Bessie Smith
1894-1937

Smith, Bessie (b. April 15, 1894?, Chattanooga, Tenn.; d. September 26, 1937, Clarksdale, Miss.), greatest blues vocalist of the 1920s, known as the Empress of the Blues.

Bessie Smith was the greatest of the classic blues singers of the 1920s; she laid the foundation for all subsequent women's blues and jazz singing. Her singing combined an array of vocal embellishments, including scoops, slides, and blue notes, and a rhythmic freedom that heightened the emotional effect of her lyrics. African American audiences loved her, especially in the South and those in the North made up of recent southern migrants, who appreciated her rough, down-home style. "She could bring about mass hypnotism," New Orleans guitarist Danny Barker recalled. "When she was performing you could hear a pin drop." In part, this was due to her musical artistry and showmanship; in part, it was because many identified with her success. Smith had risen from poverty to comparative wealth on her own terms and by her own talent. Many African Americans also admired her attitude toward white people — Smith made no effort to befriend whites and never altered her performing style to appeal to them.

Smith was born around 1894 in a poor section of Chattanooga, Tennessee. One of seven children and orphaned young, she was singing on street corners by the age of nine. Smith grew to be a large-boned woman with a powerful and expressive voice. In 1912, while still a teenager, she joined a traveling vaudeville show. Surprisingly, she was hired as a dancer rather than as a singer, joining her dancer and comedian brother Clarence, who was already in the show. The troupe also included blues singer Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, who reportedly took Smith under her wing.

Smith settled in Atlanta, Georgia, where she performed regularly at the 81 Theater, part of the black nationwide Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA) circuit. She began touring on the TOBA circuit, performing in the North as well as the Southeast, and by the end of World War I she was its star attraction. During these years Smith also had a brief marriage to Jack Gee and began a lifetime of hard drinking. She did not enter a recording studio until she was nearly 30 years old and fully formed as an artist.

African American listeners did not agree. In less than six months her first record, "Downhearted Blues," sold an astonishing 780,000 copies. In fact, Smith played a direct role in rescuing Columbia, then nearly in receivership, and putting it on a firm financial basis. Columbia proclaimed its new star the Empress of the Blues, but Smith received no royalties, only a flat fee for each recording. During the 1920s she recorded prolifically with a wide range of accompanists, including cornetist Louis Armstrong, clarinet player Sidney Bechet, pianist Fletcher Henderson, and her two favorite muscians, trumpeter Joe Smith and trombone player Charlie Green.

Smith toured extensively. During the winter she appeared at black theaters and at occasional whites-only venues such as Nashville's Orpheum Theater. In warm weather she headlined her own big-tent variety show, with the entire cast traveling from performance to performance in her private Pullman car. In 1924 she made her first radio broadcast on WMC in Memphis, Tennessee, singing a set that included "Mistreatin' Papa" and "Chicago Bound." Five years later she starred in a black-and-white short, St. Louis Blues, singing the title song; it is the only film footage of Smith performing. Although her Northern audiences declined when the blues craze passed in the late 1920s, Smith remained popular throughout the South, where the blues was indigenous. After the Depression put an end to her recording career in 1931, she continued performing before appreciative Southern audiences.

During the 1930s Smith made the transition from a heavier blues style to the more lightly swinging jazz of the Swing Era. She was featured at Harlem's renowned Apollo Theater during 1935 and a short time later substituted for Billie Holiday in the Broadway show Stars over Broadway. Smith appeared to be on the verge of a comeback when she was killed in a 1937 automobile accident. Record producer John Hammond, writing in Downbeat magazine five years after her death, and playwright Edward Albee, in The Death of Bessie Smith (1960), popularized the idea that the singer died because a whites-only hospital refused to admit her. However, her biographer Chris Albertson concluded that Smith died at the scene of the accident and, given the extent of her injuries, she could not have been saved.

Contributed By:
James Clyde Sellman