The World of Crickett Smith: Remembering a Forgotten Trumpeter and Traveler (1881-1947)

Abstract

This thesis tracks the life of Crickett Smith, a little-remembered black American trumpeter whose life spanned from the end of Reconstruction to the first stirrings of the Civil Rights movement. Born in the midst of the Exoduster migration, Crickett Smith carved out a musical career on the streets and small stages of Kansas City, Chicago, New York, Paris, Moscow, and Bombay. A seminal figure in the creation and dissemination of cosmopolitan modernism, black internationalism and a distinctly American sound, Smith functioned as an unofficial cultural emissary at a time when black performers were seldom named. Even admirers devalued their artistry. To follow Crickett Smith’s journey is to travel the Exoduster’s musical path out of the contraband camps of Nashville and into the core of American culture. His story reveals the labor practices of travelling entertainers, the rise of black showbusiness, and the global circulation of cultural commodities, practices, and ideas. His career played out across imperial networks, in hyper-colonial cities, and in the city streets, cafes, and cabarets where an informal, grassroots network of black internationalism took root. Crickett Smith’s life reveals a wealth of information about cultural hierarchies, the logic of the marketplace, ways of hearing, the subjective nature of art, and unpredictable forms of fellowship both along and across the color line. Despite the extraordinary scope of his musical network and depth of engagement with the commercial, avant-garde, and anti-colonial world, Crickett Smith has barely dented the public record – an absence that speaks to the racialized nature of remembering and forgetting. My effort to recover this life, then, ranges beyond biography into a microhistorical study of the process of obfuscation and erasure.