Dan Kildare’s Ciro’s Club house orchestra. As far as I know, they were the first black performers in the world to make a blues recording. P.S. I have nothing to do with the above record. I’m featuring it because such a rare recording needs to be heard.

Now, I feel that I’m on the verge of a massive blues scoop here, because it has long been written that the first black artist ever recorded singing or playing the blues was the American burlesque singer, MamieSmith.

This was in August 1920 when Mamie was persuaded to cut Crazy Blues while standing in for the white singing star, Sophie Tucker.

(Some of us, believe it or not, remember watching Sophie performing live on TV. I must add, too, I wasn’t too impressed with the way she simply hollered out her songs.)

But now, staring me in the face, is the fact that the first version of St. Louis Blues with vocals was recorded in London, between August and October 1916.

It was made by a band unfortunately called the Ciro’s Club Coon Orchestra, a group of black American musicians working in England.

Please forgive the tastelessness of the band’s name but I would rather report things as they were rather than airbrush them from history.

Coon songs were highly popular in the USA during the 1880s and 1890s but, by 1916, had thankfully fallen out of fashion in America, due to the fact that people

were beginning to realise how insulting a moniker the genre fell under. As a result, coon shouters like Sophie Tucker were then becoming known in America as

blues shouters instead. Britain, obviously, was a bit behind the times when it came to the evolution of musical genres.

So, who was Ciro’s Club Coon Orchestra and what were they doing in England during the First World War? First up, Ciro’s was a swanky nightclub located in Orange Street, just off the Charing Cross Road in London’s exclusive West End. Decorated in Louis XIV style, with a sliding roof and a dance floor on springs, it was the place in London for bright young things and high society to be seen.

A 1920s sketch of Ciro’s interior

The Ciro’s Club’s house band was led by a Jamaican pianist called Dan Kildare, born in Kingston in 1879. By his early twenties, Dan was doing well for himself in New York until NY Musician Union issues and racial politics encouraged him to sail to Liverpool, England, in 1915. Kildare took with him a number of African-American musicians from New York’s famous Clef Club (a social club and booking agency) and they secured themselves a year’s contract at the Ciro’s Club, not far from the intersection of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road in London W1.

Under the name of Ciro’s Club Coon Orchestra, Dan Kildare’s band cut a series of records in August and October 1916 for the Columbia label in the UK including several novelties, a handful of Hawaiian numbers and the first version of St. Louis Blues ever recorded with vocals. (Coincidentally, some 55 years later, I’d find myself working for the same organisation – CBS Records, then in Theobald’s Road, London

As the gossip columnist for the UK’s upmarket Tatler magazine of September 1916 wrote:

“Interesting and a very good read. #blues #blogs.”
PhillyCheeze Reviews @phillycheeze, Cedar Rapids, IA, USA. May 23, 2015.

“The main instrument sounds like a banjoline; a mandolin with a banjo body. It recorded very well with the primitive equipment.”
Al (@Resoguitar), December 26, 2013.

“I’m enjoying your blog. Entertaining and informative.” 
SassySalassi (@dinkydo1), Southern state, USA, December 21, 2013.