Bessie Smith

Bessie Smith (born April 15, 1894?, Chattanooga, Tennessee, U.S.—died September 26, 1937, Clarksdale, Mississippi) was an American singer and one of the greatest blues vocalists. Known in her lifetime as the “Empress of the Blues,” Smith was a bold, supremely confident artist who often disdained the use of a microphone and whose art expressed the frustrations and hopes of a whole generation of Black Americans.

Life and career

Smith grew up in poverty and obscurity. She may have made a first public appearance at the age of eight or nine at the Ivory Theatre in her hometown. About 1913 she toured in a show with Ma Rainey, one of the first of the great blues singers, from whom she received some training. For several years Smith traveled through the South singing in tent shows and bars and theaters in small towns and in such cities as Birmingham, Alabama; Memphis, Tennessee; and Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia. After 1920 she made her home in Philadelphia, and it was there that she was first heard by Clarence Williams, a representative of Columbia Records.

In February 1923 Smith made her first recordings, including the classic “Down Hearted Blues,” which became an enormous success, selling more than two million copies. She made 160 recordings in all, and in many of these she was accompanied by some of the great jazz musicians of the time, including Fletcher Henderson, Benny Goodman, and Louis Armstrong. Her most notable songs included “Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do,” “Careless Love Blues,” “Empty Bed Blues,” “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” and “Gimme a Pigfoot.”

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Smith’s subject matter was the classic material of the blues: poverty and oppression, love—betrayed or unrequited—and stoic acceptance of defeat at the hands of a cruel and indifferent world. She was known for her rich contralto voice and her breathtaking emotional intensity. The great tragedy of her career was that she outlived the topicality of her idiom. In the late 1920s her record sales and her fame diminished with the Great Depression and as social forces changed the face of popular music and bowdlerized the earthy realism of the sentiments she expressed in her music. She struggled with alcoholism, which led to a decrease in her performances.

In 1929 Smith appeared in a short motion picture, St. Louis Blues. The film, based on the lyrics of the song by composer W.C. Handy, which Smith sings, is the only known footage of the singer and shows the emotional power of her performance. She died in 1937 from injuries sustained in a car accident.

Legacy

Smith was inducted into both the Blues Hall of Fame (1980), in its inaugural class, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1989). She was an important influence on many later singers in genres ranging from jazz and gospel to rock and soul, including Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, Janis Joplin, and Anita Baker. In 2002 the U.S. Library of Congress added “Down Hearted Blues” to the National Recording Registry. In 2006 the film St. Louis Blues was added to the National Film Registry. Both registries serve to preserve recordings or films that are deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

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Smith’s grave in Mount Lawn Cemetery in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania, was unmarked for decades because her family could not afford a headstone. In 1970 a marker was installed at her grave at the expense of Joplin and Juanita Green, a Philadelphia nurse and president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Green had also been a domestic worker for Smith. Inscribed on the headstone are the words:

The Greatest Blues Singer In The World Will Never Stop Singing
Bessie Smith
1895–1937