Mamie Smith is widely regarded as the first female performer to record a vocal blues, with her 1920 recording of "Crazy Blues." This record proved to be enormously influential to legions of blues singers, helping to popularize the genre. However, Smith was technically not a blues singer per se, her style often tending more toward early jazz, vaudeville, and pop. Nevertheless, there was enough of the blues in her music to whet the public's appetite for the likes of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Sippie Wallace, not to mention the countless subsequent generations of singers whose careers Smith inadvertently made possible.