Sara Martin (June 18, 1884 – May 24, 1955) began her career as a vaudeville singer around 1915 in Illinois. In 1922 she was signed to a recording contract with Okeh Records by Clarence Williams. Williams wrote and played piano on a number of Martin’s early records. Sarah Martin was said to have excelled as a live performer and was a star on the TOBA circuit in the early 1920s. She had a deep, full-bodied voice that compared favorably with Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey but lacked the emotional punch of those two singers. She often sounded a bit wooden, like she was reading the lyrics on her records, although her diction was impeccable. She recorded four sides with Clarence Williams that included King Oliver on cornet in 1928. “Death Sting Me Blues” from these sessions is one of her better records and shows Oliver to be a master of the Blues.

While primarily a popular singer Martin could get low down on the blues and was billed as the “famous moanin’ mama” as well as “the colored Sophie Tucker” reflecting her dual roles as a Blues and vaudeville performer. See toured the country until the early 1930s and recorded with Okeh until 1928. In 1929 she appeared in the film Hello, Bill with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. The following year she appeared in the first all African-American sound film Darktown Revue. When the blues fad died out in the early 1930s Sarah retired from show business, but continued to sing gospel. She returned to her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky during the Depression where she ran a nursing home. She died of a stroke in 1955. Sara Martin also recorded under the names of Margaret Johnson and Sally Roberts.

Red Hot Jazz Archive

Web

Redhotjazz.com was a pioneering website during the "Information wants to be Free" era of the 1990s. In that spirit we are recovering the lost data from the now defunct site and sharing it with you.
Most of the music in the archive is in the form of MP3s hosted on Archive.org or the French servers of Jazz-on-line.com where this music is all in the public domain.
Files unavailable from those sources we host ourselves. They were made from original 78 RPM records in the hands of private collectors in the 1990s who contributed to the original redhotjazz.com. They were hosted as .ra files originally and we have converted them into the more modern MP3 format. They are of inferior quality to what is available commercially and are intended for reference purposes only. In some cases a Real Audio (.ra) file from Archive.org will download. Don't be scared! Those files will play in many music programs, but not Windows Media Player.