Sippie Wallace was one of several legendary women blues singers who dominated the earliest recordings. She is not as renowned as Ma Rainey or the great Bessie Smith, but she poured her heart out with the best of them in response to the eternal themes of the blues:

Wallace accompanies herself on the piano. The recording adds two jazz musicians, but she would have sung just about the same way if she had been performing alone. We’ve chosen this recording because, modest as it may seem, one of the musicians is the outstanding genius of early jazz, trumpeter Louis Armstrong.

After a brief instrumental introduction, Wallace sings two blues stanzas from the piano bench. The instruments play short breaks in between her lines — the trumpet (Armstrong) in stanza 1, the clarinet (the little-known Artie Starks) in stanza 2. Sympathetic respondents to her “call,” they deepen the melancholy of her song and nuance it:

Then Armstrong plays a solo section — an entire twelve-bar blues stanza. He does not play the blues melody note by note, but improvises around the melody and its bass. Armstrong has a wonderful way of speeding up the dragging blues rhythm, and his rich, almost vocal tone quality echoes and complements the singer’s bleak sound. The clarinet joins him; short as it may be, this is a real example of improvised jazz polyphony.

Wallace, too, joins in quietly during this instrumental chorus; she, too, no doubt, was singing on impulse. She then sings two more stanzas, with instrumental breaks as before.

It’s necessary to listen to this recording in a different spirit from that in which we approach the other recordings of Western music accompanying this book. The scratchy sound on these old discs cannot be helped by digital remastering, and the music itself is not “composed,” of course. It lies somewhere in between true folk music and jazz, a fascinating juxtaposition of the direct, powerful simplicity of Sippie Wallace and the artistry of Armstrong. With a little imagination, one can virtually hear history happening in this recording: Jazz is evolving from the blues.

Sippie Wallace — her name is said to derive from a childhood lisp — was equally known for gospel singing and the blues. African American gospel music — ecstatic choral singing in evangelical church services, with high-flying sopranos over the background rhythms of the congregation — grew up at the same time as the blues and ragtime. Wallace was also a pianist and songwriter, who usually sang her own compositions, and published a good many of them. Her performing career began at little churches in Houston and ended with a concert at Lincoln Center, the sprawling New York music facility that houses the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera.