Ida Cox sang in church choirs as a child in Georgia. She ran away from home in 1910 when she was a teenager and performed in minstriel and tent shows as a comedienne and singer. Sometime during this period she married a performer minstriel named Alder Cox. Ida worked her why into vaudeville and eventually became a headliner. She toured the country throughout the Teens and 1920s sometimes singing with Jazz greats like Jelly Roll Morton and with King Oliver at the Plantation Cafe in Chicago. In 1923 she began her recording contract with the Paramount label, who billed her as the Uncrowned Queen of the Blues. She recorded extensively throughout the 1920s often using pseudonyms such as Kate Lewis, Velma Bradley, Julia Powers and Jane Smith. Cox wrote many of her own songs, and had several of her own touring companies such as Raisin' Cain and Darktown Scandals which criss-crossed the country during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Unlike many of the Classic Blues singers of the 1920s Cox continued to perform and occasionally record during the Depression. She was married to Blues pianist Jesse Crump during the 1920s and 1930s. They recorded together often for Paramount. In 1934 Cox and Bessie Smith appeared together in the musical revue Fan Waves at the Apollo Theatre. She spent most of the rest of the decade on the road until 1939 when she performed regularly at the Cafe Society night club in New York City. She also appeared in John Hammond's Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall in 1939. which briefly revitaled her recording career. She released records under the name of Ida Cox and her Allstar Band and Ida Cox and her Allstar Orchestra during this time period. In the mid 1940's she had a stroke and passed out during a performance in New York. She left show business and moved to Knoxville, Tennessee where she lived with her daughter. Some time in the 1950s she began performing again sporadically. In 1961, Cox recorded for the last time on the Riverside label. The album was called "Blues for Rampart Street". She was accompanied by the Coleman Hawkins Quintet on this record. She died of cancer in 1967.