More than seventy years after her tragically early death (at age forty-three), it seems increasingly clear that Bessie Smith may be the most important female voice of the early twentieth century. Who else comes close? Back in the day, both Ethel Waters, who also sang the blues, and Ruth Etting, who didn’t, probably sold more records, but neither is as well remembered and well reissued as Bessie Smith. (Nor, for that matter, is Kate Smith, who shared Bessie’s name and her body type, but little else.) If you were to stop a hundred people on Fifth Avenue in 2010, and read them a list of singers who were stars in the acoustic era, Enrico Caruso, Al Jolson, and Bessie Smith are probably the only names anyone would recognize.
It wasn’t until shortly before Smith’s death in 1937 that other women’s names emerged that would be familiar to passersby today: Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, and Billie Holiday. There certainly wasn’t a female blues singer who could challenge Smith’s supremacy until the arrival of Dinah Washington, who clearly viewed Smith as the one to beat. Yet even the mighty Dinah could never eclipse Bessie in her own backyard.
Whereas the influence of most seminal artists tends to wane as the generations pass, Smith actually seems to have grown in importance; you can hear a lot more of her in Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, or Bono than you can Jolson or Caruso (or Crosby or Sinatra, for that matter). With her big, dark, deep voice and biting attack, Smith was virtually unchallenged as blues royalty. Her power and presence were an obvious influence on such different singers as rock icon Janis Joplin in the sixties and nineties cabaret chanteuse Susannah McCorkle.
Billie Holiday is a special case. She famously said that she wanted to combine Smith’s force with Louis Armstrong’s flexibility, but as Dan Morgenstern and others have pointed out, in the actual substance of Holiday’s music, one can more readily detect the influence of Ethel Waters. Even so, in her tribute to Smith, Billie recorded four of Bessie’s most famous numbers (“Do Your Duty,” “ ’Tain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do,” “Keeps on a Rainin’,” and “Gimme a Pigfoot”). Apparently, Decca’s Milt Gabler (although he later denied it) had planned a Billie Sings Bessie tribute album but only got as far as these four songs. Still, Smith would be the subject of similar tributes by singers as diverse as Dinah Washington (her heir apparent), Jimmy Rushing, and folksinger Ronnie Gilbert of the Weavers. In the summer of 2003 (when the new edition of the definitive Smith biography, Chris Albertson’s Bessie, was published), both Bobby Short and Wynton Marsalis resurrected her 1928 masterpiece “Empty Bed Blues, Parts 1 & 2” in direct homage to the almighty Empress.
In a series of roughly 160 songs recorded between 1923 and 1933, many of her own authorship, Smith defined the blues, and left behind its most powerful catalogue of work. On the heels of Tucker and Waters, Bessie Smith was also one of the first singers in any genre to fully master the recorded medium. She may have been even more effective in person than on wax, but her discs remain amazingly potent documents of one of the greatest personalities in all of American music. A versatile musician as well as a folk hero to African American audiences of the interwar years, Smith showed and indeed continues to show generation after generation of musicians, both instrumentalists and singers, the endless variety to be mined out of the basic 12-bar blues format.
Smith, whose life and career are vividly documented in the aforementioned Bessie, was born in Tennessee in 1894. (The date, incidentally, is the result of Albertson’s diligent research. Earlier writers, such as the usually reliable British blues scholar Paul Oliver, in his 1959 British booklet, Bessie Smith, give 1898. Still other sources speculate that she might have been born as early as 1892, but 1894 seems to be the consensus.) She started singing on the streets of Chattanooga and from there gradually established herself in the hierarchy of black show business, which was forming and formalizing itself in the years of her ascendance. Before she became the Empress, Smith owed her early success to two early Queens of the Blues. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey served as her blues-singing mentor, and Rainey prominently featured Smith in her touring company (the sort that Smith herself would later headline in). Then, too, both Rainey and Smith would have been mere footnotes to history had it not been for Mamie Smith (no relation); Mamie was not in Bessie’s or Rainey’s class as a blues singer, but she was the first important black female singer to make records, and her recordings of 1920 started a craze that revolutionized the recording industry.
In a very real sense, Bessie Smith was a product of the twenties economic boom. Both she and Ethel Waters were part of the first generation of black performers to appear before the first generation of working-class and middle-class black audiences, who themselves were a by-product of the urbanization of America and the World War I industrial expansion. Earlier black stars, most notably Bert Williams, were only granted that status because they appeared before white audiences; later, it was considered a major step forward when artists like Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, and Billy Eckstine “crossed over.”
But in the twenties, it was an equally significant achievement for blacks to have theaters of their own. The discovery of the “race” record market was the next logical outgrowth of the Northern migration. For the first time there were now African American neighborhoods in virtually every major city in the country, even in the North and the West, and by the end of the war there had been a gradual proliferation of theaters, as well as honky-tonks and saloons, that featured music in these areas. And soon there were music shops that carried phonograph records in Harlem, Los Angeles’s Central Avenue, Chicago’s South Side, and other black neighborhoods. Before 1920, what records there were of black performers were primarily aimed at white buyers; no one had imagined that there was a market for black music among black people.
As the African American songwriter Perry Bradford told the story, he was trying to promote a song of his called “Crazy Blues” and took the then unheard of step of getting a female black singer, a woman named Mamie Smith, to record it for the Okeh label. (Previously he had tried to convince the established star Sophie Tucker to sing it.) “Crazy Blues” was a smash hit with black buyers: At last their music and artists of their color were being put on records. By a bizarre coincidence, four of the leading exponents of the new genre (later dubbed “classic blues” by historians) were named Smith: Mamie, Bessie, Clara, and Trixie.
Perry Bradford and Mamie Smith launched a vogue for black female singers, and African American culture received a further boost when, a year later, the Broadway show Shuffle Along revived mainstream interest in the black musical comedy. Then, around 1923, black jazz bands (from smaller New Orleans-style groups like King Oliver’s to larger dance bands like Fletcher Henderson’s) began to be regularly recorded. By the mid-twenties, a full-scale boom of African American entertainment was under way, which would keep going until Black Friday and the Great Depression.
Bessie Smith was unquestionably the most important artist of this epoch, the number-one favorite among black theatergoers and record buyers. But unlike Ethel Waters, Smith never broke through to Broadway and Hollywood, even during the post-Shuffle Along wave of black Broadway shows. This never seems to have concerned her, and regardless of the views of the purist historians of a generation later, or even her own later years, it seems to have worked in her favor.
On the whole, the twenties were remarkably rich years for African American vocal music (in fact, until the very late acoustic era, considerably more singers were recorded than bands), although, unfortunately, little of it is commonly available on CD or is investigated in mainstream jazz history discussions. Further, for some reason—testosterone?—male historians tend to assign too much importance to the mostly male guitarists and singers from the Mississippi Delta. Let me tell you one thing, sonny: Robert Johnson isn’t nearly as crucial to American music as Bessie Smith, and the Waters who deserves the most attention is Ethel, not Muddy. It’s also unfortunate that some of the singers, like the dreadful Lillie Delk Christian, who turn up on recordings with the best male instrumental soloists (like Armstrong and Sidney Bechet) do not represent the best that the era has to offer.
Jazz historians from the fifties onward spend a lot of time dissing these women, giving the impression that most of the early female blues singers were closer to Lillie Delk Christian than to Bessie Smith. In fact, Smith is presented in some histories as representing the exception to the rule. (Some of her classic twenties sides were included in the first wave of jazz reissues around 1939, and she has been represented in the Columbia catalogue almost continuously since 1923.) But the more one listens to her contemporaries—like Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, Alberta Hunter, Eva Taylor, and the other Smiths—the clearer it becomes that Bessie Smith is hardly atypical but simply the best of the best.
Even though Mamie Smith is usually (and rightfully) singled out as the woman who launched the trend, she is rarely given credit as an artist in her own right. She didn’t get a major label reissue of her Okeh sides until 2003, but that collection proves she was a singer and entertainer of considerable appeal.
Bessie Smith was brought to Columbia Records in 1923 by producer, composer, and bandleader Clarence Williams, who is portrayed in Albertson’s book as a not always lovable scoundrel. Still, it’s hard for jazz lovers to think of him as anything other than a hero since he was directly responsible for recording much of the best music of the Jazz Age. Williams was, in many ways, the Berry Gordy of his time, equal parts hero and villain, but unlike the Motown majordomo, he was also a capable performer himself—a pianist (and, occasionally, singer). Although he was hardly a virtuoso on the same level as friend and colleague James P. Johnson, he was a thoughtful blues accompanist who could give singers the support they needed while staying out of their way.
Smith’s recording career began with “Down Hearted Blues,” recorded in New York circa February 16, 1923, and as with most of her earliest sessions, the accompaniment consists of just Williams on piano. Her first disc, it served notice that the most powerful female voice in the history of American vernacular music had now arrived. This basic 12-bar blues in C had been written by two other female giants of the early blues, pianist and occasional bandleader Lovie Austin and singer Alberta Hunter. The combination of their lyrics and Smith’s powerful delivery establishes several metaphors and images that would become recurring icons of the blues, like the one about the three men in her life and the one about having the world in a jug (“Lord!”) and the stopper in her hand. “Down Hearted Blues” established Bessie Smith as a major force in the recording industry.
“Down Hearted Blues” was an instant hit. Williams and Smith proved to Columbia, in a big way, that “race” music was an economic, as well as an artistic, boon; she was one of the label’s top artists throughout the decade, black or white, male or female. Other aspects of her earliest sessions are also notable. Everything we know about acoustic era technology tells us that high voices recorded better (and were more popular) than low, although conversely male voices came off better than female. Yet Smith’s low female voice comes off brilliantly in the state-of-the-art 1923 technology. (Admittedly, Columbia was using better equipment in New York than that which independents like Gennett had access to in Richmond, Indiana, or that Paramount was using on Ma Rainey in Chicago.)
With her deep voice and earthy style, Smith is considerably more convincing than any artist who had yet been documented in the classic blues era (she also beat her mentor, Ma Rainey, to the studio by several months). In fact, even on the 1923–25 acoustic sessions, the only word that can describe her is “modern.” Considering that all but a handful of singers from before 1930 sound terribly dated—not just those screechy tenors already being heard on white dance band records, but even some of the black singers of the classic blues era (well beyond Ms. Delk Christian), this is a remarkable achievement. You don’t need to mentally transport yourself to another time, another place, to appreciate Bessie Smith; she sounds fine right where and when she is.
One area that may, however, seem dated, is what might be called the gender politics of twenties blues, a subject that comes to the fore in “ ’Tain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do,” another of her earliest recordings and one of the many songs she introduced into the permanent repertoire of the blues. Smith sounds positively defiant singing what might be considered a feminist text, asserting her right to be treated as she chooses. However, when one listens more closely, it becomes apparent that what she’s actually demanding is the right to stay with her man even if he beats her: “I would rather my man would hit me / than that he would up and quit me” This blues-based song by Smith’s future accompanist Porter Grainger is based on an even then ancient strain of the folk blues, which manifested itself at around the same time in a very different way as Mississippi John Hurt’s “Nobody’s Dirty Business.”
In 1925, the coming of electrical recording meant an instant sea change for the recording industry, but the technological shift only helped Smith consolidate her gains. She sounded better than ever in the new medium. Her last excellent acoustic date occurred in January of that year, and it resulted in one of the most remarkable summit meetings in all American music: history’s single greatest blues shouter and the most influential instrumentalist (and later a supreme singer himself) joining forces to take on one of the signature works of American music. Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong doing “St. Louis Blues” was a bit like Laurence Olivier and Sarah Bernhardt teaming up in a production of Death of a Salesman. Regrettably, the collaboration of Bessie and Louis extended to only one recording session, but we should be grateful that it happened at all—and that W. C. Handy’s already classic 1912 composition “St. Louis Blues” was the first tune on the date.
Smith is at her most powerful and Armstrong is at his most inventive; it’s said that she preferred less “frisky” players than Armstrong, ones who wouldn’t make her “play second fiddle” (as the title of one 1925 tune implied), yet she needn’t have worried. Even if Armstrong had set about stealing her thunder—which he didn’t—it’s doubtful that even the greatest jazz musician of all time (which he is) could have pulled focus from Bessie Smith. The other musician on the date is keyboardist Fred Longshaw. He played piano on other sessions with Smith, but for some reason Columbia had him accompany Smith and Armstrong on harmonium, a miniature counterpart to the traditional pipe organ heard in many small Southern houses of worship. Blues scholars have often derided his playing as well as his instrument here, but to me it gives the side a down-home churchy sound that’s perfectly appropriate.
As Smith moved into the electrical era, hers was a declamatory, extroverted style, but she held her own against the more intimate singers who began emerging in both the “colored time” and the “white time” (as black entertainers used to put it). These phrases, used by Ethel Waters in her autobiography, are employed in roughly the same way as “big time” and “small time,” two showbiz expressions of the era that are still in general use. Yet, in the more literal sense, time is not a major element of Smith’s music, which in itself is exceptional since nearly every other singer in the jazz and blues fields tends to make a big deal out of time. Smith stays close to the beat, and tends to fill almost every space, only occasionally leaving room for a soloist to play an obbligato. With many singers, the silences can be as important as the notes; not so with Smith.
Still, even though rhythm and humor are closely related in music, Smith has perfect comic timing, evident as early as the 1923 “Sam Jones Blues.” Two of her funniest sides are “Put It Right Here (Or Keep It out There)”—the phrase is the 1929 equivalent of “Show Me the Money”—and its sequel of a few months later, “Take It Right Back (’Cause I Don’t Want It in Here).” As Paul Oliver has pointed out, “Put It Right Here” is a vaudeville comedy number of the sort done by such veterans of the black showbiz circuit as the team known as Butterbeans and Susie. It’s also the genesis of dozens of punch line-driven blues comedy numbers done by the King Cole Trio and Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five fifteen years later, e.g., Cole’s “Solid Potato Salad” (“Pick it up …Bring it right back!”) and shows that Smith can, in fact, do a tune where rhythm is the key element.
“It” continued to serve as a key euphemism in the age of Clara Bow, as in “I’ve Got What It Takes, but It Breaks My Heart to Give It Away.” Smith also recorded Clarence Williams’s “I Want Every Bit of It.” “Young Woman’s Blues,” an early electric side from 1926, and “Lock and Key” from the following year, represent additional examples of Smith pondering what to do with “it.” “Lock and Key,” for which James P. Johnson provides both the melody and Smith’s accompaniment, is classic fare for Bessie Smith and the classic blues singers of her generation. It depicts a battle of the sexes that’s at once earthy and urbane: She loved her man once, but he made a fool out of her. In retaliation, she’s going to lock him out—and there ain’t nothin’ passive-aggressive about it, sugar. She even demands that her misbehaving lover return all the clothes she bought for him, right then and there, until he’s literally standing in the hallway in his BVDs.
The popular belief is that the majority of the great blues lyrics begin with the cliché “Woke up this morning,” and “Young Woman’s Blues” is one of the few that actually does. It also includes many other familiar features of the genre: Our heroine wakes up one morning to find that her man has left her. From then on, the song refuses to follow any formula, but like Smith’s singing itself, is complex and highly nuanced. On the one hand, she wants her man back, and she wants him to stop chasing other women and settle down with her. At the same time, she expresses the urge to run around; she, too, wants to go out drinking and sleeping with strangers, even though more conservative types may label her a “hobo” (and that’s why the lady is a tramp). Only Smith is capable of illuminating both sides of this woman’s complex personality in this surprisingly deep interpretation of one of the lesser-known songs of her career. Released as by “Bessie Smith and Her Blue Boys,” this was one of many sides she cut with the accompaniment of Fletcher Henderson and various Hendersonians.
Almost everything she sings is in the classic 12-bar blues format: Her occasional pop songs, like “My Sweetie Went Away,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” and “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” stand way out from the rest of her material. She generally does two types of songs: sad blues, about the man she loves who treats her awful mean; then, increasingly in the late twenties, double entendre numbers in which she sings of the boudoir prowess of her various lovermen. Customarily, she expresses this boast in what could charitably be referred to as metaphors, such as “I’m wild about that thing” and “I can’t do without my kitchen man.” Often erotic skill appears as a bedfellow of musical ability, as in the case of that lovin’ clarinet man, “Jazzbo Brown from Memphis Town,” a playin’ fool who “wraps his big fat lips ’round that doggone horn.”
The important thing is that, as opposed to the sadder blues pieces, the happier blues numbers show her as at least glad to get what she’s getting, a little sugar in her bowl (she uses “sugar” as the same kind of code word in “What’s the Matter Now?”), a little hot dog between her rolls. One can only imagine exactly what she means when she says, in recitative, at the end of “Sugar in My Bowl,” “Get off your knees, I can’t see what you’re driving at! It’s dark down there, looks like a snake. Come on there, and drop something in my bowl.” Even when Nina Simone revived the song, she left that line alone. Many of Smith’s numbers, like the two-part “Empty Bed Blues” of 1928, offer a mixed message. Here she sings joyfully of her man, who, we are told, is a deep-sea diver who loves to grind her coffee (let’s hope he doesn’t attempt these two activities simultaneously), and woefully of the loneliness that wells up inside of her when the “bed get[s] empty.”
As the Jazz Age was about to implode into the Great Depression, Smith also did a number of songs where Topic A was politics and even economics rather than sex. She spent most of her career working in what was a loose equivalent of vaudeville, touring in tent shows and theaters primarily in the South. Most of the material she presented was highly theatrical in nature, and many of her songs were written by professional composers based in the urban North. Yet that didn’t stop her from occasionally recording a song that authentically reflected the trials and tribulations of her Deep South audiences, both white and black. In the 1927 “Backwater Blues,” a descriptive tale of Southern rivers overflowing, she tells of having “to pack my things and go” because “my house fell down and I can’t live there no mo’.” Her description of the floods ravaging the country in the late twenties seems as if it could have been written anytime in the last eighty years—and it’s a particularly compelling description of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A classic blues usually included in Smith tributes (like Washington’s), much of the credit for it should go to accompanist James P. Johnson, who not only does the work of an entire band, but musically depicts the falling of rain and hail as well.
“Poor Man’s Blues,” from 1928, is about as close as Smith came to a protest song, of the kind that later folk-blues singers favored. It’s hard not to be moved as she sings, “While you’re living in your mansion, you don’t know what hard times mean. / A working man’s wife is starving, your wife is living like a Queen.” Even more than usual, her delivery is direct and to the point—there’s no mistaking her meaning or her message. Her rhythm style is so basic and fundamental that she rarely required what later became known as a conventional rhythm section, with bass and drums. Most of her recordings use just a piano (often played by her eloquent accompanist Porter Grainger); here there are three horns, including a moaning trombone.
Three years hence, during the depths of the Depression, she sang one of her most downhearted blues, “Long Old Road” In this exceedingly despondent D-flat dirge, Smith is “weepin’ and cryin’ ” with her “tears fallin’ on the ground” Even when she sings of meeting a friend at the end of the Long Old Road, the implication is that the only relief to be found is in death. The highly vocalized obbligatos of trumpeter Louis Metcalf and trombonist Charlie Green sound like grief-stricken mourners at a funeral. Cheerful it ain’t.
Smith sounds surprisingly up-to-date even if much of her material is foreign to us. Of the roughly 160 titles she cut, fewer than a dozen are songs that have any reputation apart from her (“Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home” and “Squeeze Me,” to name two), and perhaps another dozen are well known to later generations from Smith herself and subsequent tribute albums, such as “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” This latter song, written in 1929 by black vaudevillian Jimmy Cox, anticipates the Wall Street meltdowns of both that year and seventy-nine years later. Smith turned it into an alltime classic, which reverberates through the entire history of black music, and was heard long into the soul era, emanating from Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Ruth Brown, Eric Clapton, and even Liza Minnelli (Liza Minnelli?). Here she puts over the image of holding on to a dollar so vividly that one can easily visualize the formidable singer squeezing it “until them eagles grin!” Among other things, “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” is a direct antecedent of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”; when I play the Smith record, I keep expecting to hear her shout, “How does it feel?”
Still, the great bulk of songs that she sang are unfamiliar to most contemporary listeners; Ethel Waters and Ruth Etting introduced considerably more jazz and pop standards. But it’s a double-edged sword: Contemporary singers can do “Dinah” or “Am I Blue” without having to acknowledge Waters, or “Love Me or Leave Me” and not associate it with Etting, yet it’s nearly impossible to do anything Smith had anything to do with without her influence continuing to resonate. Every song she ever sang is a Bessie Smith song, and her identity continues to stamp those songs in a way that few other artists can claim.
Smith’s material echoes back to us in funny ways: Nina Simone sang “Sugar in My Bowl” for so long that she may have come closest to making audiences forget it was associated with Smith. However, Dr. Simone didn’t have the same luck with “Gimme a Pigfoot.” Billie Holiday took two lines from the 1931 “Safety Mama” (“I ain’t good lookin’, I’m built for speed /I got everything a pigmeat needs”) and made them a key part of her own “Billie’s Blues.” Jimmy Rushing built at least two whole blues numbers around quotes from Smith’s songs. “Baby, Don’t Tell on Me” begins with the line “If you catch me stealin’ ” from Smith’s “Sorrowful Blues,” whereas one of Rushing’s signature phrases, “Good morning, blues (blues, how do you do?”), was sung by Smith in “Jailhouse Blues” “Hard-Lovin’ Blues” by Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five, with a vocal by a female blues singer named Yack Taylor, is a pastiche of classic Smith phrases, including familiar lines from “Jailhouse Blues” and “Empty Bed Blues.” Jordan also recorded “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” Lester Young famously quoted “My Sweetie Went Away” (one of Smith’s earliest sides, from 1923), at the close of his classic 1943 solo on “Sometimes I’m Happy”—one of the most glorious improvisations in all of jazz.
In 1930, Smith cut two Tin Pan Alley spirituals, “On Revival Day” and “Moan, You Mourners”—two pop songs with an ersatz-religious feel—which anticipate much of the gospel movement that would emerge over the next few years. However, by this time the Depression and the arrival of radio were already putting a major crimp in the “race” records market, and for a time it looked as if Smith’s recording career would end with “Sugar in My Bowl” and “Safety Mama,” two of her most explicitly blues numbers, rendered with the modest accompaniment of Clarence Williams’s piano.
Then, in 1933, with the help of producer John Hammond, Smith was allowed to provide history with a tasty encore. She cut four numbers under his supervision, which are not typical of her earlier output but in fact illustrate that her artistry had continued to evolve over the two years she was out of the studio. All are new tunes commissioned for the occasion from the vaudeville blues team of Coot Grant and Socks Wilson, a Butterbeans and Susie—like comedy-and-blues man-and-wife duo (both teams could be described as the Burns and Allen of the blues). Hammond himself claimed to be disappointed in the songs they came up with, although his has proved to be a minority opinion. The four Grant-Wilson songs use blues elements and fit within the blues idiom, but none of them is in the standard 12-bar format. Further, while Smith had frequently employed small bands before (as opposed to piano, or piano and one-horn-only formats), she had never sung with anything like the modern, swinging group that Hammond assembled, state-of-the-art of the immediate preswing era. The four horns, for instance, were Frankie Newton, Jack Tea-garden, Chu Berry, and Benny Goodman, all musicians who were more a part of the future than of the past.
This being Smith’s last session, it may seem from a distance that she was, by 1933, part of the past as well. But one of the more compelling points of Albertson’s biography is that he doesn’t depict her as a has-been in the mid-thirties. Rather, he quotes extensively from Lionel Hampton, whose uncle Richard Morgan, a well-known Chicago-based entrepreneur (and bootlegger), was married to Smith in everything but name. Hampton and others insist that Smith’s later career, though unrecorded, was actually going strong, that she was working frequently, and that she would have been a force in the swing era had she been able to stick around. As John Hammond wrote in his autobiography, “Had she lived even a few years longer she would have become a star again.”
Hampton’s and Hammond’s testimonies are borne out by the 1933 session: Smith sounds looser and much more rhythmically motivated than even on the 1931 titles, without having lost any of the power and authority that had been her trademark from the beginning. These four final tracks, ironically, are among the most reissued and most covered of her entire canon, especially “Gimme a Pigfoot” (famously done by Billie Holiday, as we’ve seen, as well as Bobby Short and Nina Simone). “Do Your Duty” and “Take Me for a Buggy Ride” are her two best songs in the mode of boasting of her man’s romantic accomplishments, set in the first and third person, respectively. “I’m Down in the Dumps” is a classic example of a blues-idiom song with lyrics that, when read on the page, are definitely a downer, but are imbued with that joyous aggression that is a key element of Bessie’s blues. Like Sinatra swinging a torch song, confronting the blues with a smile on one’s face is a way of laughing to keep from crying.
From Smith’s spoken intro (“Twenty-five cents! I wouldn’t pay twenty-five cents to go in nowhere, ’cause listen here …”) onward, “Gimme a Pigfoot” is the archetypal document of a party atmosphere—it’s the polar opposite of “Long Old Road” and “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” The Grant-Wilson song paints a vivid picture of a woman in very high spirits out on a bender—it’s the forerunner of “The Joint Is Jumpin’,” “At the Swing Cat’s Ball,” “Saturday Night Fish Fry,” “Louisville Lodge Meeting”—it’s also “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” “Rock Around the Clock,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and practically everything ever sung by Louis Jordan and even Ray Charles and Sam Cooke (like “Having a Party” and “Twistin’ the Night Away”).
She is persuasive, to say the least. Far from sounding like a fading relic at her final recording, Bessie Smith is at the height of her powers on this amazing date. She was never more euphorically persuasive than on this infectious tune about going out for a good time; consuming pig feet and beer, puffing on reefer, and guzzling “a gang of gin” … at least “until the [police] wagon comes.” Her energy and her charm are contagious: You will have a good time listening to this record because she wills you to. There’s no arguing with the way she growls, “He’s got rhythm—yeah!—when he stomps his feet!” In a very real way, “Pigfoot” is the first rhythm and blues record.
Lionel Hampton was convinced that the woman who was practically his aunt could have made the leap from the classic blues style and the Jazz Age to the swing era. “Pigfoot” shows that she could transcend her own generation and a few generations after that as well. Alas, it was not to be. Four years after producing her last record date, John Hammond would also be a key player in her death scene. Apparently he was the chief perpetrator of the widely held misconception that Smith died as a result of white racism. According to this account, Smith was injured in a car crash and died because a whites-only hospital refused to admit her.
Paul Oliver wrote in 1959 that it would be a tragedy if Smith’s death were to be “exploited by racial propagandists,” and that’s essentially what happened. Nearly ten years after Oliver’s minibook Bessie Smith was published, Edward Albee turned the myth into a one-act play entitled The Death of Bessie Smith. The story had originally come from Hammond, who heard it from the promoter Smith was working for in Mississippi. The man “was in a position to know,” and thus Hammond circulated the story “in several magazines.” Although he told the tale in good faith in 1937, in 1977, in his autobiography, John Hammond on Record, he hinted that it might not be completely true. Albertson’s account of the accident is another key strength of his book Bessie; he credibly debunks the tale told by Hammond and dramatized by Albee, establishing that Smith was fatally injured in the crash and beyond saving by any hospital, black or white.
As noted, Smith’s recorded legacy is well preserved, and readily available—if only the same could be said for virtually every other singer, blues and otherwise, of the years leading up to the swing era. American Sony has a ten-CD series annotated by Albertson, in sound quality that will be good enough for nearly everyone. As an added bonus, the tenth disc contains excerpts from his interviews with Ruby Walker Smith (niece of Smith’s only legal husband, Jack Gee), who as a member of both her family and her touring company was in a unique position to observe Smith’s inner workings—particularly her stormy marriage to Gee, a former police officer more preoccupied with breaking the law than enforcing it. However, there’s an independent British label, run by and for hard-core early jazz collectors, named Frog Records that has released an eight-CD version (with alternate takes) of the entire Smith output, and the audio, as engineered by the late John R. T. Davies, is significantly more pleasing—to my ears, at least.
Both sets are titled Complete Recordings. Ultimately, everything in either edition of Smith’s entire recorded output justifies the epitaph on the great diva’s tombstone, unveiled in 1970: “The world’s greatest blues singer will never stop singing.”