Ma Rainey's Real Producers-J. Mayo Williams & Aletha Dickerson

The film and play "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" is a great piece of historical fiction, but it gets one thing very wrong: Ma Rainey's records were actually produced by two extraordinary African-Americans: J. Mayo Williams & Aletha Dickerson. Here is their story and, in this case, truth is far more interesting than fiction.

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You’re listening to the original 1927 recording of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Our program today is about the two African Americans who were the real producers of Ma Rainey’s recordings, and their story is in many ways, far more interesting than their fictionalized counterparts in either the August Wilson play, or the Ruben Santiago-Hudson screenplay. Right now, let’s hear the rest of this wonderful recording. 

 On October 11, 1984, August Wilson’s play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” opened at the Cort Theater on W. 48th St in New York City’s Broadway theater district. It starred Theresa Merritt as Ma Rainey and Charles Dutton as the fictionalized tortured trumpeter Levee. In a 2003 revival, Whoopi Goldberg played the role of Ma, and Charles Dutton returned as Levee. The original production played for 276 performances, what would be called a Broadway smash hit; the revival was less successful with only 68 performances. 

 In 2020, in the middle of the Covid Pandemic, TV streaming service Netflix release a filmed version, directed by George C. Wolfe, with an adapted screenplay by Ruben Santiago-Hudson. Music was provided by jazz great Branford Marsalis. In the film version, Rainey is played by Oscar winning actress Viola Davis, and Levee by Chadwick Boseman in his final role before his tragic death to colon cancer in August of the same year. 

 This program is not about the play or the film. It’s not really about Ma Rainey, who was a seminal figure in blues history and probably deserves a program of her own; instead it’s about the two remarkable African-Americans who were the real producers of Ma Rainey’s records. 

 There are two white characters in the play, Ma’s slimey, obsequious manager Irvin (played by Jeremy Shamos in the film), and her sleazy and corrupt producer Mel Sturdyvant, played by British actor Jonny Coyne. 

 What the play and the film get wrong, is that none of Ma Rainey’s 94 titles, all for Paramount Records, were produced by white people. Her records were produced by one of two remarkable African-Americans, J. Mayo Williams, and Aletha Mae Dickerson. Here…are their stories. 

 J. Mayo Williams was born in 1894 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. When he was 7 years old, his father got into an argument with a neighbor, threatened the neighbor with a gun and was shot dead. Following his father’s death, he moved with his mother to her hometown of Monmouth, IL, a small city in the Northwest corner of the state, that was also the hometown of Wyatt Earp and Ronald Reagan. 

 By the time he reached high school, Williams had developed a reputation as both a brilliant student, and more importantly for him, a standout athlete in track and football. He was offered a full scholarship to Brown University where, in 1917 he made third-team All-American at the end position. He left school to enlist in the Army, and fought in WWI, but returned to Brown after the Armistice to complete his degree in philosophy and to continue playing football and running track, where he held the New England record in the 40 yard dash. 

 After graduation in 1921, Williams was signed to the nacent National Football League  for the Hammond Pros, where he was one of three Black players, the others being Fritz Pollard, who went on to a successful career in banking, and Paul Robson, who became internationally famous as an operatic baritone, film actor, and civil rights icon. Williams also played for the Canton Bulldogs, the Dayton Triangles, and the Cleveland Bulldogs. 

 Just for a little perspective, Williams was 5’11” and weighed 175 pounds. Today, tight ends usually range between 240 and 265. Also, while Williams, Pollard, and Robson were accepted in their day, the NFL did bow to racist pressure and banned Black players in 1933. The ban lasted until 1946 when Cleveland’s Paul Brown signed running back Marion Motley and defensive lineman Bill Willis. 

 In the early 1920s, professional football was considered a part-time job. Williams was interested in the music business, particularly in the recording end. He approached Paramount Records who, in 1923 offered him a position running their race records division. His job was to seek out and find black performers, record them, and supervise the marketing of their recordings. 

 I wouldn’t be accurate to say Williams “discovered” Ma Rainey. Ma had been a featured performer in tent shows, minstrel shows, medicine shows, and theaters for nearly two decades, but Williams saw her performance at a theater in Chicago and offered her a contract with Paramount Records, a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Chair Company. In December of 1923 she recorded her first eight of an eventual 94 recordings for Paramount. Remember that in 1923, record making was still an entirely mechanical procedure. The artist sang or played into a big horn, and the vibrations were transferred to the wax master. No microphones or amplification of any kind was used. The first electrical recording, using microphones was made by Leopold Stokowsky and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1925. The technology didn’t filter down to Paramount until a year or so later. 

 By the mid to late 1920s the race division was essentially keeping Paramount afloat. While for the most part, Delta musicians like Charlie Patton, Son House, Skip James and others came a bit later after Williams departure, Williams was early to recognize that the market for female “theater style” performers was becoming saturated and he began seeking out male performers who accompanied themselves. Three of his earliest discoveries were Papa Charlie Jackson, Blind Blake, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. All three became big sellers for Paramount. Jackson played the six string banjo and was more of a medicine show-street performer, but Blake and Jefferson were extraordinary virtuosos who’s playing continues to dazzle listeners to this day.

In mid 1927, a little before Rainey recorded “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”, Williams was either edged out of his position by a competing Paramount employee or left on his own. Either way his departure was abrupt. 

 About two weeks after his departure, Paramount’s president Otto Moeser informed Williams’ secretary, Alethea Dickerson, that as of that moment, she would be in charge of recording race records for Paramount. She was 25 years old. In a series of interviews done by mail in 1972, Alethea remembered it like this:

 "I had no desire to or expectation of being what was then called "recording manager" for Paramount. I was neither asked whether or not I wanted such a position, nor even informed until three months after the fact. My resentment about this has not diminished with the years!

"Mayo Williams was in charge of recording. I was his secretary. Nothing was said to me to indicate that he was leaving Paramount to connect with Vocalion-Brunswick. I would have preferred to go with him and remain his secretary. He later explained that since he was aware the company intended to place me in charge of recording; he thought I’d want the position. Which all goes to show the "gap" between males and females. He was ambitious. Ergo, to his way of thinking, I was too. Well, I was not!"

"Except that I could read music, play piano, and arrange music, I was wholly unqualified for such a job. In the first place, my training had been on the snobbish side. I assumed that anyone whose background and environment had been different from mine was uninteresting. I’d had the old cliche that a girl’s name should appear in the paper three times; once when she was born, once when she married and when she died, to such an extent that any time I learned a newspaper reporter was trying to see me for an interview, I literally ran in the other direction. That explains why there is very little known about my tenure as recording manager for Paramount."

 After Mayo Williams departure from Paramount, he started his own label, Black Patti, which was the second Black owned record company, the first being the short-lived Black Swan label which was absorbed into Paramount in the early 20s. Williams named Black Patti for the Black opera singer Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones, who was called the Black Patti and who gave Williams permission to use the name despite the fact that Black Patti recorded some of the most wonderfully down-home blues of the era. There was a hefty amount of gospel, Rev. Gates and the Pace Jubilee Singers recorded for Black Patti, and some white, country singers as well including VERNON DALHART, who recorded the old English ballad “Barbara Allen” for the label. Blues singers included a number of “theater type” singers like Clara Smith and Elnora Johnson, as well as some great “Southern style” blues singers like Cryin’ Sam Collins, Jaybird Coleman, and Papa Harvey Hull who recorded the very first version of Stagolee with Long Cleve Reed, called “The Original Stack O Lee Blues”. 

 Despite recording and releasing around 100 titles, and Williams released everything he recorded, Black Patti didn’t even last out the year and closed shop at the end of 1927. Williams moved to the much larger Brunswick label where he supervised their 7000 “race” series but when the depression hit, he found himself out of work again. So, he went back to football and took a job at Moorhouse College as a coach. He remained there between 1931 and 1933 when he had worked his way up to head coach. Still, in 1934 he left football to take up a position heading up the “race” division at Decca where he recorded Mahalia Jackson, Alberta Hunter, Blind Boy Fuller, Roosevelt Sykes, Sleepy John Estes, Kokomo Arnold, Peetie Wheatstraw, Bill Gaither, Bumble Bee Slim, Georgia White, Trixie Smith, Monette Moore, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Marie Knight, Tab Smith and The Harlem Hamfats.

 Aletha Dickerson was, by all accounts, an extremely attractive woman; so attractive that, decades later, Skip James remembered her from seeing her around the Paramount offices in 1931. She was also a very fine, if reluctant pianist. Her appearances on record usually occurred when a session pianist either failed to show up, or was unable to play the part a song called for. A shy yet competent person Aletha had absolutely no interest in becoming a recording artist or performer herself. Still, between 1926 and 1939 she found herself on recordings by Blind Blake, The Hokum Boys, Victoria Spivey, Bumble Bee Slim, Lil Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy and many others. There is strong evidence that, while working for Lester Melrose,  she recorded several songs under the pseudonym “Barrel House Annie”. She later denied it, but that could be because all the songs were of the “double entendre” variety. About her abilities as a pianist, she had this to say, "At no time did I consider myself to be a recording artist. Any person, group or band, to be successful, they must have something about their work that that easily identifies them on a recording. It has always been impossible for me to play any two songs in a style that would identify me. As an example, Lester Melrose visited us one day in the late 1930s. He put on a record. I listened only to the pianist (naturally!) and I stated, "That’s a very good pianist.—who is it?" Melrose replied, "YOU". Even I couldn’t identify my own playing."

Dickerson left Paramount in 1932 when they tried to cut her salary, and for a while worked for Lester Melrose, Chicago’s other major producer of blues records, went to Decca for a while where she was once again Mayo William’s secretary, and, with her husband Bob Robinson, ran a “turn your poems into music” service. By the 1940s she was out of the music business. Aletha Dickerson-Robinson lived to the ripe old age of 92 and passed away in 1994. But again, it was most likely a 25 year old Aletha Dickerson who produced and supervised the recording of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” in the summer of 1927. 

 Both Mayo Williams and Aletha Dickerson were highly educated individuals. Williams had a degree from an Ivy League university, and Dickerson was trained both as a musician and a stenographer. This put them in what they perceived to be a different social class from the musicians they worked with. The African-American social structure of the early 20th century was complicated and would better be explained further by someone other than me. Williams and Dickerson were certainly better educated than the musicians and singers they recorded, many of whom were illiterate; they were better educated than the white people they work for. Consequently, both were perceived as “dicty”, “saditty” by other Blacks; in other words: snobby. Williams made it his policy never to socialize with the performers he recorded. He didn’t entertain them; eat or drink with them. As a result, he gained a reputation among blues performers as being dishonest, though there is absolutely no evidence that he was. Lester Melrose, who was white, was probably better liked. 

 From 1945 until his full retirement in 1972, Williams managed to eke out a living running four small independent record labels, Ebony, Chicago, Southern and Harlem. There are some fine recordings on these labels with issues from Tab Smith, Little Brother Montgomery, Lil Armstrong, Slim Gaillard and Johnny Temple, but the majority seem to be from local Chicago club performers. There were hundreds of releases on these labels, most were produced in extremely small numbers and are very rare today. 

 In 1972, just before he left the business entirely, Williams met with record collector George Paulus and told him, “"Those low-down country guys," he said, "could play a few numbers and then they weren't good for nothing. Blind Lemon froze to death in a hallway. They were just drunken, low-down guys. They weren't people I wanted to hang around with for more than it took to do my business. I'm not a country blues fan,"

 Mayo Williams closed out his business shortly after their meeting. His beloved wife Aleta had died in 1968. Mayo Williams himself, lived until 1980, passing away at age 86.