Bessie Smith

Her father, a laborer who preached part time, died before she could remember him, and by the time she was nine her mother and one of her brothers were dead too. An older sister, Viola, kept the house. Bessie got no schooling at all. She and her brother Andrew worked the corner of Thirteenth and Elm outside the White Elephant Saloon, he on guitar, she singing and dancing for coins. Their oldest brother Clarence left with a travelling troupe in 1904 and came back in 1912 with an audition. The managers hired her as a dancer, because they already had a singer, and the singer was Ma Rainey. She worked chorus lines and the Black vaudeville circuit out of Atlanta's 81 Theatre until she had her own act.

Mamie Smith's Crazy Blues had sold more than 100,000 copies and sent every label in New York hunting for women who could sing the blues. Columbia signed Bessie Smith in 1923, and her first session, on February 15, produced Downhearted Blues and Gulf Coast Blues, both hits. She cut about 160 sides, with Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, James P. Johnson and Coleman Hawkins in the room, and when electrical recording arrived in 1925 the machines finally caught what her voice actually did. She sang about chain gangs, the convict lease system and the electric chair, about washwomen and poor men, and about a working woman's right to drink and to want what she wanted. By the mid-1920s she was the highest paid Black entertainer in the country, touring in a custom 72-foot railroad car.

The money came as flat fees. Her last session, in November 1933, paid 37 dollars and 50 cents a side with no royalty — four sides for Okeh, with Jack Teagarden and Chu Berry on the date and Benny Goodman wandering in from the studio next door. The Depression had taken the record business and sound film had taken vaudeville. Respectability had never taken her at all. Black Swan Records, with W. E. B. Du Bois on its board, turned her down as too rough, and admirers of both races called her low class. Her marriage to Jack Gee ran on infidelity and violence in both directions: he beat her, she beat him back, and on learning of one of his affairs she took his gun and shot at him.

She died on September 26, 1937, hours after a collision on Highway 61 outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, her right arm nearly severed. In November the producer John Hammond wrote in DownBeat that a whites-only hospital had turned her away, a story Edward Albee made into a play in 1959 and her biographer Chris Albertson dismantled with testimony from the surgeon who reached her first. Some 10,000 people filed past her coffin in Philadelphia. Then the grave went unmarked for 33 years, because Gee blocked every attempt to buy a stone and pocketed the money raised. The headstone went up on August 7, 1970, paid for by Janis Joplin and by Juanita Green, who had cleaned house for her as a child.

Bessie Smith's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Downhearted Blues song
  Her first Columbia side, cut February 15, 1923, and a hit 1923
• St. Louis Blues song
  Recorded with Louis Armstrong on cornet 1925
• Empty Bed Blues song
  Two sides, recorded March 20, 1928 1928
• Poor Man's Blues song
  Read by scholars as an early piece of African American protest music 1928
• Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out song
  Recorded May 15, 1929, as the good years ended 1929
• St. Louis Blues film
  A two-reel short, her only film appearance 1929

• 1901 aged ~9 Orphaned by about the age of nine Her sister Viola took charge of the children. Bessie and Andrew busked for coins.
• 1912 aged ~20 Hired by the Moses Stokes troupe as a dancer Ma Rainey was already the company's singer.
• February 15, 1923 aged 30 First Columbia session Downhearted Blues and Gulf Coast Blues were both hits.
• June 7, 1923 aged 31 Marries Jack Gee, a security guard, in Philadelphia The marriage broke in 1929 and neither of them filed for divorce.
• May 5, 1925 aged 33 Makes her first electrical recording The new microphones caught the power of the voice that acoustic horns had flattened.
• November 1929 aged 37 Films the two-reeler St. Louis Blues in Queens Her only surviving film appearance.
• November 24, 1933 aged 41 Cuts four last sides for Okeh at 37.50 dollars each, no royalty Jack Teagarden, Chu Berry and Frankie Newton played the date.
• September 26, 1937 aged 45 Dies at the G. T. Thomas Afro-American Hospital in Clarksdale Her right arm was amputated. She never regained consciousness.
• August 7, 1970 aged 78 A headstone finally goes up at Mount Lawn Cemetery Paid for by Janis Joplin and Juanita Green.

• Louis Armstrong 1901–1971
  Trumpeter and singer whose innovations and worldwide fame made jazz a central American art form. recorded with
• W.E.B. Du Bois 1868–1963
  Sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist who was the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate. rejected by the label of
• Billie Holiday 1915–1959
  Jazz singer whose intensely personal phrasing and performances, including 'Strange Fruit,' transformed American vocal music. came after her
• Aretha Franklin 1942–2018
  Singer whose gospel-rooted artistry made her a defining voice of soul music and Black cultural pride. inherited the line
• Langston Hughes 1901–1967
  Harlem Renaissance poet and writer whose work celebrated Black life and challenged racial injustice. wrote about the same people