blues singer
Personal Information
Born on February 25, 1896, in Toccoa, GA; died on November 10, 1967, in Knoxville, TN; married Adler Cox, c. 1916 (died); married Eugene Williams, c. 1920s (divorced); married Jesse "Tiny" Crump, 1927; children: Helen (from second marriage).
Career
Vaudeville stage actor and singer, 1910-15; blues singer, 1915-1945; blues recording artist, 1923-29, 1939, 1961.
Life's Work
Ida Cox was touted as the "Uncrowned Queen of the Blues" by Paramount in the early 1920s. A contemporary of blues greats Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, Cox never achieved their level of fame, but her powerful voice and captivating stage presence earned her significant popularity during the 1920s, when women dominated blues music. She recorded 78 songs for Paramount between 1923 and 1929, resulting in an impressive four-volume set of her greatest hits. Traveling the show circuit for years, Cox performed on stage until the mid-1940s. Although her voice did not embody the greatest range or depth, her ability to manipulate emotion and mood through musical phrasing and the sheer energy of her charismatic personality was unmatched.
Cox was born as Ida Prather on February 25, 1896, in Toccoa, Georgia. She grew up in nearby Cedartown, Georgia, where she formed an early interest in music and sang in the choir of the local African Methodist Episcopal Church. Cox left home at the age of 14 to tour with the White and Clark's Black & Tan Minstrels. She began her career on stage playing Topsy, a "pickaninny" role typical of the vaudeville stage at the time. Cox's road show experience also included stints with the Florida Orange Blossom Minstrels, the Silas Green Show, and the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, which also launched the careers of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.
Became Blues Singer
Around 1916 Cox married Adler Cox, a trumpeter with the Florida Blossoms Minstrels and her first of three husbands, but the marriage was cut short by Adler Cox's death during the First World War. During the 1920s Cox married Eugene Williams, and the couple had a daughter, Helen. Few other details are known of Cox's second marriage. Her third marriage was in 1927 to Jesse "Tiny" Crump, a pianist who collaborated with Cox in writing songs and managed her blossoming career. He also played piano and organ on some of her recordings.
By 1915 Cox, not yet 20 years old, had advanced from her pickanniny roles to singing the blues on stage. Although in 1920 she worked briefly as the manager of the Douglass Hotel in Macon, Georgia, Cox quickly returned to the music business, appearing with blues piano great Jelly Roll Morton at 81 Theater in Atlanta, Georgia, in that same year. Her bluesy voice, combined with a commanding stage presence and physical beauty, soon earned Cox star billing. By the early 1920s, she was recognized as one of the premiere solo acts offered by the shows that traveled the Theatre Owners' Booking Association circuit. She worked shows up and down the East Coast with jaunts into the Midwest, including stops at the Plantation Club and Grand Theatre, both in Chicago, Illinois, and the Bijou Theater in Nashville, Tennessee. In March of 1922 her performance at Beale Street Palace of Memphis, Tennessee, was aired on WMC Radio, leading to a wider audience and positive reviews.
With her popularity rapidly increasing, Cox garnered the attention of Paramount talent scouts, and in 1923 she began her recording career. Between September of 1923 and October of 1929, Cox recorded 78 titles for Paramount, resulting in four volumes of her Complete Recorded Works. Although some of the early recordings were technically inferior, Paramount provided Cox with talented back-up musicians, including pianist Lovie Austin and her Serenaders, and touted Cox as "The Uncrowned Queen of the Blues," a name that Cox proved she deserved.
Sang With Bravo and Confidence
Although Cox's voice did not have extraordinary depth and strength, her ability to convey varying emotion and manipulate moods through superior vocal and rhythmic phrasing provided her music with a lasting quality that seldom failed to make an emotional impact on her listeners. "Death Letter Blues," one of her best-known songs, embodies the characteristics of Cox's mournful blues, overflowing with regret and sadness. In the simple format of 12-bar blues, "Death Letter Blues" is a powerful lament of a woman who learns of her lover's impending death: "I received a letter that my man was dying' / I received a letter that my man was dyin' / I caught the first plane and went home flyin'." Cox repeats her death dirge in other songs, including "Graveyard Dream Blues," "Coffin Blues," "Graveyard Bound Blues," and "Cold Black Ground Blues." In the heart-wrenching "Coffin Blues," she once again relies on a simple 12-bar formula: "When I left the undertakers, I couldn't help but cry / When I left the undertakers, I couldn't help but cry / And it hurt me so bad, to tell the man I love goodbye."
Cox's recordings were also peppered with songs that reflected her vaudeville background and highlighted the theme of love, particularly ill-fated love. These songs, which Cox sang with bravo and swaggering confidence, were filled with sexual innuendos and tongue-in-cheek humor. Her most famous song in this style was "Wild Women Don't Have the Blues": "Now when you got a man, don't ever be on the square / Because if you do, he'll have a woman everywhere. / I never was known, to treat no one man right / I keep 'em working hard, both day and night. / Because wild women don't worry, wild women don't have the blues!"
During the 1920s Cox was at the pinnacle of her career. Along with her supposedly exclusive recording deal with Paramount, she also released recordings under the Harmograph and Silvertone labels using the pseudonyms Velma Bradley, Kate Lewis, Julia or Julius Powers, and Jane Smith. Her stage act was also proving to be a great success. Through the 1920s Cox and Crump booked shows in Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Texas, Missouri, and Oklahoma as well as a number of performances in Chicago.
Possessed Beauty and Sophistication
If Cox's recordings conveyed emotion and feeling, her stage presence offered her audiences something more. Cox understood her role as the "Queen of the Blues" and played the part to perfection. Her larger-than-life presence on stage included regal costumes that could include a tiara, a cape, and a rhinestone wand. She had beauty, glamour, and an air of sophistication and confidence that enthralled her listeners. She carried herself in such a manner that even when she sang her off-color lyrics of her vaudeville-influenced songs, she was perceived as no less a lady, no less the Queen of the Blues.
In 1929 Cox and Crump formed their own tent show revue, Raisin' Cain, which proved to be so popular that in the same year it became the first show associated with the Theatre Owners Booking Circuit to open at the famed Apollo Theater in New York. However, by the end of the decade, the Great Depression and changes on the musical scene provided difficult times for Cox and her show. Soon after the stock market crashed, Cox was forced to seek out whatever engagements she could still find and the show had difficulty maintaining its performers as frequent layoffs accompanied gaps in the show's schedule.
Despite the changes in the public's taste in music that resulted in the waning popularity of women blues singers, Cox managed to continue her performing career throughout the 1930s, although she made no recordings between 1929 and 1939. During tough times, Cox managed to book enough shows and play enough dances in hotels, ballrooms, and nightclubs to stay afloat. In 1935 after a short-lived opening at the Lincoln Theatre in Los Angeles, Cox and Crump reorganized Raisin' Cain, which by then had been renamed as the Darktown Scandals, and continued to tour through the South and Midwest. In 1939 Columbia Record talent scout John Hammond invited Cox to perform in his "Spirituals to Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall, giving a lift to Cox's stage and recording career.
Continued to Perform Until 1945
Also, in 1939, Vocalion invited Cox to record several songs, accompanied by such blues greats as "Hot Lips" Page on the trumpet, J. C. Higginbotham on trombone, Lionel Hampton on drums, and Fletcher Henderson on the piano. Along with "Death Letter Blues," "Hard Time Blues," "Pink Slip Blues," "Take Him Off My Mind," and "One Hour Mama," Cox wrote and performed "Four Day Creep" that warned women against trusting a man to remain faithful: "And I'm gonna buy me a bulldog to watch my man sleep / I'm gonna buy me a bulldog to watch my man sleep / Men are so doggone crooked, afraid he might make a four day creep." She ends the song with humor: "Lord Lord I'm getting up in years / Lordy Lordy Lordy I'm getting up in years / But mama ain't too old to shift her gears / And I'm a big fat mama, got the meat shakin' on my bones / I'm a big fat mama, got the meat shakin' on my bones / And every time I shake, some skinny gal loses her home."
In 1940 the radio show "Hobby Lobby" did a feature story on Cox and announced her comeback, and Columbia Records scheduled recording sessions. Although the recordings, for unknown reasons, were never released, and Cox's recording career remained stagnant, she continued to perform on stage until 1945, when she suffered a stroke during a show at a nightclub in Buffalo, New York. Although still shy of her fiftieth birthday, the stroke prompted Cox to retire. She moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1949 where she lived with her daughter the remainder of her life.
Living in Knoxville, Cox became very active in her church and effectively fell off the map of the music world until 1959 when John Hammond, who had not forgotten the power of Cox's blues, placed an ad in Variety in search of Cox. After successfully locating her, Hammond eventually convinced Cox, who as a churchgoing woman was not sure it was proper for her to continue to sing the blues, to return to the recording studio for the first time in 20 years. In 1961 Cox recorded her final album, Blues for Rampart Street with the Coleman Hawkins Quintet. Although, at 65 years old, Cox had lost some of her control of range and pitch, she fully retained her charismatic and gutsy confidence in renditions of such classics as "Mama Goes Where Papa Goes," "Hard Time Blues," and "Wild Women Don't Have the Blues."
Cox suffered another stroke in 1965, and in 1967 she entered East Tennessee Baptist Hospital in Knoxville, where she died of cancer on November 10. She is buried in Longview Cemetery in Knoxville. Her contribution to the development of the blues genre during her lifetime is acknowledged by the many contemporary blues compilations that include a performance by Cox. Her songs have also been extensively covered, especially by Bessie Smith, who made "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" a hit. During the 1990s Document Records re-released Cox's four volumes of Complete Recorded Works, originally released during the 1920s, and in 2001 Classic Blues released Ida Cox: The Essential.
Works
Selected discography
- Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 1, Paramount, 1923. Re-released by Document Records, 1997.
- Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 2, Paramount, 1924. Re-released by Document Records, 2000.
- Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 3, Paramount, 1925. Re-released by Document Records, 2000.
- Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 4, Paramount, 1927. Re-released by Document Records, 2000.
- Blues for Rampart Street, Original Jazz Classics, 1961.
- Ida Cox: The Essentials, Classic Blues, 2001.
Further Reading
Books
- American National Biography, Oxford University Press, 1999.
- Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Schirmer Books, 2001.
- The Encyclopedia of Popular Music, 3rd ed. MUZE UK Ltd., 1998.
- Harris, Sheldon, Blues Who's Who, Arlington House Publishers, 1979.
- Harrison, Daphne Duval, Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s, Rutgers University Press, 1988.
- Notable Black Women, Gale Research, 1992.
- "Ida Cox," All Music Guide, www.allmusic.com (October 29, 2003).
- "Ida Cox," Grove Music Online, www.grovemusic.com (October 29, 2003).
— Kari Bethel
