From 1909 to 1918 Bradford performed in a song-and-dance act with Jeanette Taylor (known as Bradford and Jeanette).

Blues and vaudeville songwriter, publisher and musical director, was born John Henry Perry Bradford (1895 - 1970) in Montgomery, Alabama, the son of Adam Bradford, a bricklayer and tile setter, and Bella (maiden name unknown), a cook. Early in his youth Bradford learned to play piano by ear. In 1901 his family moved to Atlanta, where his mother cooked meals for prisoners in the adjacent Fulton Street Jail. There he was exposed to the inmates' blues and folk singing. He would often visit Decatur Street, the black district in Atlanta, to learn singing, dancing and piano from the black entertainers. In 1906 he joined Allen's New Orleans Minstrels, and then worked briefly as a solo pianist in Chicago.

From about 1909 to 1918 he performed in a song-and-dance act with Jeanette Taylor calling themselves Bradford and Jeanette. They traveled widely and Bradford absorbed more black culture which he incorporated into the songs he wrote. A shrewd entrepreneur, he initially published his songs as sheet music, to be sold after his performances. This informal method of distribution was caused in part by the racist structure of the publishing industry, which put roadblocks in the paths of aspiring African American songwriters.

In 1918 he settled in New York City and, instead of peddling his own sheet music, sold his songs to white publisher, Frederick V. Bowers. In that same year, to publicize his songs, he and other actors produced the Made in Harlem Revue which featured cabaret singer, Mamie Smith, singing his title song, Harlem Blues.

Bradford was impressed with Mamie, and felt she could help him sell his conviction that there was a huge, untapped black audience eager to buy authentic black recordings sung by blacks.

"I thought our folks had a story to tell, and it only could be told in vocal, not instrumental, recordings."

He finally convinced Fred Hager at OKeh Records to schedule a recording session for February 14, 1920, to record Mamie Smith singing two Bradford songs, That Thing Called Love and You Can't Keep A Good Man Down. Both songs were backed by OKeh's white studio band, the Milo Rega Orchestra. Essentially these were two Pop songs with a slight Jazz and Blues feel. The two songs sold 10,000 copies within a month, which was enough to prove Bradford's point, and to warrant a follow-up session, on August 10, 1920, to record another two of Bradford's songs, It's Right Here For You and Crazy Blues. But this time both songs were backed by Bradford's hand-picked African American band, the Jazz Hounds.

Crazy Blues was a sensation, quickly selling 75,000 copies. Other record labels scrambled to sign black female singers. This marked the beginning of the Classic Blues era and, more importantly, opened the door for all black Blues and Jazz musicians on the newly-created "race" labels.

From this momentous high, Bradford's career slowly began to decline. Bradford's publishing problems started with the success of Crazy Blues. The lyrics of this song were identical to his Harlem Blues, a song for which he sold the publishing rights. In fact, by his own admission, ". . . I feared what would happen if the song became a big hit, because I had used the same lyrics three times before." In 1921 he was sued for selling a song to more than one publisher. This was settled out-of-court. In 1922 he was again sued: this time for publishing a song owned by another publisher. This suit also involved perjury of a character witness. Bradford was sentenced to four months in prison.

At some point he decided life might be simpler if he kept the rights to his songs and built his own publishing empire. He was very aware of the money to be made in publishing based on royalties received as a songwriter. Consequently, through the 1920s, he built four publishing companies that eventually owned the publishing rights to about 1,400 songs. But this proved to be his undoing. As a publisher he needed to market records, but his catalog of songs was blackballed by the recording industry. As Bradford didn't have the resources to manufacture and distribute his own records, he was left out in the cold.

Through the 1920s Bradford was active with several early Jazz bands. In 1923, needing to do something exceptional to put his career back on track, Bradford assembled a Jazz band with greats such as Louis Armstrong, James P Johnson and Buster Bailey. Perry Bradford and his Jazz Phools recorded from 1923–1927 without much success. Bradford continued composing for musical revues through the 1920s without much impact. In 1927 he was moved to write, All I Have is Gone. In 1940, Bradford copyrighted Keep A-Knockin', there were several versions of the song prior to 1940. It was a big hit for Little Richard in 1957.

Little Richard had this to say: "Everything happens for a reason. Who knew that the style Perry was developing in the 1920s would lead to Rock and Roll."

In 1965, feeling like an outcast in the very music he fostered, Bradford felt compelled to publish his book, Born With The Blues, in which he describes "the true story of the pioneering Blues singers and musicians in the early days of Jazz." In this book he attempts to debunk much music history as we know it. Perry Bradford the man whose historic song, Crazy Blues, opened the door for commercial black music lived on relief and worked in New York as a mailman at Queens General Hospital, where he died after having spent his last years in ill health and confined to a nursing home. He died on April 20, 1970.

In 1994 Crazy Blues was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Sources: Harlem Renaissance Lives from the African American National Biography, edited by Henry Louis Gates and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham