Josephine Baker was only 20 years old when she recorded the song “Dinah” at her first studio session 98 years ago this fall.
That was just a year after the provocative dancer/singer arrived in Paris, immediately setting the town on fire with her risqué shows at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.
And a West Virginian was right there to help her light those blazes.
Ada “ Bricktop” Smith, a young Alderson, WV, native, was in Paris several years ahead of Baker, entertaining at composer Cole Porter’s famous parties, often teaching his guests the latest dance crazes, such as the Charleston and the Black Bottom.
Josephine Baker always acknowledged she was one Ada Smith’s protégés in those heady early days of The Jazz Age.
“I didn't get my first break on Broadway,” Baker told London’s Guardian a half century later. No, she was just a nameless hoofer in the chorus line in those New York shows, she said, but “I became famous first in France in the Twenties.”
“Oh yes,” she added, “Bricktop was there. Me and her were the only two, and we had a marvelous time. Of course, everyone who was anyone knew Bricky. And they got to know Miss Baker as well."
Ada Smith became one of 1920s’ best known American singers/dancers, owning the famed “Chez Bricktop” in Paris from 1924 to 1961. She even got a shout-out in Woody Allen’s hit film, Midnight in Paris, in 2011 when the character of Zelda Fitzgerald proposes an evening’s escapade:
In the next scene, Cole Porter, the Fitzgeralds and their fabulous friends pile into a period open car and tear down Parisian streetd into the night.
Ending up at Chez Bricktop, they watch Josephine Baker dance (and the Fitzgeralds drink…)
Back to the Song
“Dinah,” considered an anthem of the Roarin’ Twenties, was not quite two years old when Josephine Baker recorded it that autumn day in 1926 in Paris.
It was back in The States that she learned the hot number when she sang it at New York’s Plantation Club on Broadway as the understudy to Ethel Waters.
Obviously, the song was still much on Baker’s mind when she strolled into the Odeon studio for her first recording session. The band recruited to accompany her on the date is thought to be members of a group called “Olivier’s Jazz Boys.”
“Dinah” by then had been introduced to the world by Waters within a year of its composition in 1925. After it was recorded by Waters for Columbia in 1926, the song went on to be waxxed by everyone from Fletcher Henderson and Cab Calloway to Bing Crosby, the Mills Brothers and the Boswell Sisters to Chet Baker, Thelonious Monk and Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli.
And, as noted in an earlier Flood Watch article, the tune was famously among the favorites of trumpeter Louis Armstrong, who perform it in most of his numerous live shows and his radio appearances for decades after initially recording it in 1930.
Our Take on the Tune
Whenever the guys haven’t seen each other for a couple of weeks, there’s always a special joy when they all get back together again. That was certainly the case at last week’s rehearsal.
Add to that the fact that Floodster Emeritus Paul Martin dropped by to sit in. That always cranks up the energy level in the room.
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