Donald's Encyclopedia of Popular Music


SMITH, Bessie

(b 15 April 1894, Chattanooga TN; d 26 September 1937, Clarkedale MS) The greatest of all female blues singers, 'Empress of the Blues'. She was one of seven children, orphaned at about age seven; sang in the streets for pennies. Worked with Ma Rainey '12, as chorus girl c'12; toured with Rainey '15 in Rabbits Foot Minstrels; had her own Liberty Belles revue in Atlanta '18-19. She may have recorded for Swan/Emerson '21; some sources say a record was issued under the name of Rosa Henderson, but blues discographies give Henderson's first record date as '23. There may have been a test record for OKeh '23, now lost; she recorded for Columbia '23-33; 160 sides survive. She was paid $250 a side in her heyday; her records are said to have saved Columbia from bankruptcy. Thirty-six tracks were reissued on three LPs early '50s (The Bessie Smith Story); all 160 in five two-LP sets '70.

She was a headliner in the mid-to-late 1920s; Pop Memories '86 calculated that 15 of her records were best-sellers, beginning with 'Downhearted Blues' (no. 1 '23, selling 780,000 in six months), accompanied (as on several others) by Clarence Williams; on three '25 hits including 'St. Louis Blues' she was accompanied by Louis Armstrong, but he sounds uncharacteristically restrained: he was becoming a star and she didn't like competition. Other hits included accompaniment by Fletcher Henderson and Buster Bailey ('After You've Gone'), Coleman Hawkins (on clarinet); legendary trombonist Charlie Green (then with Henderson) played on many records; two '23 sides were duets with Clara Smith; prophetically, 'Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out' '29 was her last big seller. She made a short film St Louis Blues '29, the soundtrack issued on several labels including Biograph (the band including the unmistakeable James P. Johnson, and the W.C. Handy Choir). The Depression wrecked her career and Columbia dropped her '31. John Hammond brought her back into the studio in November '33; she refused to record blues and wanted to do something more modern: she was paid $50 a side for four sides with a band led by Buck Washington including Chu Berry, Jack Teagarden, Frankie Newton and a barely audible Benny Goodman on 'Gimme A Pigfoot'. She was considered old-fashioned by then; even the black community saw her as a washed-up vaudevillian (Hammond produced Billie Holiday's first recording session the following month; an era had ended and another begun).

There was a powerful dignity and a sense of humour, along with irony and resignation in her work: she is one of the all-time great stars of the gramophone record. With her big, beautiful contralto voice she developed a method, like Ma Rainey, of singing each song around centre tones, perhaps in order to project more easily before the days of microphones, and she would often choose to sing a song in an unusual key. Her artistry in bending and stretching notes and her emotionally naked interpretations resulted in records that will never stop selling; hear her on 'After You've Gone', one moment phrasing across the beat and the next delivering the syllables like hammer blows. She could turn any song into a classic because in her own way she was an interpreter the equal of Holiday, Frank Sinatra or anybody else. Not related to Clara, Mamie or Trixie Smith, or Bessie Mae Smith, who recorded for OKeh, Paramount and Vocalion '27-30, also probably under other names. The Essential Bessie Smith (Columbia Legacy '97) collects 36 tracks on two CDs.

Badly injured in a car crash in 1937, Bessie lost too much blood before help was obtained. Chris Albertson found in researching his biography Bessie: Empress Of The Blues '72 that the legend that she was refused hospital admittance because she was black was not true. He interviewed Dr. Hugh Smith in 1971, a young man going fishing in 1937 who many years later became director of the local medical clinic. He came across the wreck and could see that Bessie Smith was very badly injured: she might have survived given the technology of many years later, he said, but in 1937 she was doomed. The rural roads were very narrow, to save money, and Bessie's arm had been virtually torn off (they even had a term for that: it was a sideswipe injury, in the days before air conditioning when people had an arm hanging out the window), plus she had serious internal injuries. Dr Smith didn't know who Bessie Smith was at the time, but later became an Art Tatum fan, and even something of an amateur jazz pianist himself. In any case, he said, no ambulance driver in Mississippi in 1937 would have tried to take a black patient to a white hospital.