This Week In Texas Music History: Maggie Jones
This Week in Texas Music History, we’ll honor one of the Lone Star State’s very first female recording artists.
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On July 26, 1923, Maggie Jones, born Fae Barnes in Hillsboro, Texas, recorded for Black Swan Records, one of the earliest African-American owned labels in the country. This session made Jones among the first female singers from Texas to record professionally. Although not as well known as fellow Texas “blues queens” Sippie Wallace and Victoria Spivey, Maggie Jones performed with such notable artists as Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson.
For a brief time, Maggie Jones supplemented her musical income by opening a dress shop in New York City. However, by the early 1930s, she had returned to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where she operated a cabaret group that performed throughout the Southwest.
Next time on This Week in Texas Music History, we’ll remember a World War I doughboy who helped launch the singing cowboy craze of the 1930s and 1940s.
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