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SMITH, BESSIE 1894-1937

BLUES SINGER

Empress of the Blues

Born in poverty in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Bessie Smith became the greatest of blues singers. Supposedly discovered when she was eleven by blues singer Ma Rainey, Smith toured with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels and tent shows in the South. During her lifetime the blues was regarded as a form of black expression; she performed for mostly black audiences and recorded for what were classified as race records that were not stocked in record shops catering to whites. Unlike Louis Armstrong, who reached all audiences, Smith was unknown or unavailable to most white Americans during her career. She was a black artist working with traditional black material for a black public; nevertheless, Smith gave special performances for white audiences in some large cities.

Recordings

Smith reached her own audience through 160 records. She made her first identified recordings in 1923, "Gulf Coast Blues" and "Down-Hearted Blues." These two sides sold an extraordinary 780,000 copies, and Smith became the best-selling vocalist in the racerecords field, where she competed with Ma Rainey, Mamie Smith, and Clara Smith. Her top recording fee was $200 per usable side; there were no royalties on sales. Smith's majestic voice was the vehicle for her versatility and technical mastery. Smith also differed from other blues singers in her range of material; her repertoire included vaudeville material and popular songs such as "Alexander's Ragtime Band." Her singing was lusty and profane, expressing misery, exuberance, and bitter humor. Her control of inflection and phrasing, lyricism, vocal wit, growling, moaning, and command of material set her above competing blues shouters. Smith's audiences required her to be more than a great blues singer: she was a commanding stage figure in lavish gowns. Carl Van Vechten, a white promoter of black artists, wrote lushly of her 1925 performance in a Newark, New Jersey, theater:

Walking slowly to the footlights … she began her strange, rhythmic rites in a voice full of shouting and moaning and praying and suffering, a wild, rough Ethiopan voice, harsh and volcanic, but seductive and sensuous, too, released between rouged lips and the whitest teeth, the singer swaying lightly to the beat, as is the negro custom.

Now, inspired partly by the expressive words, partly by the stumbling strain of the accompaniment, partly by the powerfully magnetic personality of this elemental conjure woman with her pleasant African voice, quivering with passion and pain, sounding as if it had been developed at the sources of the Nile, the black and blue-back crowd, notable for the absence of mulattoes, burst into hysterical, semi-religious shrieks of sorrow and lamentations. Amens rent the air.

Decline

Smith's popularity declined markedly at the end of the 1920s as new forms of jazz made her singing seem old-fashioned. She never achieved a radio following. Smith's heavy drinking increased, and she became difficult to work with. She had squandered her substantial earnings. Smith had once commanded $2,000 a night, but in the 1930s she was working in a Philadelphia dive. Her last recording session came in 1933, for which she was paid $50 a side. Her death after an auto wreck near Coahoma, Mississippi, raised charges that she had been denied treatment at a white hospital in Clarksdale. The statement that "Bessie was the best" has never been seriously challenged.