Smith, Bessie

By: Michelle R. Scott

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Smith, Bessie

Sex:  Female

Born:  Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States
15 April 1894

Died:  Clarksdale, Mississippi, United States
26 September 1937

Activity/Profession:  Blues Musician / Singer

(b. 15 April 1892?; d. 26 September 1937),
singer.

A prominent figure in American popular culture and African American history, Bessie Smith was often as known for her turbulent private life as she was for her powerful and moving voice. Lyrics from her 1920s hit “T'Ain't Nobody's Bizness If I Do,” which recounted how it was no one's business if she “went to church on Sunday and went out shimmying all day Monday,” exemplified how Smith challenged conventional roles of African American womanhood while rising to national acclaim. She was among the first African American vocalists to be recorded, and her voice and stage presence furthered a blues music craze that reached new heights with Smith's first recordings in 1923 and lasted until the 1930s. Known as the “Empress of the Blues,” Smith helped transform blues music from a regional African American pastime into a national musical art form that would influence all other forms of American music throughout the twentieth century.

Bessie Smith, the “empress of the blues,” photographed by Carl Van Vechten on 3 February 1936.

Library of Congress

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Bessie Smith was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as the last of seven surviving children born to the Alabama natives William and Laura Smith. In the 1890s Chattanooga was a rapidly changing city, in part because of the surge of African American migrants flooding into the city from Deep South states. The migration boom had provided improvements in education, employment, and standard of living for many black migrants who had fled the poor economic conditions and escalating racial violence of the lower South. Yet migration also more clearly revealed class distinctions and gender inequities within the black community and forced impoverished migrants to struggle with the overcrowded, often unsanitary conditions of city life. By the 1890s Bessie had joined her parents and six elder siblings in a crowded shack dwelling in the poverty-stricken Blue Goose Hollow region of Chattanooga.

According to prominent biographical studies of Bessie Smith, including Chris Albertson's Bessie and Carman Moore's Somebody's Angel Child, William Smith was both a part-time, or lay, Baptist minister and a day laborer. Just as William Smith held the dual role of laborer and clergy worker to economically and spiritually support the Smith household, so too did Laura Smith hold the roles of homemaker and child-rearer along with those of laundress and domestic servant. William and Laura's involvement with the church provided Bessie with her first exposure to African American hymns, spirituals, and shouts and to the power that music can have on an attentive audience. As Bessie witnessed the parishioners who, possessed by the Holy Spirit, clapped, shouted, and responded to the church service with a chorus of “amens” and “hallelujahs,” there was a foreshadowing of what a secular blues audience could be like when moved by a performance. Bessie would not necessarily be conscious of this relationship between religious worship and secular performance, but the setting itself and the manner in which a sacred music soloist delivered her song would be something that would remain familiar to young Bessie and would form a foundation for her musical training in Chattanooga.

By the time Smith reached the age of eight or nine, both of her parents had died, and Smith's eldest sister, Viola, had taken over as financial head of the household, working as a washerwoman. Smith initially was drawn to performing to escape the drudgery of domestic labor and to bring some necessary supplemental income into the struggling Smith household. She had witnessed the small success that her elder brother Clarence had found in the entertainment industry after he joined a traveling minstrel show as a comedian in the early 1900s. Inspired by Clarence's success and entranced by the music, dance, and adventure of Chattanooga's Ninth Street, the hub of the African American community, Smith, accompanied by her brother Andrew on guitar, became a street performer in downtown Chattanooga.

The songs that Smith performed as an amateur street entertainer in the early 1900s were not the classic blues she would become famous for in the 1920s. Rather, Smith often performed a medley of songs of different musical styles—popular songs, minstrel tunes, work songs, and other genres—that Andrew could successfully play on the guitar. Her typical fare included the minstrel standard “Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey,” which she would belt out while dancing, in the hope of earning spare change from a passerby. After gaining some popularity in the local community for her impromptu street shows, Smith began to think more seriously of becoming a professional entertainer, but initially as a dancer, not a vocalist.

Before Smith “preached them blues” to millions of Americans in her popular phonograph records in the 1920s, she perfected her craft in the regional theaters and tent shows of the black vaudeville circuit. By the early 1900s Smith had left Chattanooga, joined a traveling revue as a chorus girl, and resettled in the black entertainment district of Atlanta, Georgia. The first mention of Smith performing appears in 1909 in the Indianapolis Freeman, a prominent black newspaper of the time with a large entertainment news section. In May of that year, Bessie appeared in the chorus of a show at the Arcade, or Eighty-One Theater, in Atlanta.

It was during the 1910 theater season that Smith met and performed with an entertainer and composer who would decidedly influence her career—Gertrude Pridgett, also known as the incomparable Ma Rainey. Born on 26 April 1886, in Columbus, Georgia, Ma Rainey was one of the first African American women to perform blues music professionally, and for her efforts she was known as the “Mother of the Blues.” Rainey's style was a bridge between the folk or country blues originally performed by itinerant solo male performers who often accompanied themselves on guitar and the classic or vaudeville blues performed primarily by women who were supported by instrumental ensembles onstage. Rainey served as an early model for Smith, particularly in her ability to communicate emotion through her songs. As one of Rainey's castmates in 1910, Smith arguably absorbed much of Ma's ability to deliver a performance and learned basic skills on how to excel in the difficult entertainment industry.

By 1912 Smith had moved out of the chorus line, working as a duo with the comedian and dancer Wayne “Buzzin” Burton. It was in her years as half of the Burton and Smith combo that Smith developed the blues sound she would become famous for in her recordings. Nevertheless, this early in her career Smith was not yet the consummate performer she would later become. In his autobiography, I Remember: Eighty Years of Black Entertainment, Big Bands, and the Blues, the trumpeter Clyde Bernhardt wrote of witnessing an early Smith performance in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and recalled that a “slender, dark…Bessie was moaning those blues and dancing up a storm,” but “she was just another black woman singing the blues.” Bessie was not a lyrically trained vocalist, and some of her fellow musicians held that in her early years she did not have the “polish” or the pretty, refined sound of her contemporary Ethel Waters or the magnetism of Ma Rainey.

Smith encountered many of the difficulties of theater life. She rapidly moved from city to city with various theater troupes, undoubtedly changing in inadequate dressing rooms and spending much of her day in shoddy theaters. In addition, Smith endured the skin color and body type commentary often leveled at African American female performers; because she was a tall, formidable, dark-skinned woman, Smith was denied roles in shows that demanded light-skinned, petite African American girls. Fortunately, Smith triumphed over the impediments associated with theater life because of the power and efficacy of her voice and her increasing popularity with audiences.

As her career progressed, Smith crafted a sound that was improvisational, syncopated, and often marked by a sustained, slow rhythm that allowed the audience to feel every word of her song. She could omit a word and insert a hum or a moan and reveal all of the emotion behind her delivery. Smith's unique blues sound could transform a non-blues-format song, such as her later recorded “Nobody Loves You When You're Down and Out,” into a memorable blues tune. For this ability to improvise and transform a song and make it her own, music critics have argued that Smith was not only transforming blues music but also becoming a skilled jazz vocalist.

After several years on the vaudeville circuit, Smith had crafted a performance that exposed audiences to the glamour, humor, and adventure that vaudeville life could contain. Yet Smith also related to her audience on their level. In her songs she spoke frankly about the hardships and joys of everyday life, a life that her listeners could comprehend and share in. When she performed a song like W. C. Handy's “St. Louis Blues,” which she sang as early as 1916 as a Florida Blossoms company member, she could convey emotion behind the lyrics: “Feelin' tomorrow like I feel today, I'm a pack up my trunk and make my getaway.” Audiences could almost visualize Smith fleeing her home in grief after losing her beloved man to that “St. Louis woman.”

One of the fundamental reasons that Smith's audiences, particularly those in cities outside the South, generally felt so connected to her music can be largely attributed to their status as migrants and participants in the Great Migration, the movement of thousands of African Americans from the South to the urban North which reached its peak between 1915 and 1930. For many migrants in the North and Midwest, witnessing a Bessie Smith performance was similar to seeing a familiar face from home. Thus, when the shows in which she performed reached venues such as the Monogram Theater in Chicago, the Washington Theater in Indianapolis, or the Gilmor Theater in Baltimore, Smith often danced and sang before an audience that welcomed her because she represented a piece of their origins.

From Vaudeville to Columbia Records

By the 1920s those who knew Smith through her live performances would be forced to share her with the world through her recordings. Only a select few African Americans had been recorded prior to the 1920s, including the vaudevillian comedian Bert Williams and the Fisk Jubilee Singers. At that time, African American women soloists were not recording artists because of the racially motivated belief in the recording industry that black female voices lacked diction and clarity. This dislike for African American female recording artists was only altered once a recording of “Crazy Blues,” made in August 1920 by the black vaudevillian Mamie Smith (no relation to Bessie), sold several thousand copies and earned a sizeable profit for Okeh Records.

By 1922 several black women, including Trixie Smith, Lucille Heagmin, and Ethel Waters, had followed in Mamie Smith's footsteps. Initially, Bessie Smith was unsuccessful in her attempts to gain a contract. Okeh, Columbia, and the African American–owned Black Swan Records had all maintained that Smith's sound, which mesmerized listeners on stage, was simply too harsh to record, and they quite likely feared that her folk sound would neither be marketable to urban African Americans nor would “cross over” to a white audience. Yet in 1923 the Columbia executive Frank Walker, entranced by the frenzy and profit blues records garnered, looked for his own blues queen to place on Columbia. In February 1923 Smith signed a contract that promised her $125 a side (an individual song) and no royalties. Her first Columbia side, “Downhearted Blues,” sold more than 780,000 copies, and Smith became Columbia's “Empress” and an overnight success.

As the Empress of the Blues, Smith greatly increased her popularity, and she spent the pinnacle of her career traveling the nation in her own stylized revue, at times titled “Bessie Smith and Her Harlem Frolics.” Smith became known for her elaborate stage show, which often included chorus girls, a full instrumental ensemble, and comedians. She furthered her national acclaim and became a headliner of the Theater Owners' Booking Association (TOBA), a theater organization formally founded in 1920 that featured African American entertainers. While on the TOBA circuit, Smith was able to record as well as compose many of the legendary blues tunes of the period.

Many of Smith's blues songs examined unrequited love and bold sexual desire, themes often shared by her audience members yet not necessarily seen as appropriate subjects for a “respectable” woman to discuss openly. Hence, Smith expressed these themes by using double entendres, or phrases that on the surface described cooking or housecleaning but really represented sexual desire, acts, or prowess. These suggestive tunes were incredibly popular and included “Empty Bed Blues,” “Kitchen Man Blues,” “I Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl,” “You've Got to Give Me Some,” and “I'm Wild about That Thing.” Smith also frankly discussed drinking, smoking, and other “sinful” activities in famous pieces like “Me and My Gin” and “Gimme a Pigfoot,” one of the tunes from her final recording sessions, in 1933.

While tales of sex and sin were extremely successful, Smith's repertoire contained more than just bawdy and amusing tunes. She became known as the Empress of Blues for her ability to communicate with audiences on subjects like domestic abuse, natural disasters, negative aspects of urban life, religious faith, poverty, and racism. Smith's 1927 composition and recording of “Backwater Blues” was memorable because it served as a glimpse into the emotional loss that people felt after a disaster such as a flood, and it interestingly foretold of what many Mississippi residents experienced later that year in the Great Flood of 1927. When Smith sang “when it thunders and lightnin' and the wind begins to blow, there's thousands of people ain't got nowhere to go,” it was as if she were speaking directly to displaced sharecroppers and tenant farmers that had been left homeless by the flood's devastation. In 1928 Bessie wrote and recorded “Poor Man's Blues,” which served as a harsh critique of a nation that would allow African Americans to serve and die for their country in World War I yet do nothing to alleviate the poverty and racial discrimination that these men felt when they returned home. As Smith implored “mister rich man, mister rich man” to “open up his heart and mind,” she tapped into the class hierarchy as well as the racial stratification that plagued the United States. Other Smith songs from the period that reflect similar concerns include “Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out,” “Sing Sing Prison Blues,” “Washerwoman Blues,” “A Woman's Trouble Blues,” and “Homeless Blues.”

When Smith reached the height of her career, she was able to work with some of the greatest blues and jazz musicians and vocalists of the 1920s. She wrote and recorded with fellow blueswomen Ma Rainey and Clara Smith. Such jazz greats as the legendary trumpeter Louis Armstrong, the pianist and bandleader Fletcher Henderson, the pianist James P. Johnson, the pianist and composer Porter Grainger, and the clarinetist Sidney Bechet often accompanied Smith on record. Between 1928 and 1929, the zenith of her popularity, Smith garnered fame in both the African American and white communities and headlined on the TOBA circuit and in her own revues; she also briefly performed on Broadway and made the film St. Louis Blues, which revolved around her performance of W.C. Handy's famed composition of the same name. Hence, the label “The Empress of the Blues” was no empty title: by 1929 Smith had recorded more than 150 sides for Columbia and was one of the nation's highest paid African American recording stars.

Life away from the Stage

Smith's private life did not always match the success of her public career. She married twice—first to Earl Love of Mississippi and then to Jack Gee of Philadelphia. Smith and Gee relocated to Philadelphia in 1923; they had a friction-filled relationship at best and separated after seven years. Gee was known to have extramarital relationships and to be physically abusive and financially draining (he quit his job to act as Smith's manager). Smith was reportedly known to have extramarital affairs as well, many of them with her chorus girls. Smith's bisexuality was not a tightly kept secret, and she often turned to women on the road when she suffered physical abuse or just basic neglect from her husband. In 1925 Smith adopted a chorus girl's son and renamed him Jack Gee Jr. Because she had no biological children, Smith lavished her money and attention on Gee Jr. even though her career did not really allow for her to serve as a traditional mother figure. Smith's generosity extended to the rest of her family as well. In the 1920s Bessie sent for her sisters in Chattanooga and their respective children and grandchildren and purchased homes for them in the downtown district of Philadelphia.

Smith's generous nature was equally matched by a strong temper and a love of excess of food, drink, and sex. The stories of her alcoholism, sexual adventures, and violent behavior were as legendary as her recordings. Smith lived many of the lyrics in her popular tunes, and these life experiences, positive and negative, could often be heard in the expressiveness of her music. When not performing, Smith spent much of her leisure time in establishments frequented by the same African Americans who bought her records and attended her performances. In such cities as Washington, DC, Detroit, Chicago, and New York, Bessie often spent time with black residents in the impoverished alley dwellings of the area and perhaps attended the same “chittlin' struts,” or dance parties, as her listeners. On the road Smith was known to socialize with fellow performers in back alley cafés or private house parties that could be filled with dancing, smoking, alcohol consumption, and sexual activity. Ultimately, Smith did not separate herself from the working-class black people who had made her famous.

As the 1920s came to a close and the Great Depression approached, the blues began to wane in popularity. Accordingly, Smith lost much of her basis of income and began recording and performing more infrequently. Her last recording sessions, in 1933, were with the Columbia Records producer John Hammond and resulted in such classic songs as “Do Your Duty” and “Gimme a Pigfoot.” Smith continued to travel on the black theater circuit and made appearances at New York's Apollo Theater in the 1930s. Although less lavish than her early revues, a Bessie Smith performance was still a relatively well-attended event. Tragically, while traveling to one of these performances with her companion, Richard Morgan, Smith died on 26 September 1937 as a result of blood loss sustained in a car crash in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

Smith's legacy as the entertainment icon the Empress of the Blues still lives on in American social history and popular culture. The popular images of Smith adorned in a glamorous gown, a feathered headdress, and a wide smile have been reproduced thousands of times on postcards, T-shirts, coloring books, posters, and a postage stamp. Smith's life has been the subject of dramatic productions such as Edward Albee's The Death of Bessie Smith (1960) as well as musical productions such as “Me and Bessie” (1977). Beyond the glamorous image Smith will always have a place in history as the defiant blueswoman who spoke to her listeners through her unparalleled and poignant voice.

See also Blues; Jazz; Music Industry; Rainey, Ma (Gertrude Pridgett); and Waters, Ethel.

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