Clara Smith recorded 122 tracks for Columbia Records, sang alongside Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson, was second only to Bessie Smith in blues record sales during the 1920s, and gave a 13-year-old Josephine Baker her first job in show business. Yet history has largely reduced her to a footnote, in part because she shared a last name with Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith, to whom she was entirely unrelated. In this deep dive we pull her out of the footnotes, starting in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, where she was born in 1894, was never officially enrolled in school, and taught herself to read and write anyway.

We follow her from the traveling tent shows that passed through her hometown to the vaudeville circuit by 1910 and headliner status on the Theater Owners Booking Association circuit by 1918, playing the Lyric in New Orleans, the Bijou in Nashville and the Booker T. Washington Theater in St. Louis, three or four shows a day. Her 1923 move to New York and Harlem’s cabaret scene brought a Columbia contract, rare duets with her rival Bessie Smith, and the marketing title “Queen of the Moaners,” a label that had more to do with her melancholy repertoire than her lighter, more melodic voice.

• Why TOBA performers had a dark joke about what the circuit’s acronym really stood for, and how it became the ultimate proving ground for projecting to a packed theater without a microphone
• Her relationship with Josephine Baker, whom she hired as her personal dresser and with whom she was romantically involved
• How established female blues singers built touring companies that served as protective micro-economies for their communities
• Her 1926 pivot from slow ballads to upbeat “dirty blues” like “Whip It to a Jelly,” and a rare West Coast tour that proved her national appeal
• Her sudden death from a heart condition in Detroit in February 1935, weeks before her 41st birthday, and how archivists let her legacy be overwritten