Kansas City Blues

Full Transcript

Jim Jackson's "Kansas City Blues" is believed by some to be the first-ever million-seller as a recorded disc, mainly because so many copies of that disc survive today. For me, that makes it clearly the first rock 'n' roll release. Also it's the first because, of all the songs reputed to be the first, it's the only one that makes me want to move. It's in the style of country blues, sung in a voice that's deep and has real range.

Mind you, a few years earlier, Jelly Roll Morton was on the scene. Morton's music comes pretty close to rock-and-roll. When I hear it, especially "The Pearls" and "Jelly Roll Blues," I do want to move. But first I want to learn swing dancing. Morton's songs don't make me move in the ways I typically move, the ways that feel good to me.

Other songs from the early 20s are either too slow or too fast to make me catch the beat and start to really rock and roll. I would have loved to include Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith—if you know of a song from early in the 20s that really rocks, please let me know, at [email protected], that's G-L-X-Z-R-W at-sign gmail-dot-com.

Jelly Roll Morton is often characterized as a ragtime artist. Ragtime arose in the 1910s, and it features up-front the word "rag." A "rag" is said to be a piece of music with a steady rhythm, created for southern banjo, which tended to be loud enough to record, and then re-interpreted for piano, another loud instrument. But "rag" also refers to dances that were hosted for centuries on plantations, by enslaved African-Americans. I have no doubt, to just temporarily relieve distress.

Ragtime was the first form of truly popular music. Until the turn of the 20th century, it appears it was mostly opera singers and opera music that was circulated as records. As an aside, I hate opera. Once fun music came along, and was being played in vaudeville shows, it lit a number of fires. The cost of and permissions for record players, records, and record-slicing methods all dropped, finally, as patents started to expire between 1900 and 1920.

"Kansas City Blues" was recorded in 1927. That was 50 years into the Jim Crow era, the one that set out a racial caste system in the United States, and nearly 40 years before that system was made illegal by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But note that "Kansas City Blues" may have been the first million-seller—well-deserved, but also quite impressive, given that an African-American artist wrote and sang it under Jim Crow.

1927 is also the year the first-ever Academy Awards were given. So it seems like, between the turn of the century and the Great Depression, people had enough extra time and money to spend on what we now call pop culture.

This was also a new era in tech. Thomas Edison had developed records, as foil-wrapped cylinders, in 1877, but by 1887, ten years later, Thomas Berliner had invented a gramophone machine that played flat discs. Those discs were first celluloid, then hard rubber, a type of disc that Berliner patented in 1893. Rubber discs could be mass-produced from a single metal master.

Around 1893 the same guy, Berliner, launched a business called the United States Gramophone Company, the first entry into a new marketplace that we call today the record industry. That was the same year the Chicago World's Fair first exposed many Americans to ragtime music.

Two years later, in 1895, the U.S. Gramophone Company switched from rubber discs to shellac ones. Production and sales of operatic recordings went pretty well until a plant that held about 100 masters burned to the ground, in 1897. By 1900, Berliner was forced out of business by competitors, who all sprang up after his inventions, and who violated his patents and even sometimes just re-branded his existing songs. It could be said of 20th-century record companies that they were focused on revenue more than on artists, integrity, or the rights of competitors—very much like similar companies seem today. Actor/creator and entrepreneur Issa Rae has said of the modern music industry that it's full of villains and criminals.

Berliner's competitors were selling some non-classical music, including melodic ballads and catchy songs, some of them ragtime, with syncopation. That syncopated rhythm is the common theme between ragtime and the song "Kansas City Blues"—a theme that's propulsive and that grabs you.

NOTE, in the book Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us About the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves, author Chris Dalla Riva tells us that "It wasn't until the 1920s that early record labels realized that there was a market for music made by Black musicians," end-quote. The moment in history when the industry wised up coincides with the industry's first million-seller. Interesting.

[musical interlude: KANSAS CITY BLUES—'rockin' chair to rock, rubber ball to roll']

Jim Jackson, who wrote "Kansas City Blues," was born in northern Mississippi around 1884—though some say as late as 1890. He paved the way for African-American guitar players in the early years of recorded music. As I expect you know, African-American musicians have been leaders in most periods of rock 'n' roll, and especially its origins.

Jackson was taught to play guitar by his dad, who 20 years after the Emancipation proclamation was working as a farmer. It isn't clear who taught Jackson's dad to play or where. It also isn't clear whether Jackson's father was a sharecropper or instead owned his farm. But in Mississippi, in that era, black farmers owned more land than they owned in any other state.

Jackson started recording before 1927. This is when American broadcast radio debuted as a commercial enterprise, in about 1920.

Since the turn of the 20th century, sheet music had been more popular than records were. And sheet music was the first format to popularize non-classical music, with folios printed in New York City. The NYC companies that released and sold sheet music, and often ragtime sheet music, were all lined up along Tin Pan Alley.

But then radio broadcasting and advertising took off. Once radio was everywhere, people could hear music without having to invest in expensive instruments and sheet music. Suddenly you could buy records at the 5 and dime. You could buy them in furniture stores, where gramophones were for sale, and from department stores, some of them with music departments that eventually expanded into stand-alone storefronts.

Places where people had been buying sheet music were increasingly places to buy records. You could get them from piano companies. Even some jewelry stores stocked record players and records. The 20s are when the music industry exploded.

But Jackson's musical career had launched by 1905, when he started to travel with medicine shows. Medicine shows featured con men selling miracle cures, yes. They also featured entertainers, including magicians, acrobats, comics, ventriloquists, often people who were once called 'freaks,' and sometimes Hollywood celebrities, at least after the 1910s. That's when filmmakers headed west, to avoid lawsuits filed by...Thomas Edison. Musicians were typically part of any medicine show...and alcohol, cocaine, and opium were typically part of any medicinal miracle cure.

As another aside: The 1910s saw the first releases of records in bound storage sleeves—think album covers that are bound together along one edge. This allowed singles to be collected into booklets. Those booklets are how albums got that name, because they were akin to photo albums.

A standard 10-inch record of that era could maybe hold 3½ minutes per side, given the speed at which it was played and the area available for grooves. A 12-inch record could hold a bit more than a 10-inch one. But, at 78 revolutions per minute, the additional space typically meant about 5 minutes versus 3½—still not enough for what we call today an album.

[music: Kansas City Blues]

By 1915 Jackson had begun to accompany or even head touring vaudeville and minstrel shows. Minstrel shows featured a similar selection of entertainers to medicine shows, let's hope without the miracle cures. The minstrel shows that Jackson played tended to be black-owned and -operated and were performed for racially mixed audiences. Still, the content didn't differ significantly from what was performed by whites in blackface.

Jackson was playing countless traditional and bluesy tunes, as well as his own music. While he was touring, during the 1920s, the 78rpm record was becoming the standard.

Jackson composed "Kansas City Blues" and, after a stint with the Paramount label, recorded his song for Vocalion Records in October 1927. That's Voc-A-lion or maybe Voc-AU-lion, I'm not honestly certain. During the 1920s Vocalion was both bought by Brunswick Records and had begun its '1000 races' series, made up of records that were recorded by and marketed to African Americans.

The recording of "Kansas City Blues" was complete about 10 years before most Americans ever heard Robert Johnson, the Delta blues-man who, per the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, was the "first ever rock star"—Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the devil for success in music. I would contend that Jackson, who knew more songs than just about anybody and sold startlingly large numbers of records, was the first-ever rock star.

1927 was just a year after the electrical process of amplification was first advertised as a breakthrough. For rock, amplification was vital. Western Electric and a few inventors had developed microphones and related technology in the 20s, around the same time Vocalion introduced its '1000 races' series. The new amplification tech allowed for more full and clear recordings of music, and it opened up use of the guitar, before electric guitars were devised in the 1930s.

[musical interlude: KANSAS CITY BLUES—'rockin' chair to rock, rubber ball to roll']

Jackson played extensively on Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, which was about 25 miles from the spot where he was born in Mississippi. Black blues musicians had by the 20s been playing the Beale Street area of Memphis for at least 50 years.

That neighborhood hosted the first Southern black millionaire, and Ida B. Wells's anti-segregation newspaper, the Free Speech. The part of Beale Street where Jackson played was declared a National Historical Landmark in 1966, and in 1977 Beale Street was declared "The Home of the Blues," by act of the U.S. Congress.

No matter where he performed, Jackson was a real draw. His inventory of blues, ballads, traditional songs, and popular vaudeville tunes was so large that he's considered, quote, "the greatest repository of pre-blues songs among all recorded musicians," per the website of the U.S. National Park Service, circa 2025. His popularity won him an appearance in a 1929 film, King Vidor's Hallelujah, which had an all-black cast.

If you're interested in viewing Hallelujah, it's been restored and remastered in 4K, and it was uploaded to YouTube in May 2025, as part of The Public Domain Vault. There's a link in the show notes. Jackson is un-credited, and there remains a question about who exactly he plays.

Hallelujah was directed by a white man, with an all-black cast, at a time when black people were making their own films. It's riddled with stereotypes. But Irving Berlin is said to have been so moved, by the gospel and spiritual numbers that cast members sang, that he wrote two songs for the movie.

Plus, Hallelujah was the first feature film ever to be shot on location—in Memphis and along the Mississippi River. It does have historical significance.

In pictures, Jackson looks to me like a cross between young Denzel Washington and the musician Seal. Pictures of him are rare.

The melody of "Kansas City Blues" stuck in other musicians' heads. It was retooled for the song "Rock Around the Clock," another one often labeled the first rock 'n' roll record, as performed by Bill Haley and His Comets. But that song wasn't recorded until at least 25 years later. The melody was also retooled by Hank Williams, for his 1947 song "Move It On Over," as well as, just 2 years after Jackson's recording, by Charley Patton, for his 1929 song "Going to Move to Alabama." Janis Joplin covered "Kansas City Blues" in 1964, and she stayed faithful to Jackson's original version, except for adding in some lines about Jackson.

On earlyblues-dot-com, Max Haymes says that enslaved instrumentalists, as well as freedmen, found inspiration and rhythm schemes in their surroundings—for example, train wheels passing by, fire bells ringing, logs bobbing in rivers, or night birds calling. But rhythm as African drumming dates back thousands of years. In Africa, at least as early as 500 CE, rhythm and drumming were vital in cultural traditions, as well as in communication and spirituality.

They also were vital in those contexts for Native peoples in the Americas. Drumming is described on native-spirit-crafts-dot-com as, quote, "A heartbeat that connects the Earth and the spirits"—see the show notes.

I see African and Native cultures as our forebears, our spiritual parents. And although it seems we've lost much of what they taught us, they did instill in us an appreciation of rhythm.

Rhythm schemes are so important to this podcast. I love a great bass player with a great drummer. And it would appear that they're also elemental to human existence, given that we all arise from African roots.

There's a link in the show notes to a 60 Minutes segment from April 2026. That 13-minute story examines an album and effort called Wild Concerto. Wild Concerto is a collaborative project by naturalist Martyn Stewart and composer Stewart Copeland, the drummer in the Police, Oysterhead, and Gizmodrome. It uses excerpts from 60 years' worth of Martyn Stewart's recordings of movement and insects and animal life—wings fluttering, wolves howling, crocodiles rumbling, tides flowing and crashing, birds singing, you name it. Each has its own rhythm.

In the 1980s Copeland had used barking dogs and similar, quote, "found sounds" as rhythm in the score to Francis Ford Coppola's film Rumblefish. Now Copeland has used Stewart's recordings in a composition for orchestra.

A concerned environmentalist, Stewart says that, quote, "Audio is the barometer of the planet." He's referring to calls of the wild. But I see the quote as connected to what can be taken in physically, via our senses and via the senses of any living thing. It can Make You Move, right?

If we think "Kansas City Blues" took rhythmic inspiration from anything environmental, then, to my mind, it would be a scuff-walk, the motion of a child's swing, or a swishing scythe. But if instead we all hold within ourselves that connection to rhythm, then "Kansas City Blues" took inspiration from the heartbeat, from the pulse.

This song makes me move my hips in the shape of an infinity symbol, with bump-stops as I move. Without being especially suggestive, it makes me think of alluring women moving their shoulders with their hips.

[musical interlude: KANSAS CITY BLUES—'rockin' chair to rock, rubber ball to roll']

A little bit after the release of "Kansas City Blues," attempts were being made to lengthen the 78rpm record's run time, which was only 3½ minutes. Standard 78s were 10-inch. 12-inch 78s could hold maybe 5 minutes of music. In 1927 Jackson's label Vocalion stopped producing 10" records, but not before the release of Jackson's song. Vocalion owned a budget label that produced shellac 78s in 6-inch, 8-inch, 10-inch, and 12-inch sizes. The label's "Twelve" series were only 10-inch but had the playing time of other labels' 12-inch records.

Single 12-inch records were not yet sold with long run times, as in, accommodating several songs, so Jackson's single was not part of an album at the time it was released. Albums of music did exist but, as I've said, they were more like photo albums, as bound collections of singles in storage sleeves.

Jackson died around the age of 50, in either 1933 or 1937—either way, no more than 10 years after the huge success of "Kansas City Blues." A memorial was erected to him in his hometown cemetery, Hernando Memorial Park, but not until 2023, about 90 years after his death. Area musicians, politicians, and clergy took part in an installation ceremony, held by the Mount Zion Memorial Fund. Dollars for the memorial came from the American Historical Association, because historians were disturbed that no marker had ever been placed on Jackson's grave.

From about the 1950s onward, blues fans and historians have been identifying early blues performers, often by meeting with them, or speaking with those who saw them live, and/or scouring the archives of defunct labels. But Jackson, claimed to have the most vast knowledge of music at the time, didn't live into the 1950s, and it appears the multitudes who saw him live were never interviewed. What remains are many copies of the record.

Today, Jackson's "Kansas City Blues" is on CD, in my collection on the Famous Flames recording The First Rock and Roll Record—where the Flames claim it might've been rock-and-roll song number 3. See famousflames.bandcamp.com. An excellent version is on YouTube under Central Park Records, called 'Jim Jackson – Jim Jackson's Kansas City Blues.' That inescapable hiss from primitive analog tech is audible on YouTube recordings, but the Central Parks Records version minimizes it somehow. There's another YouTube version that has zero hiss, but I'm not convinced that it's really Jackson singing—and the lyrics combine parts 1 and 2 of the song. You can find a link to the lyrics to "Kansas City Blues," Part 1, in the show notes.

There are a few albums that feature this song on CD at Tower Records-dot-com, but note that, back in the 20s, singles were released without being parts of albums. You can buy an mp3 of just the single "Kansas City Blues" for about a dollar from amazon.com or from thedocumentrecordsstore.com.

Buying new is the best way to support a song's contributors and rights-holders and sometimes the heirs of the musicians. But there are used albums that include this song, available on vinyl from eBay. And as of June 2026, Discogs.com has a shellac copy of the original, 10-inch, 78-rpm record for about $60, with shipping.

This is Sarah Blaxon, and I thank you for listening. Please email me at G-L-X-Z-R-W-at-gmail.com if this podcast got you thinking.

Next time, we'll look at 1928's "It's Tight Like That," one of the first suggestive songs to be a big hit. It was recorded by Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, who were part of the 1930 record "Jim Jackson's Jamboree." These early rockers knew each other!