Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith, born in 1894 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is often celebrated as the "Empress of the Blues" and is considered one of the greatest blues singers of all time. Growing up in poverty, Smith faced numerous challenges, including the early deaths of her parents and being raised by her older sister. She discovered her powerful singing voice during her childhood and found early success performing on the streets and later with traveling minstrel shows, including alongside Gertrude "Ma" Rainey. Smith's big break came in 1923 with her recording of "Downhearted Blues," which propelled her to fame and led to over 160 recordings, making her the first blues artist to reach a wide white audience.
Despite her success during the Roaring Twenties, Smith's career declined in the 1930s due to the Great Depression, changing musical tastes, and personal struggles, including alcoholism. She passed away in a tragic car accident in 1937, with conflicting accounts of her final moments, particularly regarding her treatment at a racially segregated hospital. Smith's legacy endures through her influence on later artists, including Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin, and her contributions to the blues genre, which expressed the struggles and injustices faced by African Americans. Her music continues to resonate, reminding listeners of the rich cultural heritage and the resilience found in the blues.
Bessie Smith
Singer
- Born: April 15, 1894
- Birthplace: Chattanooga, Tennessee
- Died: September 26, 1937
- Place of death: Clarksdale, Mississippi
American blues singer
The first internationally popular female blues singer, Smith paved the way for later female blues and gospel singers such as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mahalia Jackson.
Area of achievement Music
Early Life
Bessie Smith was born into abject poverty in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Her parents, William and Laura Smith, had a total of seven children in what Bessie later described as “a little ramshackle cabin.” William was a part-time Baptist minister who ran a small mission but had to support his family by doing manual labor. He died shortly after Bessie was born, and her mother died by the time Bessie was eight or nine years old. Bessie and the other children were reared by their oldest sister Viola, who became an unwed mother at an early age, adding another hungry mouth to the family.
Smith realized at an early age that she had an exceptional voice. She used to sing on the streets of Chattanooga with her brother Andrew accompanying her on the guitar. Then another brother got her a job with the Moses Stokes traveling minstrel show, and she began appearing with the legendary blues singer, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey. Their audiences were predominantly black because African American music was yet to be discovered by most white Americans. For many years, Smith toured the South with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels under the tutelage of Rainey, who is generally considered a blues singer second only to Smith.
It was a hard life, with exhausting schedules, segregated accommodations, humiliating encounters with bigoted white police officers, late hours, casual sex, gambling, fighting, and plenty of drinking. Smith did not use hard drugs, but she enjoyed smoking marijuana, which was considered fairly innocuous and did not become illegal under federal law until 1937. Smith picked up many bad habits from the people she associated with, who included gangsters, prostitutes, pimps, gamblers, dope peddlers, con artists, and assorted grifters, along with the hard-boiled booking agents who paid starvation wages to their overworked performers.
Smith’s early life taught her to be tough in a tough world. She was a big, strong woman who weighed approximately 210 pounds; she became notorious for her temper as well as her powerful voice. Her singing has been described as rough, coarse, low-down, and dirty, but her voice was a perfect instrument for the earthy blues songs that would eventually make her world famous.
Life’s Work
Smith’s big break came in 1923, when she was discovered by Frank Walker, a talent scout for Columbia Records. Her recording of “Downhearted Blues” sold three-quarters of a million copies, a fantastic achievement in those early days of wind-up phonographs and primitive recording equipment. In that one year she sold more than two million records. Some of her other famous recordings were “Jealous Hearted Blues” and “Jailhouse Blues.” The power of Smith’s singing is impossible to describe in words. Fortunately, her recordings are readily available throughout the United States, Europe, and elsewhere.
During the next decade, Smith recorded approximately 160 songs, accompanied by some musicians who also made music history, including trumpeter Louis Armstrong and pianist-bandleader Fletcher Henderson. At the peak of her career, during the Roaring Twenties, she was making as much as two thousand dollars a week from personal appearances and had a large additional income from royalties on record sales. It was her recordings that first brought her to the attention of white listeners in America and Europe; the affluence of this new audience made her rich and famous.
The titles of some of Smith’s most popular songs provide an idea of the nihilistic philosophical background of the blues, which appealed so strongly to white audiences during the lawless Prohibition era. One famous song was “’T’ain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do.” Another was “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” The standard twelve-bar form consisted of four bars per line, with the first line of the lyrics repeated, as in the following stanza:
I cried and worried, all night I laid and groaned,
Many citizens, both black and white, regarded the blues as “devil’s music” because it seemed so hopeless and negative, and because it frequently celebrated such activities as drinking and having sex. Nevertheless, it appealed to many people who were disillusioned with traditional religion and were becoming pessimistic about the human condition in an era of gangsterism, predatory laissez-faire capitalism, and crooked politics. The blues had an influence not only on popular music but also on poetry, fiction, drama, and other art forms.
Smith lavished her money on her husband Jack Gee, an enormous man with a temper matching Smith’s own. He had been a Philadelphia police officer but left the force to manage or mismanage his wife’s business affairs. Gee was not faithful to Smith, and she was not faithful to him. She was sexually attracted to women as well as men and suffered many beatings from her husband, who was extremely jealous in addition to being concerned about guarding the source of his income. They separated in 1930 but remained on reasonably good terms until her death.
Smith’s life ended abruptly in a tragic automobile accident on a narrow Louisiana road in the dead of night. The driver of her car did not see a truck that was blocking part of the road; they crashed into it at full speed, and the singer suffered numerous serious injuries, including a nearly severed arm. The aftermath has been the subject of many conflicting stories. Some people claim that Smith died from loss of blood because she was refused admittance at a racially segregated hospital. For more than thirty years she lay in an unmarked grave. Then in the 1960’s, the famous rock and roll singer Janis Joplin, acknowledging her debt to Smith’s inspirational example, paid to have a headstone created bearing the epitaph “The Greatest Blues Singer in the World Will Never Stop Singing.”
When Smith died in 1937, her career was on the decline. Record sales had collapsed with the advent of the Great Depression after the stock market crash in October of 1929. New kinds of popular music were being developed to suit the younger generation and the more sophisticated, urbane spirit of the 1930’s. Swing, as exemplified by such big bands as those of Glenn Miller, Count Basie, and Tommy Dorsey, had stolen the spotlight from blues and jazz, and Smith could not adapt to this type of music. Alcoholism was another important factor in destroying her illustrious career. She acquired a bad reputation for not showing up for engagements or for being too intoxicated to perform when she finally arrived.
Significance
Smith is generally considered to have been the greatest blues singer and is still referred to as the Empress of the Blues. Before her time, most blues singers had been men. Smith not only became a great blues singer in her own right but also feminized the musical form so that the way was opened for many women to follow in her footsteps. Some of America’s most famous popular female vocalists owe their success to the model provided by Smith. Among those others are Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Joplin, but there were also countless others whose careers were not as brilliant or dramatic. She also influenced the musical styles of such famous jazz musicians as Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, and Jack Teagarden, among many others.
Smith was the first blues singer to achieve popularity with white audiences, which brought the wonderfully expressive musical form of the blues to the attention of the entire world. She introduced the blues to the new media of phonograph records, radio, and talking pictures, which had the capability of reaching vast numbers of people. Her recordings made white audiences in the United States and Europe conscious of the important contributions of African Americans to popular art and inspired musicologists to scour the South in search of great folk musicians who were still living in poverty and obscurity.
It was many years, however, before another new generation rediscovered Smith through her recordings and gave her the credit she richly deserved for her contributions to popular music. In 1970, Columbia Records initiated one of the biggest reissue projects in recording history. The company released Smith’s entire output on five double albums. Two hundred thousand copies of these albums were snapped up within two years, and her recordings continue to be played on radio broadcasts and featured in record stores all over the world.
The blues expressed the suffering of African Americans and made other people more conscious of the injustice that this minority group had experienced since the settlement of the American colonies began. Black women were an oppressed minority within a minority because they often bore the burden of providing all the financial and moral support for their families. Smith’s beautiful blues songs carried the implicit message that racial injustice was responsible for much of the pain they expressed. Because of the many recordings Smith made during her lifetime, she became better known after her death than she was at the height of her career. Great art always has the power to bring people closer together, and Smith continues to influence people all over the world in that positive way.
Bibliography
Albee, Edward. The Death of Bessie Smith. London: S. French, 1960. This one-act play by a well-known American author helped to spread Smith’s reputation to a wider audience and also helped to perpetuate the legend that she had died of injuries because she was refused admittance to a white hospital in Tennessee.
Albertson, Chris. Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues. Rev. and expanded ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. A carefully researched biography written by an authority on Smith’s music and told in an interesting, anecdotal fashion. Liberally illustrated with black-and-white photographs of Smith taken throughout her life. Contains a valuable discography of Smith’s recordings as well as those of Ma Rainey and other significant blues artists.
Azerrad, Michael. “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.” Rolling Stone, February 9, 1989, 93. A section on inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame discusses the meteoric career of the Empress of the Blues and the great musical artists with whom she worked. Contains a portrait of Bessie Smith.
Brooks, Edward. The Bessie Smith Companion: A Critical and Detailed Appreciation of the Recordings. New York: Da Capo Press, 1982. This book represents many years of intense work by a Bessie Smith enthusiast who offers a detailed analysis of 159 recordings by the singer along with discussions of her life and the characteristics of her various accompanists. The best Smith discography available.
Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998. Feminist scholar Davis examines the songs of Smith and the two other singers, maintaining their music contains a “historical feminist consciousness that reflected the lives of working-class black communities.” Davis argues that, contrary to popular belief, Smith’s songs are not about women’s desolation and despair but are expressions of women’s independence and assertiveness.
Feinstein, Elaine. Bessie Smith. New York: Viking, 1985. A short, well-written biography covering all the main details of Bessie Smith’s life. This book is part of Viking’s Lives of Modern Women series. Contains photographs, a chronology, a bibliography, and information on available recordings.
Jones, Hettie. Big Star Fallin’ Mama: Five Women in Black Music. New York: Viking Press, 1974. This excellent small volume contains chapters devoted to Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Mahalia Jackson, Billie Holiday, and Aretha Franklin, focusing on their influences on one another as well as their contributions to popular music. Contains good photographs of all five women.
Mezzrow, Milton. Really the Blues. New York: Random House, 1946. Reprint. New York: Limelight Editions, 1987. One of the best books about the history and meaning of the blues. Mezzrow was a white musician who knew most of the early blues and jazz artists in Chicago and New York, including Bessie Smith. Discusses the early use of drugs by musicians and the precarious lives they led on the road.
Moore, Carmen. Somebody’s Angel Child: The Story of Bessie Smith. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969. A short biography containing excerpts from the lyrics of Bessie Smith’s blues songs. Emphasizes how the songs reflected her life experiences. Contains a discography and a bibliography.
Terkel, Studs. Giants of Jazz. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1957. A famous American writer discusses perceptively and appreciatively the careers of thirteen great jazz artists. He devotes one chapter to Bessie Smith.
Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century
1901-1940: 1910’s: Handy Ushers in the Commercial Blues Era; 1920’s: Harlem Renaissance; February 15, 1923: Bessie Smith Records “Downhearted Blues”; November, 1925: Armstrong Records with the Hot Five; 1929: Hallelujah Is the First Important Black Musical Film; 1933: Billie Holiday Begins Her Recording Career.
1941-1970: October 3, 1946: Mahalia Jackson Begins Her Recording Career.