saloon and house party environment. Some created their own excellent song material, while others were merely the vehicles for ambitious song-writers who often also served as their accompanists. Some are obscure and many leave us wishing they had been more extensively recorded. Whatever the case, they fill out the picture of the blues of this era and present plenty of fine musical moments and material of great interest.