Singing the TOBA Blues in the 1920s : BLACK PEARLS Blues Queens of the 1920s <i> by Daphne Duval Harrison (Rutgers University Press: $19.95; 285 pp.) </i>

They all had nicknames: the Empress of the Blues, the Uncrowned Queen, the Creole Songbird, the World’s Greatest Moaner, the Colored Sophie Tucker.

They sang about freight trains and floods, prostitution and pimps, sweet men and jealous women, jail houses and courthouses, disasters, dreams, the Depression, drink, dope, and death. Their decade was the ‘20s; their outlets were the ghetto stages, their principal windows on the world were the recording studios.

They were the great blues women who, through their stories, became a metaphor of black life and durable legends many of whose records are being reissued to this day.

Despite the plethora of books on blues-related subjects, the author, an Afro-American studies professor at the University of Maryland, has managed to find new insights. We learn, for example, that the phonograph record, long assumed to be the main launching pad for the blues artists, in fact followed by at least a decade the vaudeville stage. Central to their entertainment world was the Theatre Owners Booking Assn., organized in 1909 and known as a main outlet for blacks.

Working conditions were such that many artists, instead of calling it TOBA, referred to it as “Tough on Black Artists” (but “Artists” was not the word they used). It was not until 1920 that Mamie Smith, with her best-selling “Crazy Blues,” established the blues in the white-dominated record industry.

The taboos of American life took odd forms. The frequent use of female pianists in red light districts was due, Daphne Duval Harrison claims, to the disapproval, by wealthy whites who patronized brothels, of relationships between white prostitutes and black male pianists. Black artists working for TOBA were treated much like blacks more recently in South Africa: because they had to be off the streets after a certain hour, passes had to be given them by the white theatre bosses. At that, the Klan might have its fun by taking a performer to some remote spot for a clubbing-and-stoning party.

Though she deals with singers in every area--Ma Rainey and other country blues women, urban artists such as Bessie Smith, vaudevillians like Ida Cox, and cabaret stars from Alberta Hunter to Edith Wilson--the author focuses mainly on Hunter, Wilson, Sippie Wallace and Victoria Spivey.

The claim that the blues draws on the singers’ personal experience does not always hold true. Alberta Hunter’s songs about her men did not mirror her own life: Although Harrison deals with Ma Rainey’s and Bessie Smith’s affairs with women, Hunter’s lesbianism (dealt with in her own posthumous biography) is never mentioned. Nevertheless, the long chapter analyzing blues lyrics is perceptive and laced with the mordant wit that characterized many of the songs.

That the blues era ended with the Depression was due to several factors: the economy’s effects on record sales (in 1932 the entire industry sold a mere 6 million 78s), changing social and musical values, and the chaotic lives of the artists. Though some died of their own excesses, others ended by returning to their home towns and the church, rejecting their blues-ridden pasts in favor of gospel music. (Harrison should have dealt with the reality that the blues never really died, that the tradition was carried forward by Lil Green, Dinah Washington, Linda Hopkins and Koko Taylor, and by countless male singers.)

The grotesque caricatures on some of the record companies’ leaflets illustrate the humiliation these artists had to endure. Somehow, though, they succeeded for a while in rising above it all. As one famous and still current blues line put it: “Trouble in mind, I’m blue, but I won’t be blue always; the sun’s gonna shine in my back door some day.”