Pop Music's First Black Stars

In one sentence: The American popular music industry's first business model was white performers blacking their faces to mimic Black people; once Black performers could actually take the stage after the Civil War, they didn't sidestep that mocking script — they put the same mask on to make a living and, slowly, to bend it from the inside. This episode traces how that pattern kept repeating, from blackface troupes and "coon songs" to Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" to Elvis covering Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog": Black musicians kept originating the sound, and once the sound turned profitable, the money and the name recognition kept landing on someone else.

How We Got Here

In the late 1820s, an Irish American performer named Thomas Dartmouth "T.D." Rice set the country on fire with "Jump Jim Crow," a blackface act he performed in Cincinnati and New York — face blacked with burnt cork, playing an exaggerated, disabled enslaved man. It became, in historical musicologist Matthew D. Morrison's phrase, something close to the nation's first viral sensation. Blackface minstrelsy quickly outgrew its start as a between-acts novelty and became its own industry — Morrison calls it the first original form of American commercial popular music, one whose DNA you can trace, in some fashion, through country, rock, even electronic dance music, back to a localized Black musical source. But for the entire span of slavery, Black people were legally barred from performing this caricature of themselves. As Yale professor Daphne A. Brooks puts it, enslaved African Americans had no ability to narrate ideas about themselves in the popular domain at all — a fact she calls "heavy, heavy."

That changed after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. Black minstrel troupes began touring — the Georgia Minstrels, made up of roughly a dozen recently freed Black men, were among the first, marketing themselves as the "authentic" version and even touring Britain. White audiences ate it up; papers praised them for being "true to life." But the trap was already built into the premise: Black performers were making a living off racist stereotypes white performers had invented. W.E.B. Du Bois, for one, was withering about it, dismissing "Negro minstrel songs" as a mass of music where the real Negro melodies got lost. Something odder happened too — once Black performers were doing more of the work, white blackface acts started to look, by comparison, like cheap knockoffs. Bert Williams and George Walker, a Black duo who rose in the 1890s, pushed that logic to its limit: rather than making Black audiences the punchline, they blew up the absurdity of racist caricature itself into something closer to satire — critique wearing the mask, not surrender to it. They went on to star in "In Dahomey," the first full-length musical written and performed by Black artists at a major Broadway house — a farce about two Black con men from Boston scheming to "colonize" the West African kingdom of Dahomey — which later ran in London for seven months, including a command performance at Buckingham Palace.

Blackface's live popularity crested in the 1870s, but it kept traveling as sheet music, and New York's Tin Pan Alley became the industry's commercial heart. What actually rewrote the rules was Thomas Edison's 1877 phonograph, cooked up across the river in New Jersey. Among the first Black voices ever captured on the device was George Washington Johnson — born enslaved in Loudoun County, Virginia, in 1846, with no surviving record of his exact birthdate. Freed as a young man, he was singing for tips at New York ferry terminals when a record-company scout found him. He cut "The Whistling Coon" and "The Laughing Song," both textbook "coon songs" — the term derives from a slur for Black people, set to a sanitized ragtime beat, carrying blackface's racist mockery straight onto wax — and both topped the charts for months, reportedly the best-selling records of the 1890s. Johnson had to record every copy live, one performance at a time; to save effort, he'd sing into as many as six phonographs at once. He's credited with roughly 50,000 recording sessions over his career, paid a flat rate of around twenty cents each, while a single record retailed for several times that.

Around the same time, a Kentucky-born Black musician named Ernest Hogan scored a massive hit with "All Coons Look Alike to Me" and became known as the father of ragtime. Late in life he expressed real regret over the song and over blackface generally — but he also argued the song "opened the way" for songwriters, Black and white alike, who no longer needed the word "coon" to write a hit. By the turn of the century the record business was booming across genres — opera (Caruso), classical music, and, Morrison notes, grotesque recordings that reenacted lynchings, sold and played at exhibitions around the country. This was the Jim Crow era of legal segregation, named for the disabled enslaved character Rice had mocked decades earlier. Black intellectuals split on how to read all this: Alain Locke, a founding figure of the Harlem Renaissance, dismissed coon-song performers as "pseudo Negroes" peddling "a relic of the worst minstrel days"; others argued that if racist material was going to sell either way, better the money go to Black artists than white ones.

The blues had been born in Black communities in the South, but through 1920 nearly every recording of it was by a white artist. The first crack in that arrangement opened in 1910, almost by accident: vaudeville star Sophie Tucker, mid-card-game, was introduced by her Black assistant and close friend, Molly Elkins, to a young Black songwriter named Shelton Brooks — and walked away with "Some of These Days," the song that made her career and later titled her memoir. Black songwriter, white star: that was the one division of labor the industry would tolerate. Perry Bradford, who'd also written for Tucker, wanted to break it. Nicknamed "Mule" for his stubbornness, Bradford got laughed out of Columbia and the rest of Tin Pan Alley, and kept pushing anyway — broke enough that his shoe soles had worn through and his rent was overdue, insisting the country was "waiting for the sound of the voice of a Negro singing the blues." His break came in 1920, when Sophie Tucker canceled a session at OKeh Records at the last minute; Bradford talked the label into replacing her with Mamie Smith, a vaudeville performer from Cincinnati. On August 10, 1920, Smith cut "Crazy Blues" with her backing band, the Jazz Hounds — a song of heartbreak and desperation whose final verse has its heroine vowing to get a gun and shoot a cop. It sold 75,000 copies in its first month, proof by the numbers that Black audiences were, in fact, a market. Record companies coined a new category for the boom: "race records," made by and for Black listeners. Smith's own stardom burned fast and dimmed fast, eclipsed within a few years by Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Ethel Waters — but the door she opened never closed. Race records sold 5 million copies a year through the 1920s, carrying blues, jazz, and gospel into the mainstream. That boom collapsed with the Depression (Paramount Records, once a powerhouse, folded by the mid-1930s), but the jazz coming out of New Orleans and the Harlem Renaissance had already laid down roots that would outlast it.

In 1952, Big Mama Thornton, a Black singer from Alabama, recorded "Hound Dog." It sold more than half a million copies and helped kick-start rock and roll — but history remembers Elvis Presley's version, cut four years later. Thornton spent her later years broke and died in a boarding house with almost nothing to her name; only in 2024 — the same year this episode aired — was she finally inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The show pulls that thread all the way to the present: according to University of Oregon instructor Larry Wayte, 88 percent of all money in today's music industry goes to people who neither perform nor write the music, leaving roughly 12 percent for the artists themselves.

The Core Argument and the Twist

The episode's sharpest point isn't the expected one — that the American pop music business has an ugly history. It's that Black artists broke into the industry not by sidestepping racist caricature but by putting it on deliberately, monetizing it, and prying it open from within. Freed Black minstrel troupes didn't refuse to perform blackface; they marketed themselves as the authentic version and competed for the same audiences white troupes had. That triggered an unexpected reversal: because Black performers did it so convincingly, white blackface acts started to look like the fake by comparison. Bert Williams and George Walker took that logic as far as it would go — not making Black audiences the joke, but exaggerating the absurdity of the racist narrative itself into something closer to critique wearing a mask than surrender to one.

The second twist runs along the question of who was allowed to profit. George Washington Johnson and Ernest Hogan pried open the record market through degrading coon songs, not through some more dignified alternative — the industry simply didn't believe Black people were a market worth serving until Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" sold 75,000 copies in a month and forced executives to reckon with the sales figures. Black musicians didn't get access to the stage or the studio because the industry corrected course; they got it once someone could show a profit in it. That logic kept repeating: a Black-originated sound gets proven out at the margins, turns profitable, and then a more mainstream — usually white — name takes it over, amplifies it, and gets remembered for it. Big Mama Thornton cut the original "Hound Dog"; it's Elvis's cover, four years later, that made it into the history of rock and roll. Thornton herself had been dead for nearly half a century by the time the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame finally inducted her, in 2024. The statistic the episode closes on — 88 percent of today's music-industry money going to people who neither perform nor write it — isn't a moralizing coda. It's two centuries of pattern converted into a royalty split still running today.

Key Voices

• Matthew D. Morrison — a historical musicologist at NYU's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, author of Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States. His throughline: blackface minstrelsy is the first original form of American commercial popular music, and nearly every mainstream American genre traces back to some silenced, localized Black origin.
• Daphne A. Brooks — professor of African American studies, American studies, women's, gender, and sexuality studies, and music at Yale. Calls the historical exclusion of Black people from narrating their own image "heavy, heavy," and is the one who insists Mamie Smith "should not be forgotten."
• Larry Wayte — senior instructor in popular music history at the University of Oregon. Supplies the folklore around how Tin Pan Alley got its name, the origins of the "race records" label, and the closing 88/12 royalty statistic.
• Lenny DeGraaf — archivist at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park, who walks the show's producer through Edison's original hand-drawn sketch of the tinfoil phonograph and the surviving wax cylinder of George Johnson's recording.
• George Washington Johnson, Ernest Hogan, Perry Bradford, Mamie Smith, and Big Mama Thornton — historical figures rather than interview subjects: the first Black recording star, the "father of ragtime," the manager who forced open the door for "Crazy Blues," the artist who broke through it, and rock and roll's erased originator. Their own words and lyrics run throughout the episode, sometimes read by voice actors.

Quotable Lines

"Blackface minstrelsy is the first original form of American popular commercial music." — Matthew D. Morrison

"...the fact that African Americans, as enslaved peoples, ... had no ability to be able to narrate ideas about themselves in the popular domain is a heavy, heavy thing." — Daphne A. Brooks

"The debasements and imitations, the Negro minstrel songs - a mass of music in which the novice may easily lose himself and never find the real Negro melodies." — W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

"This song has caused a lot of trouble in and out of show business. But it was also good for show business... That one song opened the way for a lot of colored and white songwriters." — Ernest Hogan

"I tramped the pavements of Broadway with the belief that the country was waiting for the sound of the voice of a Negro singing the blues." — Perry Bradford

"Eighty-eight percent of all the money in the music industry is going to people who aren't performing it and aren't writing the music." — Larry Wayte

"...in terms of what's lost is life - life - and by that, I mean that very seriously in the sense of the continuous extraction has material consequences for the individuals in the communities." — Matthew D. Morrison

"But what she did changed the course of American cultural life, so she should not be forgotten." — Daphne A. Brooks, on Mamie Smith

Rich Details and Trivia

• "Jim Crow" went on to name the entire legal apparatus of segregation, but the name started as a disabled, enslaved character mocked in T.D. Rice's song — the laws were named, in effect, after a racist joke.
• Tin Pan Alley publisher M. Witmark & Sons was run by three underage brothers — Julius, Isidore, and Jay. Their father, Marcus Witmark, a Prussian Jewish immigrant, had bought and enslaved people in Georgia and served in the Confederate Army before moving to New York after the war with a fortune (roughly a million of today's dollars) that he nearly blew entirely; the company got its start when young Jay won a contest and chose a printing press as the prize.
• At the turn of the century, staged reenactments of lynchings were sold and played at public exhibitions right alongside opera recordings by Caruso — the episode mentions this in a single line and doesn't dwell on it.
• "In Dahomey," starring Bert Williams and George Walker — the first Black-written musical to play a major Broadway house — went on to run in London for seven months, including one performance at Buckingham Palace.
• George Washington Johnson is credited with roughly 50,000 recording sessions over his career; even his exact birthdate didn't survive — a strange gap in the record for a man remembered as the first Black recording star.
• The final verse of "Crazy Blues" has its heroine vowing to "get myself a gun, and shoot myself a cop" — a line that would raise eyebrows on a hit record today, let alone one from 1920.
• The episode is structured in three parts with titles that double as small arguments: "The Mask," "The Talking Machine," and "Catching the Crazy Blues."

Cross-Domain Connections

The acquired (business history) domain holds two Tier 0 raw mirrors touching the music industry: sources/acquired/2022-03-07_sony_en.md (Sony's corporate history, including its music business) and sources/acquired/2023-05-18_spotify-ceo-daniel-ek_en.md (an interview with Spotify founder Daniel Ek). Both are focused on corporate strategy and platform economics in the modern recorded-music and streaming business — a different lens entirely from this episode's race and labor history. But the episode's closing statistic — 88 percent of music-industry revenue going to people who neither perform nor write the music — is exactly the royalty-split question any future extraction of those two sources would have to reckon with. Neither has been extracted into a Tier 1 page yet, so there's no object in the wiki to link to; noted here as a future possibility, not a link. No connection to the science domain.

Pages Worth Building

• blackface-minstrelsy — the mechanism and motif running through the entire episode, the root of racialized performance traditions from the early 1800s through the recording era; likely to recur across any future Throughline episode touching American race, music, or performance history.
• perry-bradford — the Black manager nicknamed "Mule" who single-handedly forced open the market for Black blues recordings; worth a standalone page under the theme of individuals rewriting industry rules after years of rejection.
• big-mama-thornton — the blues singer who cut the original "Hound Dog," was eclipsed by Elvis's cover, died broke, and was only posthumously inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2024; the episode's sharpest case study in an originator being erased, and worth an entity page for future rock-history entries to draw on.

Source · throughline