She’s not flinching whenever the trombone drops a bomb.”The reaction to the song, particularly among Black audiences, was groundbreaking. Black recording artists subsequently made significant inroads riding the coattails of Smith’s success. Blues women dominated the first half of the decade, with Waters, Rainey and Bessie Smith at the forefront of the craze. Waters’s popularity would almost single-handedly keep the African-American-owned Black Swan Records afloat in the early 1920s. Record labels now believed in the (monetary) value of Black mass cultural art, and they provided Black artists with access — though still heavily mediated by white executives — to recording their own music.

Source: New York Times August 10, 2020 19:07 UTC