Writer Pushes to Get Headstone for Famed Blues Singer's Unmarked Grave

OAKWOOD — A music writer is raising money for a gravestone to mark the Staten Island resting place of an iconic blues singer.

Michael Cala started a campaign last week on Indiegogo to have a monument put at the grave site of Mamie Smith, who was buried at the Frederick Douglass Memorial Park cemetery in 1946.

"Mamie was, at one point, the most famous African American blues singer in America," Cala wrote on the campaign's site. "She is lying in empty ground and I am determined to change that."

Smith was the first black vocalist to record a blues song, "Crazy Blues," according to NPR. The song became a hit, selling 75,000 copies in a month, the station said.