Clara Smith & Her Jazz Band - Columbia 14009 (1924)

From wikipedia…

Clara Smith was born in Spartanburg County, South Carolina in 1894. In her youth she worked on African American theater circuits and tent shows. By the late 1910s she was appearing as a headliner at the Lyric Theater in New Orleans, Louisiana and on the T.O.B.A. circuit.

In 1923 she settled in New York, appearing at cabarets and speakeasies there; that same year she made the first of her commercially successful series of gramophone recordings for Columbia Records, for whom she would continue recording through to 1932. She cut 122 songs often with the backing of top musicians (especially after 1925) including Louis Armstrong, Charlie Green, Joe Smith, Freddy Jenkins, Fletcher Henderson and James P. Johnson (in 1929). Plus she recorded two vocal duets with Bessie Smith, and four with Lonnie Johnson.

The comparisons with near namesake Bessie Smith were inevitable. Clara Smith was on the whole less fortunate than Bessie in her accompanists, and her voice was less imposing but, to some tastes, prettier, and many of her songs were interesting (and she was the second best seller on Columbia's 14000-D series, behind Bessie Smith).

In 1933 she moved to Detroit, Michigan, and worked at theaters there until her hospitalization in early 1935 for heart disease, of which she died.

Clara Smith v / Elmer Chambers c / Teddy Nixon tb / Don Redman cl / Fletcher Henderson p / Charlie Dixon bj.

Recorded in New York on January 31, 1924.