What was the first blues song ever recorded?
All roads lead back to the blues, eventually. First emerging during the late 19th century in the Black communities of places like New Orleans, blues music is among the most important and enduring musical styles ever recorded, responsible for everything from the emergence of rock and roll to a cultural fight for civil rights for Black Americans. Its infectious and endlessly adaptable style, coupled with expressive lyrics and a distinct attitude, has inspired artists for generations, yet very few people are aware of its earliest origins.
Ask any self-respecting rock and roll obsessive for the architects of the blues, and you will invariably be hit by names like Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, or perhaps Ma Rainey, if you are lucky. While each of these incredible figures were utterly essential in the development of the blues throughout the 20th century, paving the way for the future of the genre, and its adaptation into the kind of blues-rock sound adopted by the likes of The Rolling Stones, John Mayall, and countless other now-iconic artists, they are far from being the progenitors of the genre.
Boasting perhaps one of the most extensive and complex histories of any musical genre, the exact origins of the blues are endlessly disputed. Even the location of the style’s emergence is under dispute, with certain academics determining that it arose from the streets of New Orleans, while others claim that artists in Missouri, Mississippi, or Texas were among the first to establish blues music. All this confusion comes before we have even begun to discuss the ‘first’ artists to land upon the style, which are similarly disputed.
This confusing history owes to a lack of recorded material from around this time. Given that the blues originated in the Black communities of the American south, it was rarely given the credit it deserved by the musical powers that be. So, even though there is certainly evidence that the blues was already established towards the end of the 19th-century, the first recorded examples of blues music did not arrive until years later.
So, what was the first blues song published?
The first blues song to be formally published depends on your exact definition of the blues. On a basic level, the very first track to be published featuring the word ‘blues’ in the title arrived in 1908, when Italian classically-trained composer Anthony Maggio published sheet music for a track titled ‘I Got The Blues’.
Maggio himself once recalled the origins of this piece of music in a 1955 interview, during which he shared, “I took the ferry boat from New Orleans across the Mississippi to Algiers. On my way up the levee, I heard an elderly negro with a guitar playing three notes for a long time. I didn’t think anything with only three notes could have a title, so to satisfy my curiosity, I asked him what was the name of the piece. He replied, ‘I got the blues.’”
Although this might seem like a pretty open and shut case, with Maggio’s publication being the first recorded example of the blues, the music itself adheres more to the style of ragtime rather than blues. That track does, indeed, feature a 12-bar structure – an essential characteristic of the blues – but that is also true of previous tracks, like Hughie Cannon’s ‘Just Because She Made Them Goo-Goo Eyes’, from eight years prior, which was also a ragtime anthem.
Arguably, then, it was vaudeville vocalist Mamie Smith who had the first recorded blues track, with her 1920 interpretation of the Perry Bradford track entitled ‘Crazy Blues’. Recorded in August 1920 and released by Okeh Records later that year, the song became a hit, selling 75,000 copies in just one month.
Not only was the song the very first blues record created by a Black artist, but it was also the very first hit single to arise from the blues genre, making it a landmark recording for the genre, regardless of your views on whether it really was the first blues record or not.
