The Cemetery Blues

This week on Three Tune Tuesday, we went looking for skeletons and found something better: three Columbia records, six years apart, that cannot agree on what a graveyard is for. First, “Death Letter Blues,” recorded in 1924 by Clara Smith — the “Queen of the Moaners,” no relation to Bessie, though the two of them cut duets together. It’s a song about the piece of paper that tells you somebody has died, written by Ida Cox, and the clarinet and cornet behind her belong to two of Fletcher Henderson’s men. Then we go back to 1918 for “Graveyard Blues,” where a white society dance band at a Broadway lobster palace plays a white ragtime composer’s “blues” as a fox trot — the label actually says so — with a xylophone handling the spooky parts. Nobody in that room has buried anybody. And we finish with “Cemetery Blues,” Bessie Smith in 1923 on Columbia 13001-D: the second record the label ever issued in its first Race series. Just her voice and a piano, standing at a grave and laughing. For five years the graveyard was a dance step. Then somebody opened a door, and it turned out the bones had been singing the whole time — we just hadn’t been pressing the records.