Perry Bradford

Musician, composer, and actor

• Born: February 14, 1893
• Birthplace: Montgomery, Alabama
• Died: April 20, 1970
• Place of death: New York, New York

Bradford was an active performer in black vaudeville during the first two decades of the twentieth century. He is remembered primarily for producing the first blues recordings by an African American singer and for a number of blues-based compositions and recording sessions featuring jazz musicians.

Early Life

John Henry Perry Bradford was born in 1893 to Adam and Bella Bradford. Bradford’s family relocated to Atlanta when he was six, and it was there that he was exposed to numerous strains of African American folk music by the inmates of a nearby prison where his mother worked as a cook. He began playing the piano around this time and strove to emulate the free expression of the singers he heard. After a short period at Atlanta University, he struck out on his own as an actor and pianist with various black vaudeville troupes. During the next decade, he visited New York, Chicago, and New Orleans and was impressed by the musical developments in each place, although he said later that he felt as a blues player he was superior to most others he met.

Bradford said that in 1912 he formed a song-and-dance team with Jeanette Taylor (other sources suggest 1908 and state that Taylor was his wife) and toured the Theater Owners Booking Association vaudeville circuit until 1918. Bradford said that this act featured primarily blues material and was the first to succeed in New York playing such fare. After Taylor’s departure, Bradford began touring the burlesque circuit on the East Coast. He became involved with a loosely organized group of black entertainers known as the Colored Vaudeville Benevolent Association that included performers such as Bert Williams, Bill Robinson, and Wilbur Sweatman. The purpose of this organization was primarily social networking, and it played a part in Bradford’s next ventures.

Life’s Work

During the summer layoff from vaudeville in 1918, Bradford put together a revue at the Lincoln Theater in Harlem featuring the vaudeville singer Mamie Smith. Using Bradford’s own songs, the revue (called Made in Harlem) was a modest success and persuaded him that blues singing had a future in black entertainment in New York. Before 1920, the conventional wisdom among recording companies was that vocal recordings of popular music by African American performers (especially women) would not sell. Bradford attempted to convince them otherwise and expended great effort from 1918 to 1920 badgering executives of the Columbia, Victor, and Okeh recording companies to take a chance on his singers.

Bradford’s first success was in convincing Fred Hagar (the director of Okeh Records) to allow white singer Sophie Tucker to sing some of Bradford’s songs. At the time, Tucker was under contract to another company, which encouraged Bradford to push Hagar to allow Smith the chance. Smith’s recordings of “That Thing Called Love” and “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down” became respectable successes and encouraged Bradford to lobby for her to record his “Harlem Blues” (which became known as “Crazy Blues”) backed by an African American band. This recording became a tremendous success in the black community and began the rush to record black women blues singers, touching off the classic blues era that brought such established singers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith to prominence.

The success of “Crazy Blues” allowed Bradford to open his own publishing company in New York, where for the next decade he published his own music and the work of other artists. He also acted as an unofficial talent and booking agent for black performers, managing tours by Mamie Smith and others, although he generally remained in New York. While his performing career was largely confined to occasional vocal and piano appearances on recordings—he used musicians such as Louis Armstrong and James P. Johnson on his own recordings—he was largely occupied with publishing and entrepreneurship for the rest of the 1920’s, including financing a moderately successful show called Put and Take in 1921.

The tangible remains of Bradford’s career are a catalog of published songs and a handful of recordings made between 1923 and 1927 featuring some of the best young black jazz musicians of the time. While none of his compositions became standards, Bradford did have several that became well known, including “Unexpectedly” (for Bert Williams in 1922) and “Keep A-Knockin’” (for Louis Jordan in 1940 and recorded by Little Richard in 1957).

Bradford’s subsequent career was quiet—he produced some recordings (notably one featuring singer Juanita Hall in 1958) and published some more works, including his autobiography in 1965. He was not careful with his money during his successful years and constantly struggled to survive, especially during the 1940’s, when he worked as a mailman. By the 1960’s, he was in poor health and spent the last several years of his life in a nursing home. Bradford died in 1970 in New York.

Significance

While Bradford was responsible for an interesting repertoire of blues and vaudeville songs, often using suggestive themes, his lasting contribution was in his persistent efforts to get record companies to take black music and the African American consumer seriously. In doing so, he opened up a tremendous market and allowed for the preservation of countless examples of blues and African American folk-based music. In his autobiography, Bradford takes great pains to paint himself as perhaps the first to introduce “down home” blues to New York. While this is certainly an overstatement, there is a certain amount of truth to his claim.

Bibliography

Abbott, Lynn, and Doug Seroff. Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. A detailed account of the African American theatrical scene in the early twentieth century, including vaudeville, circuses, tent shows, and minstrel companies.

Bradford, Perry. Born with the Blues: Perry Bradford’s Own Story—The True Story of the Pioneering Blues Singers and Musicians in the Early Days of Jazz. New York: Oak Publications, 1965. A sometimes incoherent account of Bradford’s entertainment career that nevertheless provides many interesting details.

Kernfeld, Barry. “Perry Bradford.” In Harlem Renaissance Lives, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Brief biography chronicling Bradford’s life and career and placing his accomplishments in historical context.