From KUTX:
On July 26, 1923, blues singer Maggie Jones cut her first record with the label Black Swan, one of the earliest Texas women to record and a symbol of how the 1920s Blues Queens transformed American popular music.
Maggie Jones was born Fae Barnes in Hillsboro, Texas, around 1900. We know little of her early career in the Lone Star State, but in the 1920s, Jones moved to New York and began playing in clubs across the mid-Atlantic states billed as the “Texas Nightingale.”
The appearances brought Jones to the attention of Harry Pace’s Black Swan Records, the first Black-owned American record label. Black Swan was a Harlem Renaissance project of racial uplift, with a board of directors that included the intellectual leader W. E. B. Du Bois.
Pace argued that if the recording industry was going to make money off Black artists, surely there was a role for a Black record company to share in those profits and provide expertise on representing Black culture.
Their first signing and highest-profile blues singer was Ethel Waters. Texan Maggie Jones was on the project’s ground floor, too, arriving in July 1923 for her first session with Black Swan, the single “Do It a Long Time Papa” backed with “I Just Want a Daddy.”
Jones recorded between 1923 and 1929, appearing on Victor and Paramount Records in addition to Black Swan and performing with leading jazz artists of the decade such as Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson.
