The Empress of the Blues...Bessie Smith[c. 1894 - 1937]


“BESSIE SMITH SANG THE BLUES like no other before her. And in more than fifty years since her death, few other blues singers are so revered. Amid early twentieth century songwriters, like ALBERTA HUNTER and Fats Waller, to modern Jazz singers like Cassandra Wilson and Ruth Brown, Bessie Smith is a towering example of the rich blues tradition handed down through generations of black American WOMEN. ‘Can’t nobody bake a jelly roll like mine,‘ Bessie sang teasingly in one her big hits from the twenties...

She was born in the daunting years of post-Civil War reconstruction and rose to the heights of fame and fortune as a saloon singer of formidable presence and vocal range. She cut a dashing figure in nightclubs in the cities where the blues flourished in the early twentieth century, including the Cotton Club in Harlem, Dreamland in Chicago and the smoky backrooms of juke joints on Beale Street in Memphis. Her untimely death robbed the world of a significant singing talent, one that was just beginning to blossom when Bessie died. Nonetheless, through the admiration and respect of a whole new generation of jazz and blues singers-not to mention several reissued recordings of her work-Bessie’s sassy singing style and sensible outlook on life is preserved for all time.

During a hardscrabble childhood in the rural South, Bessie learned to emulate the singing style of the older black women she knew. Her exact birthday is unknown, although some historians and musicologists date the year of her as 1894. What we do know is that Bessie was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee in a region steeped in American folk and gospel music dating back more than two hundred years. In the Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal churches all around Bessie’s Chattanooga home, gospel music and centuries-old spirituals could be heard. From there, the step into performing popular music was inevitable. Indeed, one of Bessie’s early mentors was the famous Ma Rainey, and Bessie honed her singing craft by performing in dozens of juke joints around the Deep South during the early years of the twentieth century. From Atlanta to Memphis to Birmingham and Shreveport, Bessie sang the slow, sometimes agonizing refrains of love gone wrong and men gone bad, and expressed in highly personal, gospel inflected songs the heart and soul of the black experience...

Yet, like Rainey, Alberta Hunter and BILLIE HOLIDAY, Bessie turned her experiences of this shattered environment into a core of her artistic expression. After making a name fort herself locally, Bessie was discovered by a well-known pianist and composer CLARENCE WILLIAMS. Over the next several years she began recording some of the earliest blues standards. She would sometimes disdain the use of a microphone in life performances, believing that her rich voice and peppy personality could carry her message across the footlights. At Columbia records, she became a powerful artistic presence, recording more than a hundred songs that endure today as blues classics.

Throughout her career Bessie shocked listeners with her frank references to personal relationships, She was among the first popular female singer to allude to a woman’s desire for sexual gratification...By the late twenties, 'the Empress of the Blues,’ executives at Columbia had dubbed her, reveled in the expensive trappings of a performer’s life....By the mid-thirities she was known worldwide for her recordings with LOUIS ARMSTRONG, FLETCHER HENDERSON, AND BENNY GOODMAN.

Like many other world-class black musicians, Bessie was frustrated by the JIM CROW LAWS that forced her to perform in blacks-only clubs and to enter and exit through the kitchens of glamorous white nightclubs where she occasionally sang. It was a life that defined “duality” of the black experience... In her public life Bessie, like other black women soared to the heights of artistic success in her home nation, yet in private life she was unable to enjoy the fruits of success...By 1936, she was at the pinnacle of the music industry and had even made a valuable impression on a new medium-major motion pictures.... in 1929, Bessie went to Hollywood and performed in several living short films... her performance in St. Louis Blues, a short made ...was so candid and moving that industry censors banned the film from the nation’s theaters. At that time, the troubling state of race relations in America was considered taboo, and Bessie’s poignant portrayal of a troubled singer frightened the movie industry watchdogs.

... Suddenly Bessie Smith was gone. She died an untimely death in September 1937 from injuries she received in a car wreck near Clarksdale, Mississippi but her unique talent, keen intelligence...live on....perserved on vinyl records, compact and film. Bessie’s legendary recordings....remain to provide vivid, soulful EVIDENCE of all that black AMERICAN WOMEN have contributed to this nation’s sterling cultural heritage. “


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Excerpts from “Fifty Black Women Who Changed America”

Alexander, Amy “Fifty Black Women Who Changed America” New Jersey: Birch Lane Press, 1999:65

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