Laura Smith (blues singer) Laura Smith (blues singer) Laura Smith (March 1882 – February 1932) was an American classic female blues and country blues singer. Songs she recorded include "Gonna Put You Right in Jail" and her version of "Don't You Leave Me Here". She led Laura Smith and her Wild Cats and also worked with Clarence Williams and Perry Bradford. Details of her life outside the music industry are scanty. The researchers Bob Eagle and Eric LeBlanc state that she was born Loretta Bryant in Illinois in 1882. Other sources suggest that she was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, at an unknown date. In
When the War Was On with "Everybody Help the Boys Come Home" (1927) by William and Versey Smith, husband and wife. The other side of that record by the Smiths is "When That Great Ship Went Down", which relates to the sinking of RMS "Titanic". Johnson recorded his only other song on a temporal subject, "God Moves on the Water" (about the "Titanic" disaster), on the same day as he recorded "When the War Was On". It therefore seems likely that he knew that record. When the War Was On "When the War Was On" is a call and response blues song recorded in 1929