Clara Smith was born in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. In her youth she worked on African American theater circuits and tent shows. By the late 1910s she was appearing as a headliner at the Lyric Theater in New Orleans and on the TOBA circuit. In 1923 she settled in New York City, appearing at cabarets and speakeasies there; that same year she made the first of her commercially successfull series of disc recordings for Columbia Records, for whom she would continue recording through 1932.
In 1933 she moved to Detroit, Michigan and worked at theaters there until her hospitalization in early 1935 for heart disease, of which she died.