Clara Smith

Clara Smith (c. 1894 – February 2, 1935) was an African America classic female blues singer. She was billed as the "Queen of the Moaners", even though she had a lighter and sweeter voice than many of her contemporaries. She was not related to vocalists Bessie Smith or Mamie Smith.

Career

Smith was born in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. In her youth she worked on African American theater circuits and tent shows and in vaudeville. By the late 1910s she was appearing as a headliner at the Lyric Theater in New Orleans, Louisiana and on the T.O.B.A. circuit.

In 1923 she settled in New York, appearing at cabarets and speakeasies there; that same year she made the first of her commercially successful series of gramophone recordings for Columbia Records, for which she recorded 122 songs, working with many other musicians such as Fletcher Henderson and Louis Armstrong. In 1925, she duetted with Bessie Smith to record two songs, "My Man Blues", and "Far Away Blues" (Columbia 14098-D), recorded on September 1, that year. In 1927, she recorded Tom Delaney's "Troublesome Blues".

Clara

Clara may refer to:

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Clara (Mirbeau)

Clara is the main character in the French Novel The Torture Garden ((French) Le Jardin des supplices, 1899), by Octave Mirbeau.

A free woman

Clara, who has no last name or civil status, is an English woman with red hair and green eyes--“a greyish green of the young fruits of the almond tree.” Single, rich and bisexual, Clara lives in near Canton, and leads an idle existence, entirely devoted to finding perverse pleasures. She is fully emancipated, financially and sexually, and freed from oppressive laws and taboos prevailing in the West and which, according to her critique of anarchist inspiration, prohibit the development of the individual. Clara thus claims to enjoy complete freedom. She particularly enjoys visiting the city prison every week, which is open to tourists on Wednesday. Clara delights in watching the death row inmates, many of whom are innocent or guilty of minor offenses, being brutally tortured and put to death.

This protagonist meets the anonymous narrator, a petty political crook, aboard the Saghalien, where the pseudo-embryologist was sailing to Ceylon, as part of an official mission. In reality, his primary goal is just to distance himself from France. She seduces him, awakening his sexual desire along with the need to unburden himself, and becomes his mistress. She takes him with her to China, where both the narrator and Clara share a lover, Annie.

Clara (TV series)

Clara is a German television series.

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