Artist Info: Clara Smith

Clara Smith (c. 1894 - 2 February 1935) was a popular blues singer.

Clara Smith was born in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. In her youth she worked on African American theater circuits and tent shows. By the late 1910s she was appearing as a headliner at the Lyric Theater in New Orleans and on the T. O. B. A. circuit. In 1923 she settled in New York City, appearing at cabarets and speakeasies there; that same year she made the first of her commercially successful series of gramophone recordings for Columbia Records [read more...]