Bessie Smith

Happy Birthday, Bessie Smith 1894-1937...Known as "The Empress of the Blues", Smith lived the hard life she sang about. She was born into poverty in Tennessee and had lost both parents by the age of nine. She and her younger brother Andrew would sing and dance on street corners to earn money to live on. Her older brother Clarence began traveling with a minstrel show and within a couple of years he arranged an audition for his talented younger sister.

Smith was 18 when she joined the Moses Stokes traveling minstrel show, The Rabbit Foot Minstrels,  but they already had a singer, the bawdy, soulful Ma Rainey. Smith was taken on as a dancer and was taken under the wing of the older Rainey who helped her develop her stage presentation. It wasn't long before Smith was also singing in the show.The show circuit was a difficult life: low wages, late hours, fighting, gambling and abusing drugs and alcohol were common place events. Despite the difficulties, Smith's voice could fill a hall with it's expressive sound and earthy tones and she soon developed a following throughout the south and along the eastern seaboard.

She settled in Philadelphia in 1923 and made her first recordings for Columbia, "Gulf Coast Blues" and "Downhearted Blues" (written by Alberta Hunter) accompanied by Clarence Williams. They were a huge success, selling over 750 thousand copies in 6 months. From 1923 to 1931 Smith would record over 160 titles for Columbia and would establish herself as the most popular Blues singer of the 1920's. She would also work with some of the most celebrated jazz musicians of the day including Fletcher Henderson, James P. Johnson, Coleman Hawkins, Don Redman and Louis Armstrong. Her rendition of "St. Louis Blues" with Armstrong is considered by most critics as one of the finest recording of the 1920's.

Smith would become the highest paid African-American entertainer of the era, making two thousand dollars a week. Her traveling show was an extravaganza with 40 cast members and Smith singing and dancing throughout. They traveled in a personal train car to avoid the dispiriting effects of the racism encountered on the road. Adoring fans greeted her at each stop but in spite of her commercial success, Smith's life echoed the blues she sang. Her marriage to Jack Gee was stormy and both partners were unfaithful (Gee was never able to accept her bisexuality) and Smith struggled with alcohol addiction.

By the end of the 20's, Smith's raw, uncut country blues style had faded in fashion and the depression undermined her recording ability. Nevertheless, she continued to travel and perform, finding ways to reshape her act, adding Tin-Pan Alley tunes for more popular appeal. In 1929 she starred in a two reel film, "St. Louis Blues", that was semi biographical which stayed in circulation through 1932.

Her lean years ended in 1937 when the recording industry began to soar again on the popularity of the new swing music. Smith was asked by Okeh records to record 4 sides, her last, and they would stand as the possibilities that might have been as Smith shifted from the blues to swing.  Not long after, Smith would die as a result of a car crash at the age of 43.

Smith's recordings would go on to influence blues, jazz and rock and roll singers in the future, most notably Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughn, Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin, who in tribute, paid to put a head stone on her unmarked grave.