Vaudeville Blues

#27 / Jan. 7 Podcast

We’ve always loved a great old song -- now just about a century old — called “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” but we’ll be the first to tell you that there are some very hinky thing about our beloved tune.

For one thing, hands down, the best known rendition of it is one of the earliest, the Columbia Records release by the great blues singer Bessie Smith. However, technically, the song’s not a blues. Structurally, it’s much like a vaudeville number or even an old music hall piece than one of the classic 12-bar blues that came out of the Mississippi Delta.

Not only that, while “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” became one of the signature tunes of the Great Depression, we’ve learned that it was written actually almost a decade before those trouble times.

Here’s how The Flood’s team of crack music detectives has sorted it out.

The song was written in 1923 by a piano player named Jimmy Cox, who was indeed pretty well established on the black vaudeville circuit that worked the American roads in the Roaring Twenties. And Bessie Smith, who was just getting her career going in those days, was known to travel that same circuit and might have even performed in Jimmy Cox’s shows. It’s possible, in fact, she learned the song from Jimmy himself.

What we know for sure that that by time Bessie Smith went back into the recording studio in the spring of 1929, Columbia was beginning to notice the blues records weren’t selling as well as they had had been and the suits wanted different material. Bessie responded with the Jimmy Cox composition from her vaudeville days.

And here’s the final piece of the puzzle.

In those days, it took a quite a long time for a record to make its way around the country. By the time it had traveled from New York City to the West Coast, the stock markets had collapsed and the Depression was beginning to wreak havoc. Imagine the listeners being amazed at how prophetic Bessie Smith’s new record was in describing their misery that first Depression winter.

Click here to hear our take on the tune from a recent Flood rehearsal.

By the Way…

Like everybody else, we tuck this tune in our blues pocket. If you’d like to hear more songs rattling around in there, check out the Blues Channel on the free Radio Flooddango. Click here to turn us on!