Bessie Smith

The Full Biography

Bessie Smith. Singer. The Empress of the Blues. The largest voice classic blues ever put on a Columbia disc.

This is her story.

The image most people still carry is a woman in feathers, head back, a voice that does not ask the room for permission. The year on the famous portrait is 1936. Carl Van Vechten took it. What the photograph cannot show is a Chattanooga childhood with too many deaths in it, a tent-show apprenticeship, more than a hundred and fifty issued sides, and a Mississippi roadside in 1937 that later generations would decorate with a story the hospital file does not quite support.

She was born Elizabeth Smith in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on April 15. The year on most twentieth-century files, including the one this house first verified, is 1894. Later census work has argued for 1892. Either way she was the youngest of a large, poor family. Her father, a laborer and part-time preacher, died when she was small. Her mother died not long after. Older siblings kept the household from vanishing. Bessie and her brother Andrew sang on street corners for coins. That is not color. That is the first booking.

The door was the Black vaudeville circuit — the Theater Owners Booking Association, TOBA, which performers, not kindly, translated as Tough on Black Asses. She worked tent shows. Ma Rainey, already a star of the classic blues, was on those roads; the two women’s names are forever linked. Whether Rainey “taught” Smith or simply occupied the same weather is a biographer’s argument. What is not an argument is the result. By the early 1920s Smith had a stage body and a voice that could fill a tent without a microphone and still have authority left for the back row.

Columbia Records signed her in 1923. “Downhearted Blues,” written by Alberta Hunter and Lovie Austin, was the first smash. It sold in numbers that surprised a business still learning that Black women were not a niche. She recorded with Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, James P. Johnson, Coleman Hawkins. “St. Louis Blues.” “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” “’Tain’t Nobody’s Bizness If I Do.” The records are not folk documents. They are pop records of their decade, aimed at people who bought discs and went out at night. She became, in the trade paper sense, the highest-paid Black performer in the country. Empress was a billing. It was also, for a stretch, a fact about the gate.

In 1929 she starred in a two-reel film, St. Louis Blues, singing the Handy song in a gin-mill set while a chorus answers her. It is one of the few times a camera was allowed to sit still on that face while the voice happened. The Depression then did to race-record catalogs what it did to everything else that depended on spare change. Columbia let her go in 1931. She kept touring. She drank. She spent. She married Jack Gee, a night watchman who liked the money and the spotlight and was a poor partner for either. The marriage broke. She did not become respectable in the way white editors preferred. She became, instead, a working headliner whose records were already starting to sound like scripture to people younger than the discs.

It’s a long old road, but I’m gonna find the end.Bessie Smith, from the song she recorded in 1931

The Columbia years were a factory, not a myth. Between 1923 and 1931 she cut more than a hundred and sixty issued sides, most of them in New York, a few in the rooms Columbia used when a tour made a northern city convenient. “Gulf Coast Blues” sat on the other face of the first smash. “Cemetery Blues.” “T’ain’t Nobody’s Bizness If I Do.” “Send Me to the ’Lectric Chair.” “Young Woman’s Blues.” “Backwater Blues,” cut in 1927 after the Mississippi flood waters had already changed a map, is a weather report sung as if the water were still in the room. “Empty Bed Blues,” a two-part 1928 disc, is as plain as a boarding-house door and as carefully made as a pop record. Fletcher Henderson sat at the piano. Louis Armstrong answered her on “St. Louis Blues” and “Reckless Blues” in 1925, cornet phrases that do not decorate the voice so much as argue with it. James P. Johnson walked “Backwater Blues” and “Preachin’ the Blues.” Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Green, Joe Smith — the hired men on those dates were not atmosphere. They were the band a headliner could afford.

She toured like a small company, not like a solo. A private railroad car carried the troupe when the money was good, a rolling answer to hotels that would not take a Black company overnight. Tent dates in the South, TOBA weeks in Atlanta and Chicago and Detroit, a house in Philadelphia when the road paused. Ruby Walker, her niece, kept a running account of the fights, the women, the men, the nights the Empress paid a band and still had enough left to lose at cards. Jack Gee, married the same season as the first Columbia smash, wanted the cash and the billing. The marriage did not survive either. She loved Lillian Simpson. She loved men who could keep up. None of that is a sidebar to the records. It is how a tent-show boss stayed a tent-show boss when the respectable press wanted a cleaner Empress.

The Depression closed the race-record window the way it closed furniture stores. Columbia dropped her in 1931. OKeh was already in the same house. The discs that had sold in the hundreds of thousands were remaindered. She did not stop. She played the theaters that still paid, then the tents that still filled, then any hall that would take a name the jukebox still knew. In November 1933 John Hammond brought her back for a four-song date that is now filed as the last session: “Do Your Duty,” “Gimme a Pigfoot,” “Take Me for a Buggy Ride,” “I’m Down in the Dumps.” Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden sat in. The swing the country was about to buy is already in the room. She is not a relic on that date. She is a working singer taking a day’s pay from a producer who understood what he had.

The February 16, 1923, session that produced “Downhearted Blues” and “Gulf Coast Blues” was not a folk field recording. Clarence Williams was in the room. Columbia was in the business of selling discs to people who had a little money on a Saturday. “Careless Love Blues.” “I Ain’t Gonna Play No Second Fiddle.” “Jazzbo Brown from Memphis Town.” “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl.” The titles are a night out, not a museum label. She could fill a tent without a microphone and still leave enough voice for the back row. That is why the Empress billing stuck. It was a gate fact before it was a nickname. The Van Vechten sitting of February 1936 is the face people still carry; the Columbia ledger of 1923 to 1933 is the work.

The turn is not the crash. The turn is the decision, after the hits slowed, to stay on the road anyway — to treat the blues as a job when the empress years were over. In 1937 she was working again, talking about recording again. Hammond was circling a second time. She did not live to walk into that studio.

She loved women and men, drank hard, fought in public, and ran a show that paid a troupe. None of that is gossip if you are writing the life: it is how a headliner on the TOBA road stayed a headliner. The respectable version of the Empress is a tidy invention. The working version bought the house, lost money, and still filled the tent.

The later years

There were not many extra years. That is the cruelty of a death at forty-three or forty-five. The last stretch is 1933 to 1937: fewer records, more road, a body that had already lived a long American century in four decades. After the Hammond date she went back to the only calendar that still paid — one-nighters, tent weeks, a show that still carried her name above the rest of the bill. Swing was already the new weather on the radio. She could sing it. She had sung it in November 1933 with Goodman in the room. What she did not have was a label willing to keep a classic-blues catalog in print while jukeboxes shifted toward a faster beat.

Home, when the Packard stopped, was Philadelphia — rooms she had kept as a northern base since the money years, a city that knew the Empress as a neighbor and not only as a disc. Richard Morgan, a longtime companion who had run liquor when liquor was a business, drove her south in September 1937 on a tour that was supposed to be ordinary work. They were on U.S. 61 between Memphis and Clarksdale, Coahoma County, Mississippi, in the dark of the 26th. He came up too fast on a slow truck. The wreck sheared the wooden roof of the old Packard. Smith’s right arm was nearly taken off. Morgan was largely unhurt.

Dr. Hugh Smith, a white physician who stopped at the scene, gave an account that does not match the Albee version. An ambulance took her to the G. T. Thomas Afro-American Hospital in Clarksdale, the Black hospital that actually received her. She died that morning. Shock. Blood loss. Crushing injuries to the arm and the body no county hospital of that year was going to reverse. Racism had already shaped the roads, the hotels, the medicine, and the maps of 1937 Mississippi. It does not require a play in which a white ward turns her away. The file is harder than the play: she was admitted, and she still died.

Thousands came to the funeral in Philadelphia. The procession was the kind of civic fact a city does not invent twice. She was buried at Mount Lawn Cemetery in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania, just outside the city that had been her northern house. For more than thirty years the grave had no marker. In 1970 Juanita Green, who had met Smith as a child, and Janis Joplin paid for a stone. The inscription calls her the greatest blues singer in the world. That is a fan’s sentence. The Columbia ledger, the Armstrong sides, and the two-reel film make it hard to call it wrong. Chris Albertson’s biography put the crash, the hospital, and the unmarked years back into the public record. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame took her in 1989, in the early-influence class, a formality the 1923–33 sides had not waited for.

After she was gone

Every woman who sang the blues after her owed a debt whether she paid it in public or not. Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin — different churches, same weather. Columbia’s reissues taught the rock years who had been first. The Van Vechten portrait is still the face. The 1923–33 sides are still the file. The play about the hospital is still performed, which means the correction has to be written again every time.

She came out of Chattanooga with a brother’s harmony and a dead parents’ silence, took the tent-show road, sold a million of someone else’s “Downhearted Blues,” and made the blues sound like a person who would not step aside. Those last years were too short to be a retirement. They were a Packard on Route 61 and a hospital that did receive her. If you only remember the feathers, you have the portrait. If you remember the Columbia ledger, the two-reel film, and the unmarked grave that waited until 1970, you have her.

Portrait: Carl Van Vechten (restored by Adam Cuerden) · Public domain (no known copyright restrictions) · via Wikimedia Commons

Bessie Smith · Full Biography · 50 Plus Hub
https://50plushub.com/nostalgia/stars/bessie-smith/story