Johnny Gimble born 30 May 1926

John Paul Gimble (May 30, 1926 – May 9, 2015) was an American country musician associated with Western swing. He was considered one of the most important fiddlers in the genre.

Gimble was born in Tyler, Texas and grew up in nearby Bascom. He began playing in a band with his brothers at age 12, and continued playing with two of them, George and Jerry, as the Rose City Swingsters. The trio played local radio shows, and gigs at dance halls. Gimble later moved to Louisiana and began performing with the Jimmie Davis gubernatorial campaign. He was offered a job in the Governor's administration but turned it down to volunteer for service in the U.S. Army. Gimble returned to Texas after completing his service in the U.S. Army in World War II.

Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys

Back in Texas, Gimble continued to hone his fiddling skills with a number of Texas radio and dance bands. In 1948, he made his first recording, playing with Robert Brother's Rhythmairs in Corpus Christi. A year later he joined Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, with whom he toured for most of the next decade. With Wills, he played both fiddle and electric mandolin, and distinguished himself by using a five-string fiddle (most fiddles have four strings).

His fiddling style was influenced by other Texas fiddlers who played the "breakdown" fiddle tunes. Gimble's fiddling style, while uniquely his own, came to be known as the "Texas fiddling style" that emerged during the first half of the twentieth century among fiddlers such as Cliff Bruner, Louis Tierney, and Jesse Ashlock. Gimble learned from them, and further developed while playing with Wills, who epitomized and promoted a new sound known as Western swing. Western swing rose to national prominence in the 1940s, combining the old-time, Southern-derived Anglo string band tradition, with its breakdowns, schottisches, waltzes, and reels, with the big band jazz and pop music of the day.

After Gimble married Barbara Kemp of Gatesville, Texas, in 1949, he settled in Dallas, where, in the early 1950s, he began doing radio and television shows with Bill and Jim Boyd (of the Lone Star Cowboys) and performed on The Big D Jamboree, a weekly variety show broadcast live from the Dallas Sportatorium. He broke off to form his own group in 1951, performing as the house band at Wills's clubs in Fort Worth and Oklahoma City, but rejoined in 1953 and continued to play with Wills until the early 1960s. He played fiddle on Marty Robbins' No. 1 hit "I'll Go On Alone".

In 1955, Gimble moved to Waco, Texas, and split time between running a barber shop near the regional VA Hospital and music. In 1960, he quit touring with Bob Wills and hosted one of the first locally produced television shows on KWTX, Johnny Gimble & the Homefolks. Gimble's show featured a young bass player from nearby Abbott, Texas, named Willie Nelson, and a lifetime friendship and partnership was born. In 1968, after repeated encouragement from his peers, Gimble moved his family to Nashville, Tennessee. From then on, his steady work as a session musician included sessions with Merle Haggard and The Strangers on their Bob Wills tribute album (A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World (or, My Salute to Bob Wills)), Conway Twitty, Connie Smith, Loretta Lynn, Lefty Frizzell, Ray Price, Willie Nelson, and Chet Atkins on Superpickers in 1973. The following year he took a cue from a song ("Fiddlin' Around") which he had written and performed on the Atkins' Superpickers album, and recorded his first solo album, titled Fiddlin' Around. He recorded nine other solo albums.

                                 

From 1975 to 1990, he was nominated 15 times for Instrumentalist of the Year and won the Country Music Association Award five times. Gimble toured with Willie Nelson worldwide from 1979 to 1981, and appeared in a supporting role in the film Honeysuckle Rose. In 1983, Gimble assembled a Texas swing group featuring Ray Price on vocals, and charted a country radio hit with "One Fiddle, Two Fiddle", featured in the Clint Eastwood film Honkytonk Man in which Johnny had a supporting role portraying Bob Wills. He appeared from the 1970s through the 2000s on Austin City Limits on TV and Garrison Keillor's broadcasts (radio). At the time of his death, he held the record for most appearances on the Austin-based PBS show. He was a member of the Million Dollar Band, and frequent guest on "Hee Haw". He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999 in the early influences category as a member of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys.

Gimble's career spanned into the 21st century, recording with Vince Gill, Tanya Tucker, and performing at the 49th Annual Grammy Awards with Carrie Underwood in 2007. "Until Lloyd Maines surpassed him, Johnny held the record for most appearances on Austin City Limits. He played with heart and soul and had an infectious spirit and sense of adventure - both in his music and personality," said ACL Executive Producer Terry Lickona. Johnny was also a regular on Minnesota Public Radio's A Prairie Home Companion hosted by Garrison Keillor, who in 1994 penned "Owed to Johnny Gimble" as a tribute to his friend after Gimble received the NEA's National Heritage Fellowship, and who performed the song again on May 9, 2015, to commemorate Gimble's life.

Gimble and his wife Barbara were divorced twice and remarried twice. They had a son and two daughters, and as of 2022 they had four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Johnny and his son Dick Gimble, a college professor of music at McLennan Community College, started a Western Swing Camp focusing on fiddle. After two years in Waco and with the help of daughter Cyndy they moved the camp to SMU's Taos Campus and ensured that the western swing style of country music was passed on to the next generation. Gimble's granddaughter, Emily, is a notable vocalist and keyboard player who has performed with Johnny, Asleep at the Wheel, Warren Hood, and Hayes Carll. She has since launched a solo career, based out of Austin, Texas.

In 2010, he released his final album "Celebrating with Friends," a collection of collaborations with artists like Nelson, Haggard, Ray Benson, Dale Watson, Vince Gill and others. Gimble died not far from his home in Dripping Springs, Texas, on May 9, 2015, aged 88. His daughter stated that her father was "finally rid of the complications from several strokes over the past few years". He was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2018.

(Edited from Wikipedia) 

Freddie Redd born 29 May 1928

Freddie Redd (May 29, 1928 – March 17, 2021) was an American hard-bop pianist and composer. 

Redd was born in New York City to Freddie, a porter, and Helen, a homemaker. His father was a pianist but died before the child was two, leaving the keyboard for him to discover. Though his mother moved around New York's various boroughs, the piano always travelled with them. Redd began teaching himself to play as soon as he could comfortably reach the keys from the bench. His primary interest, however, was in the drums. That early obsession influenced his piano playing later on; Redd's sense of rhythmic invention and propulsion proved a distinctive aspect of his formidable style. As a young teen in Harlem, Redd would often skip school to see Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Jay McShann, and Earl Hines at the Apollo Theatre.

Redd was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1946. This is where he spent the next three years learning more about the piano and playing gigs with his friends throughout bases and camps within South Korea. There were pianos in every recreation room, which is where Redd taught himself how to play and formed a band during his time of service. Another GI played him Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker's bebop hit "Shaw 'Nuff," and it changed the direction of Redd's musical life. Discharged in 1949, Redd returned to New York. He had developed his technique while in the service and began getting work at home. He worked in the clubs in New York and Syracuse, New York, in a small group led by drummer Johnny Mills, and in 1951 recorded with Tiny Grimes and toured the South in Cootie Williams's sextet. In 1952 he returned to New York, where in the following year he worked briefly with Oscar Pettiford and Charles Mingus.

Redd belonged to the Jive Bombers with the saxophonist Earl Johnson, the double bass player Clarence Palmer, and the singer and guitarist Pee Wee Tinney (1954), recorded with Art Farmer's and Gigi Grace's quintet and Gene Ammons's All Stars (1955). That same year, Redd shared Piano: East/West (Savoy) with pianist Hampton Hawes -- they each led half the LP -- and released Introducing the Freddie Redd Trio on Prestige. In 1956, he served as pianist on Rolf Ericson & the American All Stars and toured Sweden. In 1957, he led a trio for San Francisco Suite on Riverside, and in 1958 released Get Happy with Freddie Redd for the U.K.'s tiny Nixa label that featured trumpeter Benny Bailey and bassist Tommy Potter. On piano, Redd was never the most dynamic improviser, but his keen ear and deep attunement to song form made him a striking "A busy chorder, he will start rattling away behind a soloist, prompting him and prodding hard," Watrous wrote for The New York Times. "Chords jar and fragment. New rhythmic and harmonic ideas pop up regularly."

                              

                        Here's "Old Man River" from above album.

On returning to the USA he moved to San Francisco, where he played for a brief period with Mingus at the Black Hawk and worked as the house pianist at Bop City. In 1959, Redd was commissioned to compose original music for Jack Gelber's play The Connection. In both the Living Theatre's off-Broadway production and Shirley Clarke's 1961 film, he played the role of musician and actor alongside saxophonist Jackie McLean and others. Blue Note signed Redd and released the recorded score as The Music from "The Connection" in 1960. The following year, Redd issued the quintet offering Shades of Redd with saxophonists McLean and Tina Brooks, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Louis Hayes. He recorded a third album for the label, but due to a dispute between Redd and Blue Note's Alfred Lion, it was shelved until 1989.

The pianist left the U.S. in 1962 for an extended stay in Europe. He spent years living and working in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and France as well as England. His only known recorded appearance between 1961 and 1970 was playing organ on James Taylor's first single, "Carolina in My Mind," at Apple Studios in 1968. In 1971, Redd released the trio outing Under Paris Skies with a French rhythm section, and in 1973 he issued In Sweden accompanied by old friends Potter and drummer Joe Harris. Redd returned to the United States in 1974 and headed for California. He spent the next 15 years between Los Angeles and San Francisco. He became a valued member of the northern and southern California jazz scenes and led a band that played clubs across Mexico -- he even moved for a time to Guadalajara.

In 1977, Redd released Straight Ahead! with bassist Henry Franklin and drummer Carl Burnett on the Interplay label, and followed with the solo outing Extemporaneous a year later. He continued to work bandstands in California, but he spent more and more time playing resort gigs in Mexico -- where he was given free rein in choosing his musicians and material. He gigged more than once with Mexican jazz pioneer/drummer/composer Tino Contreras. Redd also returned to Europe for festivals, club gigs, and occasional tours.

In 1988, Redd's Blues, his unreleased 1961 Blue Note outing, appeared for the first time, and was followed by Mosaic Records' limited-edition The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Freddie Redd, the liner notes of which quoted Jackie McLean as saying: "You never know what town you'll see Freddie in. He's always been itinerant. Freddie just appears from time to time, like some wonderful spirit."

He returned to New York to record 1989's Lonely City for the independent Uptown label, leading a septet that included Clifford Jordan, Ben Riley, and George Duvivier. In 1990, he released Live at the Studio Grill with drummer Billy Higgins and bassist Al McKibbon. He followed with the studio album Everybody Loves a Winner for Milestone in 1991, leading a sextet that included saxophonist Teddy Edwards and trombonist Phil Ranelin.

Redd moved to North Carolina to care for his ailing mother in late 1991. After her death in 1995, he returned to New York City, then moved to Pittsburgh for close to a decade. While it was his home base, he continued to work and travel internationally. He released Freddie Redd and His International Jazz Connection in 1998. Redd moved to Baltimore, Maryland, in 2009. He went on a large European tour in 2013 and undertook several recording sessions. In 2015, he issued his SteepleChase debut, Music for You with bassist Jay Anderson and drummer Billy Drummond. The following year, he released the sextet date With Due Respect, featuring the previous set's trio, plus trombonist John Mosca, saxophonist Chris Byars, and clarinetist Stefano Doglioni. 

Redd retired from music at the age of 87 and returned to New York City. In January 2021, Washington, D.C.'s Bleebop Records released the unissued 2013 recordings Baltimore Jazz Loft -- a quartet offering co-led with bassist Butch Warren -- and the quintet album Reminiscing, which included bassist Michael Formanek. Redd died at a Manhattan care facility in New York City on March 17, 2021, aged 92.  His grandson, Leslie Clarke, announced that Redd had died from natural causes in his sleep.

(Edited from AllMusic, New Grove Dictionary of Jazz & Wikipedia) 

Sonny Burgess born 28 May 1929

"Sonny" Burgess (May 28, 1929 – August 18, 2017) was an American rockabilly guitarist and singer.

Albert Austin Burgess was born near Newport, Arkansas, about 60 miles west of Memphis. His parents, Albert Austin and the former Esta Parsley, ran a cotton and soybean farm. After graduating from Newport High School in 1948, he spent two years in baseball’s minor leagues but could not hit a curveball. Giving up on a baseball career, he formed a country band, the Rocky Road Ramblers, with three friends, Kern Kennedy, Johnny Ray Hubbard, and Gerald Jackson and played boogie woogie music in dance halls and bars around Newport. He served in the Army (1951-1953) during the Korean War, stationed in West Germany with the military police. On his return to Arkansas, he reorganized the Ramblers into the Moonlighters, taking the name from the Silver Moon Club in Newport, where the group often played.

Burgess was a fan of the blues singers Jimmy Reed and Big Joe Turner and performed a mix of rhythm and blues and old standards, but in 1955 the group changed its sound after opening for Elvis Presley on four dates. “We heard Elvis and said, ‘Man, I want to go to Memphis and record and be like that,’ ” Mr. Burgess told Kicks magazine in 1988. Presley, in turn, liked the group’s version of Smiley Lewis’s “One Night of Sin,” which he recorded in 1958 as “One Night.” Adding a second guitar and trumpet and taking a new name, the Pacers, the group began recording at Sun with Sam Phillips, who encouraged Burgess to coarsen his vocal style and let loose, which he did.

The band's first record was "Red Headed Woman."  The flip side was "We Wanna Boogie." Both were written by Burgess and delivered a straight shot of full-tilt rockabilly, with manic instrumental solos behind Mr. Burgess’s growling vocals, punctuated by whoops and shrieks and growls. “Here was total abandon: coarse, untutored singing; unintelligible lyrics; ragged drumming; distorted guitar, backed by a wildly bleating trumpet,” Colin Escott wrote in “Roadkill on the Three-Chord Highway: Art and Trash in American Popular Music” (2002). “It was punk before punk, thrash before thrash.”

                                  

The record was said to have sold nearly 100,000 copies, but Mr. Burgess, who wrote both songs, was unable to capitalize on its success. His later releases for Sun including  “Thunderbird,” “Ain’t Got a Thing,” “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” and “Sadie’s Back in Town,” went nowhere. “Maybe Sonny’s sound was too raw, I don’t know — but I tell you this,” Phillips said in an interview for a boxed set of Sun recordings. “They were pure rock ’n’ roll.” In performance, the Pacers lived up to their sound. Inspired by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, whose stage antics had enlivened Bill Haley and the Comets’ movie “Rock Around the Clock,” they did splits and back flips onstage, formed a human pyramid and threw themselves into the audience at the end of every performance.

After leaving the Sun label in 1959 he scratched out a living playing bass and touring with the country singer Conway Twitty and performing with a variety of groups. After leaving Twitty in 1964, Burgess formed a new group, the King’s IV, but in 1972 he left the music business to run shoe store in Little Rock and also becoming a traveling salesman for St. Louis Trimming, a sewing-supply company. In 1986 he joined with former musicians from the Sun label to form the Sun Rhythm Section and was invited to a show in Washington DC where he made a big hit. After that, Burgess travelled all over the world and became a sensation in Europe. Due to his European fans, Mr. Burgess enjoyed a resurgence in the 1990s, and recorded the albums Tennessee Border with Dave Alvin of the Blasters and Sonny Burgess with Garry Tallent of the E Street Band.

In 1998, the Smithsonian Institution made a video called “Rockin’ on the River” that brought Burgess and the Legendary Pacers together again. In addition to original member Kern Kennedy, the group now included Bobby Crafford, Jim Aldridge, Fred Douglas, J. C. Caughron, and Charles Watson II. They made two album-length recordings in the late 1990s: They Came from the South and Still Rockin’ and Rollin’ which in 2000, was voted the best new album in the country and roots field in Europe. The group was inducted in 2002 into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. They also performed at the 2006 National Folk Festival in Richmond, Virginia. With June Taylor, he was the host of “We Wanna Boogie,” a Sunday night show on KASU, the radio station of Arkansas State University, in Jonesboro. Burgess was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music degree from Arkansas State University in Jonesboro on May 7, 2011.

In 2014, he received the Delta Cultural Center’s Sonny Payne Award for Blues Excellence. Sonny Burgess and the Legendary Pacers were given the Folklife Award by the Arkansas Arts Council, presented at the Governor’s Arts Awards ceremony on March 10, 2016. That same year, in poor heath, he moved to Little Rock (Pulaski County). In July 2017, Burgess suffered a fall at his home. He died the following month in Little Rocks Arkansas hospital, at the age of 88. 

He performed with his band, The Pacers, up until a month before he passed away. His legacy endures as a testament to his role in shaping the sound of rockabilly and influencing generations of musicians who followed.

(Edited from The New York Times, Wikipedia & Encyclopedia of Arkansas)

Redd Stewart born 27 May 1923

Henry Ellis Stewart (May 27, 1923 – August 4, 2003), better known as Redd Stewart, was an American country music songwriter and recording artist who co-wrote "Tennessee Waltz" with Pee Wee King in 1948.

Pee Wee & Redd

He was born the son of musical parents in Ashland City, Tennessee. Redd's family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, while he was still young. He learned to play the banjo, piano, fiddle and guitar as a child. All six of his brothers and sisters also became musicians. He dropped out of school after the seventh grade to perform in local bands. At age 14, he wrote his first commercial song, an ad jingle for a Louisville Ford automobile dealership. He also formed his own band at that time, the Kentucky Wildcats. He legally changed his name to Redd because of his russet-coloured hair.

In 1939, Redd Stewart became a member of Pee Wee King's band, the Golden West Cowboys, and joined the cast of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. World War II. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Redd was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to the South Pacific. While stationed there with the rank of sergeant, Redd wrote "A Soldier's Last Letter," which Ernest Tubb worked on and recorded in 1944, making it a No. 1 hit staying at the top for four weeks out of a seven month stay on the Country charts and crossing over to the Pop chart Top 20. 

                                 

When Redd returned to Pee Wee's Golden West Cowboys at the end of WW II, he became the band's vocalist, replacing Eddy Arnold who had gone solo. Most of the band's biggest hits were sung by Stewart. In 1946 he married Frances Jean Grimes. Stewart and King left the Opry and moved to Louisville in 1947. From there, they became pioneers in country music TV, starring in both regional and national programs.

When Stuart and King became a song writing team in the 1950s their first major success, "Bonaparte's Retreat," was Kay Starr's launch-pad to stardom They provided material to Eddy Arnold, Cowboy Copas and other country stars of the day. Their "Tennessee Waltz" became a pop smash for Patti Page in 1951 (reportedly selling more than 6 million copies)and was also covered by Roy Acuff, the Louvin Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and many others. It was also named a state song of Tennessee in 1965. "Slow Poke" was # 1 on both the country and pop charts for King & the Golden West Cowboys and was covered by Hawkshaw Hawkins. King and Stewart's romantic ballad "You Belong to Me," co-written with Chilton Price, topped the pop charts when recorded by Jo Stafford in 1952 and became a major doo-wop hit when revived by the Duprees a decade later.

Redd appeared in several movies with Pee Wee King, including Gold Mine in the Sky (1938), Ridin' the Outlaw Trail (1951) and The Rough, Tough West (1952), the last two starring Charles Starrett as the Durango Kid. In 1961, Redd and King appeared in the movie, Hoedown. In 1950–51, Stewart signed with King Records as a solo vocalist, though none of his singles were successful. Stewart also wrote songs that would be made famous by other artists. He provided Jim Reeves with "That's a Sad Affair", (Reeves also recorded "You Belong to Me") and Moon Mullican with "Downstream" and "When Love Dies Where Does it Go" in the mid-1950s. "Tennessee Waltz"  In 1971 he married Darlene Iona Collins and in 1972, he was inducted as a charter member into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. During his lifetime, Redd Stewart estimated that he had written more than 400 songs.

On August 2, 2003, Stewart died at 80 at Baptist Hospital East in Louisville, from complications of injuries due to a fall at his home in Louisville, in the early 1990s. n 2004, "Tennessee Waltz" was awarded BMI's 3,000,000 Airplay Award. (equivalent to 17.1 years of continuous playing). In 2004, he was inducted into Country Legends Hall of Fame and the Traditional Country Music Hall of Fame; and in 2005, Tennessee Waltz Parkway opened in his birthplace, Ashland City.

(Edited from Wikipedia, Nashville Songwriters Foundation & IMDb) 

Mamie Smith born 26 May 1883 or 1891

Mamie Smith (née Robinson; May 26, 1883 or 1891 – August or September 16, 1946) was an American singer. As a vaudeville singer, she performed in multiple styles, including jazz and blues. In 1920, she entered blues history as the first African-American artist to make vocal blues recordings.

Robinson was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. The year of her birth has been given as 1883, but in 2018, researcher John Jeremiah Sullivan discovered her birth certificate stating she was born in Cincinnati in 1891. When she was around age 10, she found work touring with the Four Dancing Mitchells, a white act. As a teenager, she danced in Salem Tutt Whitney's Smart Set. In 1913, she left the Tutt Brothers and married William "Smitty" Smith, a singer. The couple moved to New York where she began working as a cabaret dancer, pianist and singer. Her first major break came in 1918, when she appeared in Perry Bradford’s musical Made in Harlem. She remarried twice after her career took off.

On February 14, 1920, Smith recorded "That Thing Called Love" and "You Can't Keep a Good Man Down" for the Okeh label in New York City, after African-American songwriter and bandleader Perry Bradford persuaded Fred Hager to break the colour barrier in black music recording. Okeh Records recorded many iconic songs by black musicians. Although this was the first recording by a black blues singer, the backing musicians were all white. Hager had received threats from Northern and Southern pressure groups saying they would boycott the company if he recorded a black singer. Despite these threats, the record was a commercial success and opened the door for more black musicians to record.

                                  

Smith's biggest hits were the August 10, 1920 recordings of a set of songs written by Perry Bradford, including "Crazy Blues" and "It's Right Here for You (If You Don't Get It, 'Tain't No Fault of Mine)", again for Okeh Records, A million copies were sold in less than a year. Many were bought by African Americans, and there was a sharp rise in sales of "race records". Because of its historical significance, "Crazy Blues" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1994 and was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2005. Although other African Americans had been recorded earlier, such as George W. Johnson in the 1890s, they were performing music that had a substantial following among European-American audiences. The success of Smith's record prompted record companies to seek to record other female blues singers and began the era of what is now known as classic female blues.

Smith continued to make popular recordings for Okeh throughout the 1920s. By this time she was married to her manager Ossey Wilson. In 1924, she made three releases for Ajax Records, which, while heavily promoted, did not sell well. She made some records for Victor. She toured the United States and Europe with the band Mamie Smith & Her Jazz Hounds as part of Mamie Smith's Struttin' Along Review. She was billed as "The Queen of the Blues", a billing soon one-upped by Bessie Smith, who was called "The Empress of the Blues". Mamie found that the mass medium of radio provided a means of gaining additional fans, especially in cities with predominantly white audiences. For example, she and several members of her band performed on KGW in Portland, Oregon in early May 1923 and received positive reviews. Because of her popularity Smith had many engagements, touring as far as New Orleans and Dallas and appearing  as the featured singer in her own shows. She possessed a lively stage personality, was extremely attractive and had a strong voice.

Most of her best recordings were made with her Jazz Hounds whose line-ups included (from August 1920 to October 1921) Jake Green, Curtis Moseley, Garvin Bushell, Johnny Dunn, Dope Andrews, Ernest Elliot, Porter Grainger, Leroy Parker and Bob Fuller, and (from June 1922 to January 1923) Coleman Hawkins, Everett Robbins, Johnny Dunn, Herschel Brassfield, Herb Flemming, Buster Bailey Cutie Perkins, Joe Smith, Bubber Miley, and Cecil Carpenter. While recording with the Jazz Hounds, she recorded as Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Band, comprising George Bell, Charles Matson, Nathan Glantz, Larry Briers, Jules Levy, Jr., Joe Samuels, together with musicians from the Jazz Hounds, including Hawkins, Fuller and Carpenter.

Smith also became wealthy, as one of very few successful Black female performers. Her average fee was $1,000 ($13,000 today) for weekly performances. Between 1920 and 1931 she earned an estimated $100,000 ($1.3 M today) in royalties from the 95 songs recorded, 89 on OKeh and 6 on Victor. Her dresses were from New York and Paris and received as much attention as her singing. Fashion designer Madame Hammer created Mamie Smith’s stage gowns specifically, “fitting the individuality of the star and the various songs which she sings on her program.” Smith appeared in the early sound film Jailhouse Blues in 1929. Although Smith owned homes in New York City, a lavish wardrobe, gold securities, and one of the most splendid automobiles of the day, she lost most everything after the stock market crash.

She retired from recording and performing in 1931. She returned to performing in 1939 to appear in the movie Paradise in Harlem, produced by her husband, Jack Goldberg. She also appeared in other films, including Mystery in Swing (1940), Sunday Sinners (1940), Stolen Paradise (1941), Murder on Lenox Avenue (1941), and Because I Love You (1943). When she fell ill in 1944, she had few resources and was living in an Eighth Avenue boarding house. Severely arthritic, she entered Harlem Hospital that year and died there in 1946, bankrupt.

She was interred at Frederick Douglass Memorial Park on Staten Island, on ground which remained unmarked until 2013 when a monument was finally erected. Initially, according to the Jas Obrecht Music Archive website, Smith was buried in an unmarked grave until 1963 when musicians from Iserlohn, West Germany used the money from a Hot Jazz benefit to buy a headstone that read "Mamie Smith (1883–1946): First Lady of the Blues". With the help of fellow blues singer Victoria Spivey and Record Research Magazine publisher Len Kunstadt, Smith was re-interred at Frederick Douglass Memorial Park in Richmond, New York. Smith's re-interment was celebrated with a gala honouring the late singer on January 27, 1964. However, according to the 2012 campaign website, Mamie Smith still was buried without a headstone 67 years after her death in 1946.

A successful campaign to finally acquire and erect a headstone for Smith was begun in 2012 by Michael and Anne Fanciullo Cala. The couple, respectively a blues journalist and editor, developed a months-long crowdfunding campaign on the Indiegogo website to purchase a headstone for Smith. The philanthropy Music Cares also supported the effort. The campaign raised over $8,000 that funded the creation of a four-foot-high etched granite headstone featuring an image of the late blues singer. The monument was erected with great fanfare at Frederick Douglass Cemetery in Staten Island, New York on September 20, 2013. Excess funds from the campaign were donated to the cemetery for grounds care. 

(Edited from Wikipedia, Friends of Music Hall & New Grove Dictionary of Jazz) 

Ernest V. Stoneman born 25 May 1893

 

Ernest Van "Pop" Stoneman (May 25, 1893 – June 14, 1968) was an American musician, ranked among the prominent recording artists of country music's first commercial decade.

Born in a log cabin in Monarat (Iron Ridge), Carroll County, Virginia, United States, near what would later become Galax, Virginia, Stoneman was left motherless at age three and was raised by his father and three musically inclined cousins, who taught him the instrumental and vocal traditions of Blue Ridge Mountains culture. He became a singer and songwriter, and proficient musician on the guitar, autoharp, harmonica, clawhammer banjo, and jaw harp. When he married Hattie Frost in November 1918, he entered another musically involved family. Hattie and he had 23 children, 13 of whom survived to adulthood, including Calvin Scott (Scotty) (died 1973), and Veronica Loretta (Roni) (died 2024).

                                 

Stoneman worked at a variety of jobs, in mines, mills, but mostly carpentry, and played music for his own enjoyment and that of his neighbors, but when he heard a Henry Whitter record in 1924, he determined to better it and changed his life. Stoneman went to New York City in September 1924 and cut two songs for the Okeh Records label. The record was shelved and he had to return for another recording session in January 1925. The resultant debut single release, "Sinking of the Titanic", went on to become one of the biggest hits of the 1920s. One historian noted that the recording sold over two million copies. Ralph Peer directed him through several sessions for Okeh and Victor, and he freelanced on other labels such as Edison, Gennett, and Paramount Records. In 1926, he added family musicians to his group for a full string-band sound.

Ernest & Hattie Stoneman

In July and August 1927, Stoneman helped Peer conduct the Bristol sessions that led to the discovery of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. He continued to be active in recording through 1929. Between 1925 and 1929, Stoneman recorded more than 200 songs,. Falling on hard times during the Depression, the Stonemans and their nine surviving children moved to the Washington, DC, area in 1932, after losing their home and most of their possessions. There, they had four more children and struggled through dire poverty, with Stoneman taking whatever work he could find and trying to revive his musical career.

Blue Grass Champs

In 1941, Stoneman bought a lot in Carmody Hills, Maryland, where he built a shack for the family, and eventually obtained a more-or-less regular job at the Naval Gun Factory. In 1947, the Stoneman Family won a talent contest at Constitution Hall that gave them six months' exposure on local television. In 1956, Pop won $10,000 on the NBC-TV quiz show The Big Surprise and sang on the show. That same year, the Blue Grass Champs, a group composed largely of his children, were winners on the CBS-TV program Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts, and Mike Seeger recorded Pop and Hattie for Folkways.

The Stonemans

Stoneman retired from labour and the Champs went full-time to become the Stonemans. They recorded albums for Starday in 1962 and 1963, and in 1964, went to Texas and California, cutting an album for World Pacific, playing at Disneyland, on some network shows and at several folk festivals. This included an appearance at the Monterey Folk Festival in 1964. Ernest appeared at the Second Annual UCLA Folk Music Festival in 1964. In 1965, the Stonemans went to Nashville, where they worked with Jack Clement, signing a contract with MGM Records and starting a syndicated TV show. They received CMA's "Vocal Group of the Year" in 1967. They appeared in the 1967 film Hell on Wheels and in The Road to Nashville (1967).

In 1967, Pop Stoneman's health began to deteriorate; he continued recording and performing through the spring of 1968, until his death in June 1968 at age 75. He is interred in the Mount Olivet Cemetery in Nashville. Following Pop Stoneman's death in 1968, Patsy Stoneman joined the band. In 1968, they had their final chart hit with "Christopher Robin," which only reached the Top 50. They underwent several major personnel changes through the '70s and began recording less frequently, gradually easing into retirement. On February 12, 2008, Pop Stoneman was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and in 2009, his wife Hattie Frost Stoneman and he were enshrined in the Gennett Records Walk of Fame.

(Edited from Wikipedia & Rocky52)