Big Maybelle was a rhythm-and-blues singer, and this profile says so at the top rather than at the bottom. The bulk of her catalog is R&B: hit singles for Okeh and Savoy, soul sides for Scepter and Rojac in the 1960s, one gospel album for Brunswick. What puts her on a jazz reference site is narrower and entirely documented. She came up through territory bands and a big band, her Okeh and Savoy sessions were staffed with working New York jazz musicians and arranged by Ernie Wilkins, and on July 5, 1958 she sang five numbers at the Newport Jazz Festival backed by an all-star band that included Buck Clayton, Jack Teagarden, Jo Jones and Kenny Burrell. That performance was filmed for Jazz on a Summer's Day. The R&B and soul catalog is covered here only where it intersects with that story, and the discography in this folder is curated on the same basis.

She was born Mabel Louise Smith on May 1, 1924, in Jackson, Tennessee, sang gospel as a child, and turned professional at twelve, joining Dave Clark's Memphis Band in 1936. She toured with the all-female International Sweethearts of Rhythm and then joined pianist Christine Chatman's orchestra, making her first recordings with Chatman for Decca in 1944 while still nineteen. From 1947 to 1950 she recorded and toured with Tiny Bradshaw's orchestra, and around the same stretch she turned up on record with trumpeter Oran "Hot Lips" Page. Her own first sides, cut for King Records in 1947, were issued under her real name, Mabel Smith, and sold almost nothing. Nine years of big-band and territory-band work sit behind everything she did later, and it shows in how she phrased against a horn section.

Okeh signed her in 1952. Producer Fred Mendelsohn renamed her Big Maybelle, by his account for the size and evenness of the voice rather than the size of the singer, and put her in New York studios with a rotating pool of first-call players. Across seven Okeh sessions between October 8, 1952 and March 21, 1955, the credits list Joe Wilder and Taft Jordan on trumpets, Billy Byers and Eli Robinson on trombones, Budd Johnson, Jerome Richardson, Haywood Henry and Sam "The Man" Taylor on reeds, Mickey Baker and Brownie McGhee on guitars, Al Hall and Lloyd Trotman on bass, and Panama Francis and Jimmy Crawford on drums, with Leroy Kirkland, Danny Mendelsohn and Quincy Jones sharing the arranging and conducting. "Gabbin' Blues," from the first of those dates, reached number 3 on the Billboard R&B chart; "My Country Man" reached number 5 and "Way Back Home" number 10 in 1953. The last Okeh session, on March 21, 1955, with Kirkland and Jones directing the band, produced the first recording of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," issued that September as Okeh 4-7060, a full two years before Jerry Lee Lewis cut the version everyone remembers. Lewis said afterward that hers was what made him play his louder.

The Savoy years, from 1955, are where the jazz personnel get hard to miss. Nearly every session was cut at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, with Fred Mendelsohn and Ozzie Cadena producing. The May 14, 1956 date produced "Candy," her biggest seller, which reached number 11 R&B and entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. On January 7, 1957 she recorded with Gigi Gryce on alto, George Barrow on baritone, Don Abney at the piano, Wendell Marshall on bass and Bobby Donaldson on drums, with Ernie Wilkins playing tenor and conducting. Three weeks later, on January 28, the band added Frank Rehak on trombone, Jerome Richardson on tenor and Hank Jones on piano. The April 13, 1957 session, Wilkins arranging and conducting, put Sahib Shihab, Rehak, Richardson, Barrow, Abney, Kenny Burrell, Al Lucas and Donaldson behind her. Those dates fed the two Savoy LPs, Big Maybelle Sings (MG-14005, October 1957) and Blues, Candy & Big Maybelle (MG 14011). She played the Apollo Theater in 1957.

Newport came the following summer. On July 5, 1958, at Freebody Park, she sang "Baby, Please Don't Go," "Cherry," "Let's Roll It," "One Hour" and "The Blues" with the festival's pickup Blues Band: Buck Clayton on trumpet, Jack Teagarden on trombone, Tony Scott on clarinet, Buddy Tate, Rudy Rutherford and Georgie Auld on saxophones, Ray Bryant on piano, Kenny Burrell on guitar, Tommy Bryant on bass and Jo Jones on drums. Columbia recorded the set and then sat on it; it did not surface until Phontastic issued it in 1992 as Blues in the Night No. 1, sharing a disc with Chuck Berry, Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson, and Jack Teagarden's own group, all taped the same day. Bert Stern's cameras caught her too, and her number is one of the set pieces of Jazz on a Summer's Day, the 1959 film of that festival that the Library of Congress added to the National Film Registry in 1999. She is on screen in white, working a crowd that had come for Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson, and she holds it.

After 1959 the hits thinned out and the label changes came fast: a W.C. Handy songbook album for Cub under the pseudonym Mamie Webster, What More Can a Woman Do? for Brunswick in 1962 with Robert Mersey directing the orchestra, The Soul of Big Maybelle for Scepter in 1965 under producers Luther Dixon and Tony Bruno, and two 1966 albums for Rojac, Got a Brand New Bag and Saga of the Good Life & Hard Times, the latter cut in Miami with jazz trumpeter Ira Sullivan in the horn section. "Don't Pass Me By" reached number 27 R&B in 1966 and a cover of "96 Tears" got to number 23 R&B and number 96 pop, her last chart entry. Heroin use took hold during the 1960s and her bookings became irregular; she eventually settled in Cleveland and was ill for most of the eighteen months before the end. She entered a diabetic coma and passed away in a Cleveland hospital on January 23, 1972, at 47, survived by her daughter Barbara Smith and five grandchildren. The Last of Big Maybelle appeared on Paramount the following year. Epic's 1983 reissue The Okeh Sessions took that year's W.C. Handy Award for vintage or reissue album, and she was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2011.

The voice was a heavy, gospel-schooled contralto with a growl on the bottom and a hard, clean edge at volume, and Fred Mendelsohn's stage name for her was a description of the instrument. What separates her from most of her R&B contemporaries is what she did with a band behind her: nine years in territory outfits, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm and Tiny Bradshaw's orchestra taught her to sing across an arrangement rather than over it, and the Ernie Wilkins charts on the 1957 Savoy dates use her the way a Basie chart uses a soloist, with the horns answering her line instead of padding it. She was equally at home on a straight standard as on a shouted blues, which is why Big Maybelle Sings could hold "All of Me," "Say It Isn't So" and "Baby Won't You Please Come Home" without sounding like a genre exercise. Her direct influence on the record is narrower than her reputation but easy to name: Jerry Lee Lewis took "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" from her 1955 Okeh single, and her Okeh and Savoy sides are a standard reference point for the passage from jump blues into soul. Critics of the day rated her highly among R&B singers, and the Newport booking, unusual for a singer with no jazz leader date to her name, was a judgment about her musicianship rather than her sales.