1925- "At The Christmas Ball"

.....This is the oldest recording I've written about to date, but it sat around for fifteen years before it was ever released.

• 03:24 "AT THE CHRISTMAS BALL" (Fred W. Longshaw) 'vocal with instrumental accompaniment'
• -N/A- b/w "PREACHIN' THE BLUES" (Bessie Smith)
• recorded on [A-side] Nov. 18, 1925 and [B-side] Feb. 17, 1927
• original source: 10" [78 RPM] Columbia 35842 (US) 12/40; the B-side had previously been released as the B-side of "BACKWATER BLUES" on Columbia 14195-D (US) 03/27
• and my source: [A-side] 2CD THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS Volume 2 Columbia/Legacy C2K 47471 (US) 09/10/91 and [B-side] 2CD THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS Volume 3 Columbia/Legacy C2K 47474 (US) 10/27/92

.....Bessie Smith recorded for Columbia Records from 1923 until 1929, during which time she was both wealthy and famous on a scale most black Americans couldn't imagine. At the time many states mandated racial segregation and she sang in performance venues in which she couldn't attend as an audience member. As high as she was flying, it all came to an end during 1929 for all the familiar reasons: the stock market crash, the impact of talking motion pictures on live entertainment, the culture war under Hoover and organized crime mushrooming during prohibition. She did one more session in 1933, but by that time her Columbia recordings had inspired dozens if not hundreds of imitators. Fortunately, when Sony bought Columbia/CBS in the late 1980's they decided that one way to recoup their investment was to scrap the haphazard, piecemeal back catalogue of pre-World War II blues, jazz and country recordings and replace them with comprehensive, definitive packages. Sony created a new imprint for this called "Roots and Blues", which almost immediately became the template for the more general "Legacy" imprint. The "Legacy" imprint included their more lucrative pop and rock music as well as the long-out of print 78's that would have been the province of the "Roots and Blues" imprint.

.....Every Smith recording known to have survived was transferred to digital form and released in five installments of 2CD's each, which is how I found these recordings. That's an awful lot of lo-fi mono for one sit through, so I haven't heard the entire set for a while. While I was putting away some other CD's last month the Smith boxes caught my eye and I flipped them over to see how many of the tracks listed I could remember. Clearly, I didn't remember this one or I would have dragged it out earlier. I tried to see if there were any more contemporary various artists collections that included this recording so that any curious readers wouldn't have to invest in the two disc set for the one song. Amazon, which I know carries all five boxes, offered only three downloads in response to a search. I tried a search without the name 'Bessie Smith', expecting a few covers, and got two dozen albums, rarely of Christmas music, none of which had the song in any form. But at least if I ever want a five disc set of Andrew Lloyd Webber music I now know how to find it.

.....Allmusic was a little more informative, if not helpful for shopping. I found the song by researching its author, Fred Longshaw. Allmusic listed a few covers and mentioned that the Bessie Smith recording was the first. From what the article implies, Longshaw was also a recorded musician although not as often and mostly in sessions for other artists. He played piano for Smith, in fact, in a combo credited as 'Bessie Smith and Her Blue Boys':

• Bessie Smith- vocals
• Fletcher Henderson- piano?
• Fred Longshaw- piano
• Charlie Green- trombone

.....For this recording, oddly, Longshaw sat out. The original label on the 10" credits him as a composer but also lists the musicians:

• Bessie Smith- vocals
• Joe Smith- trumpet
• Charlie Green- trombone
• Fletcher Henderson- piano

.....These four, along with Buster Bailey (on clarinet) and Charlie Dixon (on banjo), also recorded as Henderson's Hot Six. Of the six, all but Charlie Green also played in a ten piece credited to 'Bessie Smith and her Band'.

.....Between the booklet in the box and various websites there's no shortage of information about Bessie Smith but much of it is devoted to the admittedly edge-of-the-seat soap opera that made up her life. Nothing specified why "AT THE CHRISTMAS BALL" languished until 1940 when the other song recorded in that session, "I'VE BEEN MISTREATED AND I DON'T LIKE IT" was released by February 1926, just three months later. I wondered if the explicit mention of alcohol in the context of Christmas might have had something to do with it. This was recorded during prohibition, after all, but all her Columbia sides were and some of them were far raunchier than this:

• "Christmas comes but once a year
• And to me it brings good cheer,
• And to everyone
• Who loves wine and beer."

.....By the time it was released in 1940 she had been dead for three years and Prohibition had been dead for seven. On the website Rate Your Music it was the latter of two posthumous singles in 1940 and the last listed overall. I had assumed that an online search for a comprehensive discography of an artist with her pervasive influence would be a snap but most only note albums compiling her recordings, not all the individual original singles. If this was her last original single it's not a bad way to close the door on a historic career.