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The blues was out. Swing was in. The classic blues singers of the 1920s were losing ground fast. Among them was a rough, crude and violent woman named Bessie Smith. The year was 1933 and Bessie was about to make her last recording.
She stood six feet tall and weighed 200 pounds. Her strong, earthy voice was like a bull horn. If microphones and amplifiers had been generally available during her short career, she probably wouldn’t have needed the help.
Bessie Smith was also good with her fists. And she didn’t care whether her opponent was man or woman -- she fought both at the drop of a hat.
Except for the recent revival of her music, the best-known thing about Bessie Smith was the alleged circumstances surrounding her death. On the way to Clarksville, Mississippi, she was involved in an automobile accident that nearly severed her arm. According to one source, she bled to death in an emergency room while being denied admission to the hospital because she was black.
Bessie was street-tough, if nothing else. Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, sometime in the late 1890s (her birth date has always been in question) her parents died when she was just a child. She worked as a street singer to earn a living. One day in 1912, she was discovered by singer Ma Rainey. Ma took the young girl under her wing and introduced her to the then emerging art of blues singing.
Always a willful and independent person, Bessie soon left Ma to strike out on her own. She joined up with traveling tent shows, singing the blues and refining her act. The older she got, the deeper, more earthy, and more powerful her voice became.
In the early 20s, blues singing was called “race music” because its performers were African-American. The style was becoming extremely popular in clubs that catered to blacks. At the same time, record companies began to realize that there was an great untapped audience for race music.
In the spring of 1923, Columbia Records invited Bessie to cut some sides in the studio. Columbia executives were stunned when the first release, “Down Hearted Blues” sold two million records the first year of its release. Of course, they invited her back.
“Down Hearted Blues” made booking agents sit up and take notice. Bessie was booked on the TOBA vaudeville circuit where she was always the star attraction. She insisted on it. Bessie became the highest paid back entertainer in the country -- $1500 a week.
Back in the recording studio, Bessie Smith continued to make records -- a total of 160 songs in her career. Her record with Louis Armstrong of his “St. Louis Blues” is considered by many critics to be the finest jazz recording of the 1920s. Actually, Armstrong didn’t sing on the record and that was fine just with Bessie. She refused to share the spotlight with anyone. There was, however, one exception. She did agree to record a few songs with Clara Smith (no relation) in 1925. Shortly after, at a party, the two women got into a knock-down, drag-out fistfight that left Clara badly beaten.
That Bessie Smith was a raging success goes without saying. She was on top. But fame and fortune aggravated her already pugnacious nature. She got into fights regularly. One night in Chattanooga, she decked a male who was bothering her and her friends. The man jumped to his feet and stabbed Bessie in the side with a knife. Bessie took off after the fleeing assailant and stopped only when she dropped from the effects of the wound.
On top of all this, Bessie drank to excess. She preferred home-made gin which she downed by the glassful. And she trusted few whites, preferring the company of blacks. Frank Walker, her producer at Columbia, was one of the few exceptions. The strange thing was that Bessie was one of the few blues singers that appealed equally to both blacks and whites. At the height of her fame she toured extensively in the North as well as the South, especially in New York where she was held in high esteem.
When Bessie Smith made her last record in 1933, it was considered largely a sentimental gesture. Columbia’s executives knew that it would probably not earn back it’s cost. Swing was the thing and all marketing was being focused in that direction. It was ironic that one of the backup musicians on her last session was none other than Benny Goodman, himself soon to be known as the “King of Swing”.
Bessie made her last New York appearance in 1936, but she was already planning a comeback. She would switch styles from blues to swing. She was looking forward to her triumphal resurrection in the music world. The day before she was to return to New York, however, she suffered her fatal auto accident.
Her manager at the time, John Hammond, told the press that Bessie had died because she had been left in the emergency room to bleed to death while the hospital refused to admit her because she was black. Without checking with the hospital, the press ran the story and created a furor. The fact that the story wasn’t true wasn’t important. It sold newspapers.
Today, there has been renewed interest in the music of Bessie Smith. Her style has had an tremendous impact on music -- an impact that has reached far beyond the narrow limits of her genre.
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