She was the right singer at the right place, and she got there by coincidence. Yet it was her song "Crazy Blues" that but the Blues on the map of music culture, making it one of the most enduring forms of entertainment of the 20th century, and there is no doubt it will remain there for some time to come. In 1920 Mamie Smith was a 37 year old veteran of the Vaudeville circus who toured the country with her own little Jazz Band. Though being not a very good singer she was asked as a stand in for a white singer who was sick, but as rumor has it she found the song too bad to perform, to record the number for Ralph Peer, who was not much impressed with neither he vocal qualities nor the song. But they were all wrong, by hitting the exact feeling to describe the postwar mood in the states, she made the "Crazy Blues" a million seller. Black audiences were delighted with the fact that there was somebody giving them a voice, and Blues was soon identified as black music per se. Soon record companies would go down into the deepest south to find new talents and a decade of female blues singers began. Nobody had any idea what a Blues song should sound like. By todays standards most of the Blues songs were mere Jazz melodies,but it was the emotion that counted. Smith followed the call for emotion, dropped out of music biz, and moved towards the big feeling- Hollywood!