USA TODAY International Edition
‘A song is never just a song’
A history of racism in music at root of anger over Kate Smith’s ‘God Bless America’
She was one of the most popular performers of her era – a patriotic woman who sang in a rich contralto and was, for a time, one of the most ubiquitous singers on radio.
More than three decades after her death, she became a controversial figure in the world of sports, almost overnight.
Kate Smith and her popular rendition of “God Bless America” were cast aside by the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Flyers in April after the organizations discovered she had performed songs with racist lyrics in the early 1930s. The Flyers removed a statue of Smith that had been erected in front of their arena to honor her role as an unofficial good luck charm for the team.
Smith’s closest living relatives – niece Suzy Andron and her husband, Bob – told USA TODAY Sports they were “heartbroken” by the developments. Defenders such as the Kate Smith Commemorative Society said the Flyers and Yankees were wrong to judge the singer’s actions in the 1930s by the standards of today.
Others pointed to the titles and lyrics of two songs she performed – “That’s Why Darkies Were Born” and “Pickaninnies’ Heaven” – as evidence of overt racism, for which they said Smith should be held accountable.
Music historians told USA TODAY Sports they believe the conversation lacks context, from the sports owner who helped steer her career to disturbing musical tendencies at the time.
History, they said, offers a possible explanation for Smith’s song selection – but it also illustrates the deep roots of racism in
American music.
A manager’s influence
Smith grew up in the Washington area and was 19 years old when she got her start on Broadway, in a musical comedy called “Honeymoon Lane.” Critics generally loved her performance, according to reviews of the show, but they also mocked her because she was overweight – a trait with which she struggled throughout her career.
It took four years for the singer to find someone who she believed would take her seriously: an executive at Columbia Records named Ted Collins.
Collins became Smith’s manager in 1930 after seeing her perform on Broadway, and he helped shape her career for more than three decades thereafter. He also became the sole or co-owner of several sports teams, according to The New York Times – including the New York Celtics, a long-defunct basketball team, and the Boston Yanks, an NFL team that folded in 1952.
Michael Pitts, the author of “Kate Smith: A Bio-Bibliography,” said Smith and Collins were extremely close. They never had a written contract and split Smith’s earnings down the middle until Collins’ death in 1964.
Smith wrote in her 1960 autobiography, “Upon My Lips a Song,” that she came to trust her manager so completely that she “often didn’t know what shows he had signed up for until we went into rehearsal.”
“He has picked all my songs, and never picked one which wasn’t successful,” Smith wrote. “He is able to listen to a song when a composer brings it to him and say immediately whether it will go over with the public or not.”
Smith was less than two years into her partnership with Collins when she recorded “That’s Why Darkies Were Born” in 1931, when she was 24. Todd Decker, a professor of musicology and American culture studies at Washington University in St. Louis, said the song was first written for Broadway and sung by Everett Marshall, a white baritone who performed it in blackface. It became a “minor hit” for Smith in the early 1930s, Decker said.
“I think often singers in this period were looking for popular songs that let them sort of reveal the power and size of their voice,” Decker explained. “I think the choice of the song was probably driven more by ‘this fits your voice’ than it was by ‘this fits your racist ideology.’ But of course, she sang the song.”
“Pickaninnies’ Heaven” was written by Sam Coslow, a white man, for Smith’s 1933 movie “Hello Everybody!” She performs the song in the film for a group of African American children at an orphanage, telling them about a mythical place with “great big watermelons” and “pork chop bushes growin’ right outside your doorway.”
‘Deep racism in pop culture’
Historians said such songs hardly outliers in the 1930s.
As African Americans migrated in large numbers from the South to Northern cities such as New York, Decker said, white songwriters took to writing lyrics from a black perspective that expressed a sort of manufactured nostalgia for the South – songs with fatalistic were and often spiteful messages of African Americans being “fated to work the land, fated to be where they are, to never change.”
“That was part of the popular music repertoire,” said Naomi André, an associate professor of Afro-American and African Studies and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan.
Yet even among other racist popular songs in the time period, Decker said, “That’s Why Darkies Were Born” stood out because it put the racism unambiguously front and center – as opposed to songs such as “Ol’ Man River” and “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” which expressed the same general theme in a less obvious way.
Make no mistake, Decker said: “That’s Why Darkies Were Born” isn’t just racist in retrospect. It was openly criticized as racist by African American audiences in the early 1930s, too.
Singer Mildred Bailey received a wave of letters urging her to stop performing the song in 1931, according to Variety magazine, and African Americans called for radio stations to take it off the air. When a white actor hired by New Jersey’s governor tried to perform the song for an African American company of the New Jersey State Militia in 1935 – entertainment that was intended to boost morale – the soldiers booed and walked out, according to The Philadelphia Tribune.
“There are other pop songs and other popular songs that a lot of revered performers have sung that express exactly the same set of ideas. They just don’t do it quite so blatantly,” Decker said. “A song like ‘That’s Why Darkies Were Born’ really reveals the deep racism in pop culture from this period that still is part of the landscape.”
Sports connection
For some music historians, the most surprising thing about the Smith controversy is that she somehow became a figure in the world of sports.
The Flyers first played Smith’s version of “God Bless America” before a game in 1969. As the team kept playing her recording of the song, and kept winning, the singer came to be revered as a lucky mascot of sorts. She even performed it live before playoff games. The Yankees started playing Smith’s version of “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch after Sept. 11, 2001, as a display of patriotism.
New York said in a statement in April that “no final conclusions have been made” about whether it will play the song at Yankee Stadium again. The team has not replied to emails seeking an update in the months since.
“A song is never just a song,” Redmond wrote in an email. “I commend both (the Flyers and Yankees) for taking the music seriously. Their actions reflect the fact that music makes meaning, and what those songs mean is antithetical to societal demands for equality and justice.”
It is unclear whether Smith ever expressed regret about her performance of those two racist songs – or about her decisions to perform in blackface during a 1929 musical and lend her likeness to an ad for a “mammy doll” in 1939. Her niece, Suzy Andron, said the two never spoke about those songs, but Smith “didn’t see a person’s color.”
Ultimately, André said, the Smith controversy points to the broader history of racism in American music – which stretches far beyond one singer.
“History is really the story we tell,” André said. “And if we erase all these things, we can pretend, fool ourselves that they were the good old days, and history was a comfort thing. But there was a lot of difficulty in the past, and a lot of voices that were threatened.
“So I think anything that talks about Kate Smith, it’s important to mention that larger context – not to portray her as good or bad but to say that this is a complicated history we’ve inherited.”