Most critics consider Bessie Smith to be the greatest of women blues singers. She set the standard for the classic blues singers of the 1920s and influenced later ones such as Billie HOLIDAY and Janis Joplin. Her flamboyance on and off stage befit a woman known as the “empress of the blues.”
Smith was born on April 15, 1894, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She was orphaned at around the age of seven and had to sing in the streets for pennies. Smith first performed on stage in 1912, starting out as a dancer and later becoming a chorus girl. Her big, lush singing voice soon commanded attention, and she quickly became a featured singer with travelling tent shows such as the Moses Stokes Company. The latter featured Ma RAINEY, the first of the great female blues singers, who may well have influenced Smith’s singing style.
By the end of the 1910s, Smith was leading the Liberty Belles Revue, based in Atlanta, Georgia. In the early 1920s, she worked in vaudeville and with various bands in Philadelphia and Atlantic City.
Smith is said to have auditioned for several recording companies before Columbia Records took her on in February 1923. That same month she cut her first and what would become her most successful record, “Down Hearted Blues,” which was backed on the other side with “Gulf Coast Blues.” The single sold 780,000 copies in six months. “Down Hearted Blues” was similar to many of Smith’s hit recordings in that it was a new version of another woman’s song, in this case Alberta Hunter’s 1922 hit.
Smith was a master of the “classic blues,” a jazz-influenced style of singing that brought the inflections and expressions of blues to popular vaudeville tunes such as “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Smith worked with many jazz musicians, including Clarence Williams, Louis ARMSTRONG, Fletcher HENDERSON, Sidney Bechet, and Coleman HAWKINS. From each of these master artists Smith learned a keen sense of timing and phrasing, and sophisticated vocal techniques. She was also a deeply emotional, earthy singer, which stemmed in part from her tortured, volatile personality. She drank heavily, often got into fights, and had wild affairs with both men and women. However, she was also capable of being kind and generous. Both her music and her lifestyle reflected the fact that she was an emancipated, urban black woman, something rare for the time. Smith’s career flourished in the mid- to late 1920s, when she recorded memorable songs such as “Young Woman’s Blues” (1926) and “Back-Water Blues” (1927). Besides recording, Smith toured the country with her own highly successful shows, including Harlem Frolics, Yellow Girl Revue, and Steamboat Days.
Smith’s last big blues hit, “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” was recorded in 1929, the same year she made the short film St. Louis Blues, featuring the eponymous W. C. Handy song that was one of her signatures.
The Great Depression and the fading popularity of the classic blues singers led Columbia to release Smith from her contract in 1931. When producer John Hammond brought her back into the studio in late 1933, she refused to record blues, wanting to do something more modern. Hammond produced a reissue of her work for Columbia in 1936, and her career was picking up when she died on September 26, 1937, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, from injuries suffered in an auto accident while on tour.
Stan Hieronymus
SEE ALSO:
BLUES; NEW ORLEANS JAZZ/DIXIELAND.
FURTHER READING
Firedwald, W. Jazz Singing
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1996);
Jones, Hettie. Big StarFallin’ Mama: Five Women in
Black Music (New York: Viking, 1995);
Kay, Jackie. Bessie Smith
(Bath: Absolute Press, 1997).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
The Bessie Smith Collection;
The Complete Recordings, Vols. 1 and 2.