MAP

Created by Sha FrasierBrooklyn, NY · 2026

Genre

Vaudeville blues

Periodc. 1902–1929
LocationThe Black vaudeville circuits, recorded in New York and Chicago
Influences
Vaudeville stagecraftEarly jazzTin Pan Alley publishing
LinksRYM

A trained stage voice, projected to the back row over a jazz band, singing the blues as theater.1 Vaudeville blues was the form’s first professional life: female stars in costume, working scripted revues on the Black theater circuits, with cornets and clarinets where the country tradition kept a lone guitar. It was also the first blues anyone could buy. Every blues record made before 1923 belongs to this style, which means the genre that history files under rural Southern manhood entered the marketplace as urban, orchestrated, and female.2

Origins

Ma Rainey told the musicologist John W. Work that she first heard the blues in 1902, from a girl who came to her tent show in a small Missouri town singing about the man who had left her; Rainey learned the song on the spot and put it in the act.3 Whatever the literal truth of the anecdote, it dates the marriage accurately: for two decades the blues lived inside Black traveling entertainment, on tent stages and theater boards, sung by professionals to paying crowds, with no recording industry interested.

The industry arrived in 1920, pried open by a songwriter. Perry Bradford spent months persuading OKeh that Black record buyers existed; in February 1920 Mamie Smith cut the first sides by a Black female vocalist, and on August 10 she returned with her own Jazz Hounds, a Black band at Bradford’s insistence, to record his “Crazy Blues”.4 It was not the first record with “blues” in the title — white vaudeville acts and the all-white Original Dixieland Jass Band had used the word years earlier — but it was the first blues sung by a Black woman on record, and it reportedly sold some 75,000 copies within months.5

The labels drew the obvious conclusion, signed every blues woman the circuits could supply, and built dedicated “race record” series — a term credited to OKeh’s Ralph Peer — to carry them; Harry Pace’s Black Swan, the first major Black-owned label, was kept solvent in its first year by Ethel Waters’s “Down Home Blues.”6 The boom ran the decade and died with it: Paramount dropped Rainey in 1928 saying down-home material had gone out of fashion, the Theatre Owners Booking Association circuit collapsed around 1930, and the Depression finished the rest. Bessie Smith’s final session, four sides cut in November 1933 with a swing band and produced by the young John Hammond, was the era’s afterword.7

The sound

This is composed, published, copyrighted music, Tin Pan Alley economics applied to the blues, which had been sold as sheet music since W. C. Handy’s “Memphis Blues” (1912) and “St. Louis Blues” (1914). The songs came from professional writers — Bradford; Lovie Austin and Alberta Hunter, who wrote Bessie’s debut hit — and wove twelve-bar strains through multi-part vaudeville song structures, so that “Crazy Blues” itself runs sixteen-bar verses around its blues choruses.8 They were delivered by voices built for theaters without microphones: Bessie Smith would push the new microphone aside and let the room have the natural sound.9 The voices ranged from the big, percussive “shouting” style of Rainey and Bessie Smith to the lighter, cooler delivery of Hunter and Mamie Smith.1

The accompaniment is early jazz royalty. Louis Armstrong answers Bessie Smith phrase for phrase on “St. Louis Blues,” and James P. Johnson’s piano carries “Backwater Blues”; the records double as documents of jazz’s first great generation at work, and Bessie kept no drummer, wanting nothing between her voice and the beat.10 Onstage the music sat inside full revues — Bessie toured with a company of forty in her own railroad car — and the singing carried the show, grief and comedy in adjacent numbers.11

The women’s voice

The lyric was a woman speaking in the first person, and what she said broke with the era’s script for respectable womanhood. The blues queens sang about desire and betrayal, travel and independence, men kept and men sent packing; Ida Cox’s 1924 “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues” made the stance a motto.12 The scholar Angela Davis, in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998), reads Rainey, Smith, and Billie Holiday as voicing “an alternative consciousness,” independent women “free of the domestic orthodoxy” of the time, claiming sexual autonomy and the right to be respected on their own terms.13 Daphne Duval Harrison’s Black Pearls (1988) had already argued that these singers introduced “a new model of the Black woman: assertive and sexy, gutsy yet tender, bereft but not downtrodden.”14 The scholarship keeps returning to the same reversal: a music remembered as the work of rural men spent its first commercial decade as a stage built for women saying these things.

The business

The stage that trained these singers was the Theatre Owners Booking Association, the Black vaudeville circuit whose initials performers read back as “Tough on Black Artists.”15 Before TOBA there were the tent shows — above all the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, where Rainey and Cox learned the trade — touring the rural South under canvas to crowds the theaters could not reach.16 The work was relentless and the pay thin, and the recording money was worse, because the labels paid a flat fee per usable side and kept the royalties. Bessie Smith signed for $125 a side with no royalty clause even as her touring revue made her, by 1924, the highest-paid Black entertainer in the country at a reported $2,000 a week.17 At Paramount the race division was run by J. Mayo Williams, the first Black executive at a major label, who discovered Rainey and described his own method without apology: working on commission, he took the artists’ royalties and copyrights, boasting that nine in ten Paramount artists saw no royalties at all and that he had “a good bit of Shylock” in him.18 The pattern held across the industry; Clarence Williams, OKeh’s Black A&R man, reportedly tricked Bessie Smith into a contract with himself and pocketed half her fee.19

Key artists

  • Mamie Smith — The accidental revolutionary: a Cincinnati vaudevillian whose “Crazy Blues” was a substitute booking that became the first blues record, proved the market, and made her the first Black female recording star.20
  • Ma Rainey — “Mother of the Blues,” the bridge from tent show to record. She had sung the blues professionally for two decades before Paramount got her into a studio in 1923; her ninety-odd sides, rough-voiced and country-leaning, kept the music’s Southern grain inside the city style. “See See Rider Blues” (1924), cut with Armstrong, seeded one of the most-recorded standards in American music.21
  • Bessie Smith — “Empress of the Blues,” and the era’s commercial and artistic summit. Her 1923 debut was a blockbuster, and her phrasing, unhurried and immense and bent toward speech, remains a benchmark for American singing across every genre that followed.22
  • Ida Cox — The “Uncrowned Queen of the Blues,” whose “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues” (1924) is an early feminist anthem: a flat refusal of the wronged-woman pose, sung by a tent-show veteran who later ran her own troupe.23
  • Victoria Spivey — The bridge to later eras twice over: “Black Snake Blues” (1926) as a teenager, a Hollywood turn in Hallelujah (1929), and a 1960s second act running her own label, where a March 1962 session used a young Bob Dylan on harmonica.24
  • Alberta Hunter — Songwriter and survivor: she wrote “Downhearted Blues” and recorded it first, before Bessie’s version made it famous, then left music for two decades of nursing and returned at 82 for a celebrated 1977 residency in Greenwich Village.25

Foundational records

  • “Crazy Blues” (1920, Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds) — The first blues record and the proof of the market; the race-record industry dates from its sales sheets4
  • “Down Home Blues” (1921, Ethel Waters) — The hit that kept Black Swan, the first major Black-owned label, solvent6
  • “Downhearted Blues” (1923, Bessie Smith) — Her debut for Columbia, written by Hunter and Austin; a reported 780,000 copies in six months22
  • “See See Rider Blues” (1924, Ma Rainey with Louis Armstrong) — The source recording of a standard still topping charts as “C.C. Rider” three decades later26
  • “St. Louis Blues” (1925, Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong) — The definitive reading of W. C. Handy’s composition: voice and cornet in open dialogue10
  • “Backwater Blues” (1927, Bessie Smith with James P. Johnson) — A flood lament released in the year of the Great Mississippi Flood, which made it an anthem; catastrophe singing without a wasted word

Legacy and influence

The repertoire outlived the era on other people’s hits — “See See Rider” alone ran from Ma Rainey through Chuck Willis’s 1957 R&B number one and on through the Animals and Mitch Ryder — and the style’s deeper legacy is the industry itself: race records, Black A&R, the discovery that Black audiences were a market, all date from “Crazy Blues.”26 The singing established a lineage of big-voiced, gospel-adjacent female authority that runs through Mahalia Jackson, Dinah Washington, and Aretha Franklin; Janis Joplin said Bessie Smith “showed me the air, and taught me how to fill it,” and the soul blues circuit’s vocal-first values are this tradition’s long echo.27

The afterlife collected its relics. Bessie Smith died in a 1937 car crash on Highway 61, and the story that a whites-only hospital let her bleed to death — spread by John Hammond and dramatized by Edward Albee — was later debunked: she was driven straight to Clarksdale’s Black hospital, where her injuries proved fatal regardless.28 Her grave near Philadelphia lay unmarked until 1970, when Janis Joplin helped pay for a headstone reading “The Greatest Blues Singer in the World Will Never Stop Singing.”29 Bessie entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989 and Rainey in 1990; August Wilson put Rainey at the center of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), and its 2020 film carried the era’s arguments about race, art, and ownership to the widest audience the blues queens ever had.30

See also

  • Acoustic blues — the itinerant, self-accompanied tradition running parallel to this staged one; the labels pivoted from her to him when the Depression made one singer cheaper than a revue
  • Jug band — the ensembles that backed vaudeville singers on the style’s first Louisville records
  • The color line in pop — race records begin here: the industry’s discovery of the Black market and the segregated catalog it built around “Crazy Blues”
  • The songwriter-performer divide — the queens sang professional songwriters’ copyrighted material, and the flat recording fee that left the proceeds with the labels and publishers

Footnotes

  1. “History of Vaudeville/Classic Blues,” Timeline of African American Music (Carnegie Hall) (accessed June 15, 2026). “Vaudeville blues” names the singers’ African American vaudeville context; “classic blues” their status as enduring classics. Performers who worked outdoor traveling shows without microphones developed a projecting, “shouting” delivery, and were “accompanied by a New Orleans–style band or a blues-, ragtime-, or jazz-style pianist,” voice and instruments interacting “in a call-and-response structure.” ↩ ↩2

  2. “History of Vaudeville/Classic Blues,” Timeline of African American Music (Carnegie Hall) (accessed June 15, 2026); “Blues — History and notable musicians,” Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Vaudeville blues singers were the first African American blues performers to be commercially recorded”; Britannica notes that “the entire decade of the 1920s, the first in which blues music was recorded for a commercial market, was dominated by women.” Rural, self-accompanied male country blues was recorded in quantity only later in the decade. ↩

  3. “Staging the Blues: The Ma Rainey Story,” Hold That Thought (Washington University in St. Louis) (accessed June 15, 2026); “Rainey, Ma (1886–1939),” Encyclopedia.com. In an account given to the musicologist John W. Work, Rainey recalled first hearing a blues-type song from a young woman outside her tent in a Missouri town around 1902 and adopting it into her act. The anecdote is her own recollection (and frequently retold) rather than independently documented; her professional tent-show career with husband William “Pa” Rainey is firmly attested from about 1904. ↩

  4. “Crazy Blues”—Mamie Smith (1920), National Recording Registry essay by Ed Komara (Library of Congress) (accessed June 15, 2026); “Perry Bradford, Fred Hager, and Mamie Smith’s Crazy Blues,” The Syncopated Times. Bradford, having been turned down elsewhere, persuaded OKeh’s recording director Fred Hager to record a Black woman; Smith first cut two non-blues Bradford songs in February 1920 (OKeh 4113), then recorded “Crazy Blues” (Bradford’s retitled “Harlem Blues”) on August 10, 1920, released that fall on OKeh 4169. Who assembled and played the session is disputed between Bradford’s and pianist Willie “The Lion” Smith’s later accounts. ↩ ↩2

  5. “Crazy Blues”—Mamie Smith (1920), National Recording Registry essay by Ed Komara (Library of Congress) (accessed June 15, 2026); “Is Mamie Smith’s ‘Crazy Blues’ The First Blues Record?,” uDiscover Music. The all-white Original Dixieland Jass Band’s “Livery Stable Blues” (1917) and white vaudeville acts had used “blues” on record earlier; “Crazy Blues” is the first blues record by a Black female vocalist. Komara documents it “reportedly selling 75,000 copies during its first two months”; the often-repeated “million copies” figure is unverified promotional lore. ↩

  6. “Race Records,” Duke University Rubenstein Library (Scriptorium) (accessed June 15, 2026); “Black Swan Rising,” National Endowment for the Humanities (Humanities, Nov/Dec 2010). “Race record” denoted 78s made for Black consumers (c. 1921–1942) and is commonly credited to Ralph Peer at OKeh. Harry Pace founded Black Swan in Harlem in 1921 (W. E. B. Du Bois on its board); Ethel Waters’s “Down Home Blues”/“Oh Daddy” was the hit that kept it afloat before Paramount absorbed it in 1924. ↩ ↩2

  7. “Blueswomen of the 1920s and 1930s,” Encyclopedia.com (Daphne Duval Harrison) (accessed June 15, 2026); “Bessie Smith’s Final Record Date,” Phil Schaap Jazz. Total U.S. record sales collapsed from about 104 million units in 1927 to roughly 10 million by 1930, gutting the race-record market; the industry pivoted toward cheaper male rural blues. Bessie Smith’s final session was November 24, 1933 on OKeh, produced by John Hammond, with a swing-era band (Frankie Newton, Jack Teagarden, Benny Goodman, Chu Berry), after a two-year recording gap. ↩

  8. “Crazy Blues”—Mamie Smith (1920), National Recording Registry essay by Ed Komara (Library of Congress) (accessed June 15, 2026). Komara analyzes “Crazy Blues” bar by bar: Bradford “wrote it as a theater piece for a stage singer,” embedding 12-bar blues choruses among 16-bar non-blues sections — “Everything about ‘Crazy Blues’ is composed in both song structure and demeanor.” W. C. Handy’s published blues (“Memphis Blues,” 1912; “St. Louis Blues,” 1914) were the model for this composed, copyrighted hybrid. ↩

  9. “Bessie Smith: Empress of the Blues,” by Dan Morgenstern (Down Beat; hosted by Texas State University) (accessed June 15, 2026). Morgenstern: Smith “had nothing but disdain for the microphone when this innovation was introduced; she’d push it aside with a contemptuous gesture and let the natural sound of her voice fill the biggest [hall].” Her “clear and unaffected diction” was a hallmark. ↩

  10. “Bessie Smith: Empress of the Blues,” by Dan Morgenstern (Down Beat; hosted by Texas State University) (accessed June 15, 2026); “The St. Louis Blues — Bessie Smith (Columbia, 1925),” Blues Foundation Hall of Fame. On “St. Louis Blues” (recorded January 14, 1925) Louis Armstrong’s cornet “seems to answer Smith’s every phrase”; her best foils were cornetist Joe Smith and pianist James P. Johnson. Morgenstern records her aversion to drums (“I don’t want to be a slave to a drummer”) — no Bessie Smith record uses a drummer. ↩ ↩2

  11. “Bessie Smith,” Encyclopedia.com (Contemporary Black Biography) (accessed June 15, 2026); “Bessie Smith — Songs, Death & Facts,” Biography.com. Bessie Smith toured a full revue and “bought a custom railroad car for her traveling troupe,” which let the company travel and sleep while barred from whites-only cars. ↩

  12. “History of Vaudeville/Classic Blues,” Timeline of African American Music (Carnegie Hall) (accessed June 15, 2026); “Behind the Song: Ida Cox, ‘Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues’,” American Songwriter. The classic-blues lyric was a woman’s first-person voice singing of love, betrayal, travel, and independence; Ida Cox’s “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues” (Paramount, 1924, with Lovie Austin’s Blues Serenaders) is its proto-feminist standard. ↩

  13. “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Y. Davis,” Penguin Random House (accessed June 15, 2026); “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (Angela Davis, Pantheon 1998),” Blues Foundation Hall of Fame. Davis reinterprets Rainey, Smith, and Billie Holiday as “powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture,” arguing “the female figures evoked in women’s blues are independent women free of the domestic orthodoxy of the prevailing representations of womanhood.” The book was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame’s Classics of Blues Literature. ↩

  14. “Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s,” Publishers Weekly review (accessed June 15, 2026). Daphne Duval Harrison’s Black Pearls (Rutgers University Press, 1988), the foundational monograph on the classic-blues women, argues they “introduced a new model of the Black woman: assertive and sexy, gutsy yet tender, bereft but not downtrodden, exploited but not resentful, independent yet vulnerable,” and that their choices “profoundly affected later American popular music.” ↩

  15. “Theater Owners Booking Association is Formed,” African American Registry (accessed June 15, 2026). The TOBA was the 1920s Black-vaudeville booking circuit (over 100 theaters at its peak), “often referred to by the black performers as Tough on Black Artists” and “generally known as Toby Time”; it “paid less and generally had worse touring arrangements, which the performers had to pay for themselves,” than white vaudeville, and employed Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Ida Cox. ↩

  16. “Rabbit Foot Minstrels,” The Mississippi Blues Trail (accessed June 15, 2026). The Rabbit’s Foot Company (founded 1900; under F. S. Wolcott from the 1910s, based at Port Gibson, Mississippi) toured the rural South as a tent show and incubated performers including Ma Rainey and Ida Cox, reaching audiences that the theaters could not. ↩

  17. “Bessie Smith,” Encyclopedia.com (Contemporary Black Biography) (accessed June 15, 2026); “Bessie Smith — Songs, Death & Facts,” Biography.com. Bessie Smith’s first Columbia contract (1923) paid “$125 per usable recording, with no provision for royalties”; on the road she peaked at a reported $2,000 a week and was “the highest-paid African American in the country” by 1924 — the flat studio fee against the huge live earnings is the era’s defining economic fact. ($2,000/week is a reported peak, not a fixed salary.) ↩

  18. “The Complicated Record Exec Left Out of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Chicago Magazine (accessed June 15, 2026); “Royalty Agreement for ‘Walking Blues’ by Ma Rainey,” Smithsonian Music. J. Mayo “Ink” Williams, the first Black executive at a major label, discovered Ma Rainey at Chicago’s Monogram Theater in December 1923 and ran Paramount’s race division on commission, “extracting royalties, fees, and copyrights from the musicians he signed”; he is quoted that he had “a good bit of Shylock in me” and that “nine out of ten Paramount artists received no royalties, regardless of sales.” (The flattering “persuasive with a contract” gloss on his nickname is contested; Chicago Magazine argues “Ink”/“Inky” likely predates his label career as a racial slur.) ↩

  19. “Clarence Williams,” Encyclopedia.com (accessed June 15, 2026). Williams, a Black bandleader, OKeh race A&R man (1923–28), and leading Black music publisher, reportedly “fooled the singer into signing a contract with him instead of with Columbia Records, and he pocketed half of her recording fee”; the partnership ended after a confrontation in his office. (The account is widely repeated but traces largely to Bessie Smith’s biographer Chris Albertson.) ↩

  20. “Crazy Blues”—Mamie Smith (1920), National Recording Registry essay by Ed Komara (Library of Congress) (accessed June 15, 2026); “Mamie Smith (1883–1946),” BlackPast.org. Mamie Smith (b. Cincinnati; a 2018 birth-certificate discovery gives May 26, 1891, superseding the older 1883 date; d. 1946, New York) was a vaudeville and cabaret veteran; “Crazy Blues” made her the first Black female recording star and triggered the women-blues-singers trend. ↩

  21. “Ma Rainey,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (accessed June 15, 2026); “Rainey, Ma (1886–1939),” Encyclopedia.com. Britannica calls Rainey (b. April 26, 1886, Columbus, Georgia — a 1900 census listing implies September 1882, Alabama; d. December 22, 1939) “the first great professional blues vocalist.” She first recorded for Paramount in 1923, cutting some 92 sides over five years, including “See See Rider Blues” (1924) with Louis Armstrong; her bandleader in the mid-1920s was Thomas A. “Georgia Tom” Dorsey, later the father of gospel music. ↩

  22. “Bessie Smith,” Encyclopedia.com (Contemporary Black Biography) (accessed June 15, 2026); “‘Down Hearted Blues’—Bessie Smith (1923),” National Recording Registry essay by Cary O’Dell (Library of Congress). Bessie Smith (b. c. 1894, Chattanooga; d. September 26, 1937) made her debut “Down Hearted Blues”/“Gulf Coast Blues” for Columbia on February 16, 1923; the side reportedly sold around 780,000 copies in six months (an estimate, not an audited figure). “Down Hearted Blues” entered the inaugural National Recording Registry in 2002; she recorded close to 200 sides through 1933. ↩ ↩2

  23. “Cox, Ida,” Encyclopedia.com (accessed June 15, 2026); “Behind the Song: Ida Cox, ‘Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues’,” American Songwriter. Ida Cox (b. February 25, 1896, Toccoa, Georgia; d. November 10, 1967), billed by Paramount the “Uncrowned Queen of the Blues,” debuted on record in 1923; “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues” (Paramount, 1924) is her signature and an early feminist standard. ↩

  24. “Spivey, Victoria,” Encyclopedia.com (accessed June 15, 2026). Victoria Spivey (b. October 15, 1906, Houston; d. October 3, 1976) had an instant hit with “Black Snake Blues” (OKeh, 1926), appeared in the film Hallelujah (1929), and co-founded Spivey Records in 1961; a 1961–62 session featured a young Bob Dylan on harmonica. ↩

  25. “Hunter, Alberta (1895–1984),” Encyclopedia.com (accessed June 15, 2026). Alberta Hunter (b. April 1, 1895, Memphis; d. October 17, 1984) wrote “Down Hearted Blues” (which Bessie Smith made a hit), trained as a nurse around 1956 and worked some twenty years, then reopened her singing career at the Cookery in Greenwich Village on October 10, 1977, at age 82. ↩

  26. “C.C. Rider by Chuck Willis,” Songfacts (accessed June 15, 2026); “Crazy Blues”—Mamie Smith (1920), National Recording Registry essay by Ed Komara (Library of Congress). Ma Rainey’s “See See Rider Blues” became the standard “C.C. Rider,” a number-one R&B hit for Chuck Willis in 1957 and later covered by the Animals and Mitch Ryder. The deeper legacy is structural: the race-record industry and the discovery of a Black record-buying market both date from the success of “Crazy Blues.” ↩ ↩2

  27. “‘Down Hearted Blues’—Bessie Smith (1923),” National Recording Registry essay by Cary O’Dell (Library of Congress) (accessed June 15, 2026); “Smith, Bessie (1894–1937),” Encyclopedia.com. O’Dell notes “a fullness and robustness to Smith’s singing… that one later sees replicated in the work of Billie Holiday and Etta James”; Encyclopedia.com lists debts owed by Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, and others, and quotes Janis Joplin that Smith “showed me the air, and taught me how to fill it.” ↩

  28. “Smith, Bessie (1894–1937),” Encyclopedia.com (accessed June 15, 2026); “Blues singer Bessie Smith, killed in Mississippi car wreck, is buried,” HISTORY. Smith died of injuries from a car crash on Highway 61 near Clarksdale on September 26, 1937. The claim that a whites-only hospital refused her, spread by John Hammond’s 1937 Down Beat article and dramatized in Edward Albee’s play, is a myth: she was taken to the Black G. T. Thomas Afro-American Hospital and treated, and “most historians now agree… her injuries were so severe that it made no difference.” Hammond later conceded his account was hearsay. ↩

  29. “‘Down Hearted Blues’—Bessie Smith (1923),” National Recording Registry essay by Cary O’Dell (Library of Congress) (accessed June 15, 2026); “Piece of Her Heart: Janis Joplin Honors Blues Inspiration Bessie Smith,” uDiscover Music. Bessie Smith’s grave at Mount Lawn Cemetery near Philadelphia stayed unmarked until August 8, 1970, when Janis Joplin and Juanita Green paid for a headstone reading “The Greatest Blues Singer in the World Will Never Stop Singing”; Joplin died about two months later. ↩

  30. “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom | August Wilson,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (accessed June 15, 2026); “Bessie Smith,” Rock & Roll Hall of Fame; “Ma Rainey,” Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Bessie Smith was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (Early Influence) in 1989 and Ma Rainey in 1990. August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, set at a 1920s recording session, opened on Broadway October 11, 1984; its 2020 film (starring Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman) received five Academy Award nominations. ↩