Bessie Smith was a blues and jazz singer of the Harlem Renaissance who is still known as the ‘Empress of the Blues’.
Elizabeth ‘Bessie’ Smith was the youngest child of seven, born in Chattanooga, Tennessee on April 15, 1895, 130 years ago today . After her parents died, with no money and no means of support, Bessie began singing on the streets with her guitar-playing brother Andrew. By the age of 14, she was performing in theatres in big cities like Atlanta and Indianapolis and there is a report published in the Indianapolis newspaper The Freedman of her “captivating the audience with her contralto voice” when she was only 14 years old.
Bessie Smith became a star of the Black vaudeville circuits. Her brother Clarence was a comedian and dancer in the Moses Stokes Traveling Show. Bessie was mentored by Ma Rainey, known as the ‘Mother of the Blues‘ who taught her to command an audience and navigate the music business.
By the time she was 24 years old, Bessie Smith was performing as a solo act throughout the United States. In 1923, she signed with Columbia Records. Her first recording was Down-hearted Blues, written by blues singer Alberta Hunter and pianist Lovie Austin. That song was a major hit of 1923 and it launched Smith into the national spotlight. From then on, Smith played and recorded with jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet and she became the highest paid Black entertainer of her time.
Smith’s lyrics reflected the hardships of being Black working class by singing about poverty, racism, and sexism as well as love and female sexuality. She was a heavy drinker and had relationships with both men and women. Her personality and life experiences were channelled into her voice.
Despite her success, her end was tragic. On her way home in 1937, she suffered fatal injuries in a car accident in Mississippi. There are various stories about what happened following the accident, one of which is that she was refused treatment at a white hospital but this has been subsequently discredited. She died without regaining consciousness although there is a widely circulated story, probably apocryphal, that her last words were, “I’m going, but I’m going in the name of the Lord.”.
7000 people attended her funeral in Philadelphia. She was buried in an unmarked grave because her estranged husband pocketed the money raised for a gravestone but in 1971 the singer Janis Joplin purchased a headstone for Bessie Smith. It reads “The greatest blues singer in the world will never stop singing.”
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