Mamie Smith sings at the Lafayette
One hundred years ago today … Mamie Smith had a week-long engagement at the Lafayette Theater, 2225 Seventh Avenue at 132 Street. The booking had been puffed in the New York Age a week earlier.
New York Age, 13 November 1920, p. 8. Chronicling America.
According to the Age, Smith’s musical collaborator Perry Bradford was now acting as manager for her band, and had secured the largest fee “ever paid the colored artists by colored management.” In August, Smith had released a massive hit record, “Crazy Blues” written by Bradford and considered the first blues vocal recording.
Note: We have chronicled Mamie Smith’s 1920, and her work with Bradford, in posts of February 11, February 14, and August 14. The Lafayette Theater itself is mentioned in several posts as well.
Smith was booked by the Quality Amusement Organization, a company that had been founded four years earlier by Lester A. Walton, the civil rights activist. In 1920 Walton just happened to be manager of the Lafayette Theater (see our November 16 post) and an occasional theater columnist for the Age. (He had written for the paper as recently as October 23.) Did he pen the announcement above?
WRITTEN BY JONATHAN GOLDMAN, NOVEMBER 23, 2020
TAGS: Jazz, blues, Harlem renaissance, music, theater, entertainment, management, publicity, Black arts, African American history, women in music