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xvii Prelude “West 55th Street Blues” The “Roaring Twenties,” the “Jazz Era,” or the “Age of Prohibition,” three of the terms often applied to the 1920s, describe a decade of profound changes that transformed American music. New styles, such as blues and jazz, and new artists like Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Duke Ellington, and Bessie Smith first rose to commercial and popular significance during the 1920s. Among all the thousands of new artists and groups that played and sang, the majority of their names mean little to most of us in the twenty-first century. The history of popular music in America has been revisited and revised time and again. Currently hundreds of colleges and universities in the United States now teach courses with titles like “American Popular Music” and the “History of Rock ’n’ Roll.” The same trend is true for the history and the evolution of jazz. As we look back and uncover some overlooked corner and add more to the overall picture, it becomes ever less simple to grasp. By the close of the 1920s the “Race Market” (packaging and selling music to an African American audience) in recordings and sheet music was firmly established and key studies—such as Tom Lord, Clarence Williams (Storyville Publications, 1979), or Paul Oliver, Barrelhouse Blues: Location Recording and the Early Traditions of the Blues (Basic Civitas Books, 2009)—enable us to follow its progress. The roles of black entrepreneurs, like Williams and W. C. Handy, have at least been assumed, though still not fully understood and appreciated. In New York City, just west of Broadway, home of Tin Pan Alley, lay a completely equipped acoustic recording studio at 240 West 55th Street. This studio hosted the New York City sessions of the Canadian Ajax label. Probably sometime in May 1924—one record from the session was advertised in the Chicago Defender of July 5—a small group gathered in the studio to accompany an artist new to recording. To judge from the nearly score of releases recorded over a ten-month period, Helen Gross quickly established herself as one the label’s most important names. xviii Prelude Her July 1924 recording of Tom Delaney’s “I Wanna Jazz Some More,” about “Miss Susan Green from New Orleans,” who “was a dancing chile,” sounds no better or no worse than hundreds of other songs from the period. It was far less commercially successful for Delaney than his earlier huge success with “Down Home Blues,” which was so important to the young Ethel Waters. For this session Ajax used just two black “house” musicians: clarinetist Bob Fuller and pianist Louis Hooper. Delaney’s song was published by Joe Davis Music Co., located at nearby 1658 Broadway. Davis apparently was on hand for the session and probably immediately set off that same night with the newly cut masters for the Ajax label’s Canadian headquarters in Lachine, Quebec. Throughout the summer of 1924 and into the spring of 1925 this became a regular journey for Davis, whose publishing companies benefited from appearing on many of the Ajax labels with titles written by then-popular black writers like Delaney. In an undated letter from Davis’s files, black showman Thomas “Baby” Grice (a member of Moton’s Minstrels temporarily located in Franklin, Indiana, for an engagement) wrote to Davis offering words and music of a song he wanted Davis to have Helen Gross record. “This is one of Hellen faveright songs,” he asserted. “Ps. let Hellen Gross make this on Record.” The relationship with Davis seemed of some standing for Grice footnoted “Pleas send-contracts at once i will send them back at once, becaus i wont be here long.” Whatever else Grice accomplished in his career, he managed to convince some artists to record his compositions during the era when female vaudeville singers held favor among race record purchasers. In August 1924 Clarence Williams recorded—and published—two of Baby Grice’s songs by Laura Smith for OKeh. Clara Smith (no relation to Laura) recorded Grice’s composition “San Francisco Blues” two months later. That same month Virginia Liston waxed his “Monkey Jungle Blues.” In January 1926 Ozie McPherson recorded “He’s My Man, He’s Your Man” (attributed to “Callans-Baby Grice”), while in September 1927 Butterbeans and Susie committed Grice’s composition “Jelly Roll Queen” to wax. The sheet music for Helen Gross’s “I Wanna Jazz Some More” contained the opening bars to another song published by...

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