Bessie Smith
- Faby Médina
- Mar 2
- 5 min read
Bessie Smith, or the Empress of the Blues!
Bessie Smith was born into a very poor family in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on April 15, 1894. That same year, the Code Noir, Louisiana's segregationist law, forced the Creoles of New Orleans to leave the city center for the working-class neighborhoods. The encounter between this culturally mixed population and the Black residents of the ghettos created a fusion that would become the cradle of jazz. That same year, the first Negro spiritual was recorded.
A young orphan, Bessie Smith grew up under the guardianship of her older sister Viola, forced to act as a parent to a handful of hungry and hopeless siblings. Bessie earned her first dollar by participating in a singing contest, encouraged by her brother Clarence. She quickly realized that a life as an entertainer could offer her a much better future than that offered to most Black women of that era. She took her chances and auditioned for the traveling shows that were so common at the time.
She crosses paths with Ma Rainey, who takes her under her wing and teaches her the ropes. Together they travel across the southern United States, entertaining the working-class populations trapped in an economy based on cotton, coffee, and other commodities grown in those regions. Bessie is greatly inspired by Ma, but her ambition and strong character demand space; it's time to fly on her own.
Her playing field would be the theaters of major Northern cities, increasingly populated by African Americans fleeing a racist South that had become too dangerous. But her ambition was matched only by her authenticity, and a path strewn with rejections awaited Bessie. She was too much! In the eyes of show producers and other organizers, she was too rustic, too dark-skinned, too tall, and too outspoken. Despite everything, life had a plan for her. With her brother, she managed to create her own troupe, her own show, and success followed, even propelling her to the doors of Black Swan, a record label dedicated to promoting Black artists for a Black audience—what were known in other words as "Race Records." But even there, Bessie didn't fit the beauty standards of these new players in the Black artistic world. The choice of Ethel Waters to represent the label highlighted the desire to erase the rural character of the Blues. A more refined voice, a lighter figure—the aim was to move beyond the rustic blues of the Southern fields and reflect a more sophisticated lifestyle, that of the Northern cities. Like an artistic echo of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, an organization dedicated to advancing the Black cause in the United States for greater political, economic, social, and civic justice), the "Harlem Renaissance" was a
The African-American cultural movement in New York sought to project an image of an educated, modern, sophisticated, and free people. Encountering the artists, poets, or writers of this movement wasn't always easy for Bessie, who didn't identify with this artistic current.
Bessie photographed by Carl Van Vechten, patron of the "Harlem Renaissance" cultural movement
Bessie had to carve out her own niche among all those blues singers like Mamie Smith, who accidentally became the first blueswoman to record her voice, stepping in at the last minute for the ailing Sophie Tucker, a white Russian Jewish immigrant forced by her producers to blacken her skin to justify her curves; Ida Cox; Clara Smith; Alberta Hunter ; and many others. Record companies quickly grasped the appeal of posters and album covers featuring young, pretty girls with varying degrees of skin tone. Bessie Smith embodied authentic, raw blues, a reflection of an unvarnished, unsettling reality. She sang in her powerful voice Washwomen's Blues , which denounced the place of women in a society that had nothing planned for them but servitude, or Back Water Blues, evoking the Mississippi floods of 1927. Columbia and its Race Records label (also intended for Black people) would eventually recognize that the authenticity and power of Bessie Smith could not be ignored.
"Bessie" Biopic of Bessie Smith directed by Dee Rees, film released in 2015 with Queen Latilah in the lead role.
In 1923, she finally recorded her first single, " Downhearted Blues ," and quickly became the best-selling blues singer in the United States, and consequently the highest-paid Black artist of her generation in the world, hailed as the "Empress of the Blues"! Along the way, she crossed paths with Louis Armstrong, with whom she recorded an album, as well as Sidney Bechet, with whom she was often rumored to have had an affair. In 1929, she was offered a role in a film, *Saint Louis Blues *, which unfortunately perpetuated all the racist and sexist stereotypes of the time. It portrays Bessie leaning on a bar, whining a tearful blues song—an image far removed from the real singer: powerful, poised, running her business like a true entrepreneur, and singing a defiant and proud blues.
Excerpt from Saint Louis Blues, a 1929 film, Bessie Smith's only film role.
Bessie Smith is a strong-willed, feisty, gin-drinking woman during Prohibition, openly bisexual, and sings as she is: authentic, powerful, often excessive, so what? After all, it takes all sorts to make this world, and from now on, we'll have to deal with her.
The years of depression that followed the 1929 Black Thursday stock market crash marked the end of the reign of the Empress of the Blues, who was forced to sell her grand house and settle for a small, unassuming New York apartment. The encounter with John Hammond, music critic, talent scout (discovering artists such as Billie Holiday, Bennie Carter, and Bob Dylan, among others), producer, and a lifelong Bessie fan, restored some of the Empress's luster, putting her back on the map. He tirelessly promoted her, even in Europe.
The blueswoman enjoyed a few years of this renewed interest in classic blues before being involved in a car accident one evening in September 1937 on Route 61 in Clarksdale, Mississippi. She never had the chance to sing at Carnegie Hall, nor to participate in the much-desired "From Spirituals to Swing" concert, organized by John Hammond to showcase Black music and tell its story. The show was performed in her honor the following year to a sold-out crowd of mixed audiences! As the curtain rose, a guitar and a phonograph played a song by Robert Johnson, the father of the blues, who had also passed away too soon, just a few days earlier. Then, a succession of stars took the stage: Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Rosetta Tharpe…
Bessie Smith is a source of inspiration for many singers, such as Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, and even Janis Joplin, to name just a few. Without Bessie, the landscape of vocal jazz would certainly not have been the same.
The Empress of the Blues never apologized for existing; neither men, nor Jim Crow laws (segregation laws), nor her status as a Black woman in the United States during the first half of the 20th century could break her. Bessie didn't try to conform to certain aesthetic codes prevalent in the 1920s. I like to think that this was a lesson she learned from Ma Rainey: don't cheat, don't betray yourself, remember where you come from, sing from the heart and nothing else.
Comments