Ida M. Cox ( Prather; February 26, 1888 or 1896 – November 10, 1967) was an American singer and vaudeville performer, best known for her blues performances and recordings. She was billed as "The Uncrowned Queen of the Blues".

Childhood and early career

Cox was born Ida M. Prather, the daughter of Lamax and Susie ( Knight) Prather in Toccoa, then Habersham County, Georgia, and grew up in Cedartown, Polk County, Georgia. Many sources give her birth date as February 26, 1896, but the researchers Bob Eagle and Eric LeBlanc have suggested she was born in 1888, and noted other evidence suggesting 1894. She faced a future of poverty and few educational and employment opportunities.

Cox joined the local African Methodist Choir at an early age and developed an interest in gospel music and performance. She began her career on stage by playing Topsy, a "pickaninny" role commonly performed in vaudeville shows of the time, often in blackface. Cox's early experience with touring troupes included stints with other African-American travelling minstrel shows on the Theater Owners Booking Association vaudeville circuit: the Florida Orange Blossom Minstrels, the Silas Green Show, and the Rabbit Foot Minstrels.

The Rabbit Foot Minstrels, organized by F. S. Wolcott and based after 1918 in Port Gibson, Mississippi, were important not only for the development of Cox's performing career but also for launching the careers of her idols Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.

Known colloquially as the Foots, the troupe provided a nurturing environment in which Cox developed her stage presence, but life on the vaudeville circuit was trying for performers and workers alike. Paul Oliver wrote, in The Story of the Blues, "The 'Foots' travelled in two cars and had an 80' x 110' tent which was raised by the roustabouts and canvassmen while a brass band would parade in town to advertise the coming of the show...The stage would be of boards on a folding frame and Coleman lanterns – gasoline mantle lamps – acted as footlights. There were no microphones; the weaker voiced singers used a megaphone, but most of the featured women blues singers scorned such aids to volume." Crump collaborated with her in the composition of many songs, including "Gypsy Glass Blues" and "Death Letter Blues", provided piano and organ accompaniment on several of her recordings, and served as manager of her blossoming career In the following years. Her commanding stage presence and expressive delivery earned Cox star billing, and by the early 1920s, she was regarded as one of the finest solo acts offered by the shows that travelled the Theater Owners Booking Association circuit. In March 1922, a performance by Cox at the Beale Street Palace, in Memphis, Tennessee, was aired on radio station WMC with positive reviews, leading to exposure to a wider audience.

Recording career

After the success of Mamie Smith's 1920 recording of "Crazy Blues", record companies became aware of a demand for recordings of race music. The classic female blues era had begun and would extend through the 1920s. With her popularity in the South rapidly increasing, Cox caught the attention of talent scouts and secured a contract with Paramount Records, the same company for which her idol Ma Rainey recorded. Paramount called her "The Uncrowned Queen of Blues". Between September 1923 and October 1929, she recorded 78 titles for Paramount. For her numerous recording sessions, Paramount provided Cox with outstanding backup musicians, including the pianist Lovie Austin and her band, the Blues Serenaders, featuring Jimmy O'Bryant (clarinet) and Tommy Ladnier (cornet). During this period, Cox also recorded songs for other labels, including Broadway and Silvertone, using the pseudonyms Kate Lewis, Velma Bradley, Julia Powers, and Jane Smith.

Raisin' Cain

In 1929, Cox and Crump formed their tent show revue, Raisin' Cain (after the biblical story of Cain and Abel and the resulting colloquialism). Cox performed as the title act, and Crump served as both accompanist and manager. Through the end of the 1920s and into the early 1930s, Raisin' Cain toured black theaters across the Southeast and westward through Texas, with shows in Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Texas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, and performed several times in Chicago. The show had sixteen chorus girls, comics, and backup singers. The Raisin' Cain tent show proved so popular that in 1929 it became the first show associated with the Theater Owners Booking Association circuit to open at the famed Apollo Theater, in Harlem, New York. Cox, sometimes billed as the "Sepia Mae West", headlined touring companies into the 1930s. This was the pinnacle of her performing career.

By the end of the decade, the economic hardships of the Great Depression and the waning popularity of female blues singers made it difficult to maintain performances of the show, with frequent layoffs and gaps in its touring schedule. Cox continued her performing career through the 1930s. In 1935, she and Crump reorganized Raisin' Cain, which by then had been renamed Darktown Scandals, and continued to tour the South and Midwest until 1939. In the early 1930s drummer Earl Palmer entered show business as a tap dancer in Cox's Darktown Scandals revue.

Later career and comeback

In 1939, she was invited to participate in the Carnegie Hall concert series From Spirituals to Swing produced by John Hammond

Cox referred to the album as her "final statement". After recording it, she returned to Knoxville to live with her daughter. She had another stroke in 1965. In 1967, she entered East Tennessee Baptist Hospital, where she died of cancer on November 10, 1967.

Singing style

Consistent with her early career, Cox's style leaned more toward vaudeville than blues. She had a less powerful and less rugged voice than her better-known contemporaries Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, but she held her audiences spellbound with the fiery spirit of her delivery. Forced to exercise independence from an early age as a result of her teenage career in the minstrel circuits, Cox proved herself as an independent and astute businesswoman through her ability to organize and maintain her own troupe, Raisin' Cain, which lasted for a decade. She broke barriers in this regard, as virtually no black women owned and managed their own businesses in the 1920s and 1930s.

Through her raw and sharp lyricism, Cox in her songs described the complex social realities of poor and working class African Americans in the early twentieth century.

I've got a disposition and a way of my own,<br />When my man starts to kicking I let him find a new home,<br />I get full of good liquor, walk the street all night<br />Go home and put my man out if he don't act right<br />Wild women don't worry,<br />Wild women don't have the blues.

Discography

  • 1923-00 - Complete Recorded Works, vol. 1 (Document Recs, 1997) Paramount recordings
  • 1924-25 - Complete Recorded Works, vol. 2 (Document Recs, 2000) Paramount recordings
  • 1925-27 - Complete Recorded Works, vol. 3 (Document Recs, 2000) Paramount recordings
  • 1927-38 - Complete Recorded Works, vol. 4 (Document Recs, 2000) Paramount recordings
  • 1939-40 - Complete Recorded Works, vol. 5 (Document Recs, 2000) Paramount recordings
  • 1960 - Blues for Rampart Street (Riverside,1961) With Coleman Hawkins quintet
  • 1923-38 The Essential (2xCD) (Classic Blues, 2001) an anthology from the Document albums

References

  • Ida Cox (1896–1967) Red Hot Jazz Archive