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| The Empress of the Blues. |
Tragedy bookended the life of 1920s blues legend, Bessie Smith. She lost her father, “a laborer and part-time Baptist preacher," before her memory kicked in and lost her mother (and an older brother) by the time she was 9 (or 10; I’ve read both). That threw her family onto the resources and guidance of her oldest sister, Viola, to raise what was left of a too-young family. The Smith family did some of the usual things to find income - e.g., doing other people’s laundry - but Bessie Smith and one of her remaining brothers (Clarence, I’m guessing) raised money by busking; they even had a street corner nailed down, Thirteenth and Elm Street, in front of Chattanooga, Tennessee’s White Elephant Saloon.
Clarence Smith later joined a touring troupe, one owned and operated by Moses Stokes, leaving Bessie behind and breaking up the busking team. He snuck out at night, knowing that Bessie would try to go with him. I haven’t read anything that says how she reacted to that whole thing, but, if hard feelings were present, Clarence made it up to her by finagling an audition to the same troupe for Bessie when she was 18 (old enough, basically, which was why Clarence snuck out the first time); that would have been 1912. She landed the job and joined her brother and the troupe on tour. The name of the company: The Rabbit Foot Minstrels - e.g., the same outfit that employed Ma Rainey. Rainey took Smith under her wing (there are rumors she kidnapped her, but…) and taught her how to sing the blues. Smith learned well. Very well:
“None of the others could sing with her combination of field holler and Jazz Age sophistication. None could throw her voice from the stage — without a microphone — and make a balcony seat feel like the front row. None made such an artistic impression on her contemporaries in jazz, or her disciples in rock 'n' roll.”
“Smith's version of ‘Downhearted Blues’ sold a reported 780,000 copies in 1923, a minor miracle for a song that had already hit nationwide for a variety of different artists.”
“In Smith's case, they amount to a woman whose life makes a liar out of every subsequent performer claiming to have had an original experience in the music business. She was the first bisexual, alcoholic, horsewhipped-by-segregationists, beat-out-of-songwriting-royalties, lemonade-making, dark-skinned singing-sensation whose husband cheated on her with a light-skinned ‘Becky with the good hair.’”
All those came out of a solid history of Smith that NPR put together, which makes better reading than Wikipedia’s entry on Smith - and I’ll get to the “Becky.” Her story parallels Rainey’s - e.g., she hit the Theater Owners Booking Association circuit (“T.O.B.A.,” or “Tough on Black Asses” as Ma Rainey called it) - performing the same kinds of shows in front the same (largely) segregated audiences. After nearly a decade in vaudeville, Smith signed with Columbia Records in 1923 and recorded her first singles: “Cemetery Blues,” “Downhearted Blues,” and “Gulf Coast Blues.” With that, she joined one of the “gold rushes” in modern music industry history: once people in the phonograph business discovered a market existed for Black, female blues singers, they started signing anyone who used “Ma” for a nickname. Smith stood out from that crowd, becoming one of the most bankable recording artists of 1920s - white, black or other. In her best years, she was the best-selling artist for the year - e.g., 1927 with her cover of Irving Berlin’s already classic “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (written 16 years earlier) - and Columbia promoted her first as “Queen of the Blues,” then “Empress of the Blues.”
Something else Smith shared with Rainey: both flagrantly broke convention, though it appears only Smith got saddled with the phrase “rough woman.” When Smith approached the Black Swan Records (W.E.B. Dubois was on the board), they passed on signing her because she paused to spit while singing. Like Rainey, though, and other performers, presumably, she sang vividly about life as she knew it…which went as expected (NPR, again):
“…she incorporated commentary on social issues like poverty, intra-racial conflict, and female sexuality into her lyrics. Her lyrical sincerity and public behavior were not widely accepted as appropriate expressions for African American women; therefore, her work was often written off as distasteful or unseemly, rather than as an accurate representation of the African-American experience.”
Whatever the scolds thought, Smith’s sales said more about what audiences wanted to hear. In her hey-day, she toured via a personalized rail-car, and worked with many of the decade’s biggest names - e.g,. Louis Armstrong (on the and her famous “St. Louis Blues”), Coleman Hawkins, Joe Smith, and Charlie Green; a Biography history adds Sidney Bechet, Fletcher Henderson, and James P. Johnson to the list (all them, regrettably, artists and players I won’t cover in this little series). Smith recorded what was arguably her biggest hit with Johnson, “Backwater Blues.” She helped some of those guys break through - there’s a great anecdote about Louis Armstrong needing change for his first-ever $100 after a 1925 recording session; when he asked Smith, she lifted her dress and revealed what amounted to a portable change drawer (“like a carpenter’s belt,” was how Armstrong recalled it in 1956).
Smith married at the beginning of it all - which makes introductions to the darker side of her story. Her husband, Jack Gee, was a night watchman, who probably didn’t marry Smith for money - but a short history by Blackpast.org reports that both he, and an early collaborator/pianist named Clarence Williams commenced to skimming when the money did come around. Smith set Columbia’s sales soaring - they hit 2 million sales the year after signing her - but general opinion holds that they kept more for themselves than they paid Smith. The marriage didn’t go great and both Gee and Smith cheated, but the “Becky Incident” involved a singer named Gertrude Saunders, a star in a show Gee produced. (Fun side note: Saunders earlier starred in Eubie Blake’s ground-breaking musical, Shuffle Along.) The fact both partners cheated didn’t mean much to Smith: she assaulted Saunders at least twice. She cut Gee loose eventually, though the couple only separated, but never divorced.
The last recording at peak of Smith's popularity, “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” came in 1929, just two weeks before the stock market crashed. Columbia terminated her contract a couple years later, making her both a victim of a shift in popular tastes and another casualty of the Great Depression. Okeh Records approached her in 1933, to re-record a bunch of her earlier hits, but at $37.50 per side (these were 78 rpm, shellac records), a pittance in the context of her career. A couple of the numbers - “Take Me for a Buggy Ride” and “Gimme a Pigfoot (and a Bottle of Beer)” - became hits and she took a stab at playing with those new sounds on several of the recordings. With the world’s belt tightened, nothing caught traction.
When Smith died in 1937, the circumstances surrounding it were fucked up enough that Edward Albee wrote a play about it. While riding in the passenger seat of a car with her lover, Richard Morgan, he misjudged the speed on a truck and rammed her side of the car into it at velocity. Smith “took the full brunt of the impact,” leaving her with crush injuries all over, massive blood loss and her right arm severed below the elbow. A Memphis surgeon showed up, got Smith to the side of the road, rendered first aid called for an ambulance. While all that was happening, a second car collided with the surgeon’s car, sending that flying toward Smith’s now-totaled Packard and barely missing Smith and another man attending to her. Two ambulances finally arrived at the scene - one from a white hospital, and another from a black hospital. In a disputed account - the one Albee borrowed from - Smith was refused at the white hospital. The surgeon disputed that story and for the terrible, but probable reason that a white ambulance driver wouldn’t have loaded Smith into his ambulance, not in “the Deep South Cotton Belt.” Smith died the next morning without ever having regained consciousness.
Her death was mourned by thousands - 10,000 passed her casket when it came to Philadelphia, and 7,000 attended her funeral. Few people attended her burial - possibly because her estranged husband both received and kept all the money forwarded for it…as they say, even in death. The story ultimately ended well, or at least with an appropriate tribute:
“That Janis Joplin helped buy Smith's headstone in 1971 — two weeks before her own untimely death — is well-known. But the other person who helped buy the stone was Juanita Green: the little girl who Smith once told to give up singing and stay in school. Green became a nurse and a businesswoman in Pennsylvania, which suggests that the breadth of Smith's influence should never be confined solely to music.”
About the Sampler
For the second post in this series, I went with a mix of songs that made Bessie Smith famous (laced into the above), or that marked something notable in her career (she wrote “You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon,” a sly bugger of a song, btw), and songs I like - e.g., “Me and My Gin,” “Jazzbo Brown from Memphis Town,” “Weeping Willow Blues,” Smith’s smooth reworking of another oldie, "There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” and the very clever “I Ain’t Goin’ to Play Second Fiddle.” Another thing to note - and it’s something you might hear between the earlier selected recordings - e.g., the very on-brand “Tain’t Nobody’s Bizness If I Do” and a later recording like “Take Me for a Buggy Ride” - Smith started recording electronically with 1925’s “Cake Walkin' Babies from Home,” which improved the sound and expanded the range of tones (and instruments) you can hear in the recordings.
And, let’s see, what songs haven’t I mentioned yet…uh, “After You’ve Gone,” “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl” and…”Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair.” That’s everything. Hope you found it educational and entertaining!
Clarence Smith later joined a touring troupe, one owned and operated by Moses Stokes, leaving Bessie behind and breaking up the busking team. He snuck out at night, knowing that Bessie would try to go with him. I haven’t read anything that says how she reacted to that whole thing, but, if hard feelings were present, Clarence made it up to her by finagling an audition to the same troupe for Bessie when she was 18 (old enough, basically, which was why Clarence snuck out the first time); that would have been 1912. She landed the job and joined her brother and the troupe on tour. The name of the company: The Rabbit Foot Minstrels - e.g., the same outfit that employed Ma Rainey. Rainey took Smith under her wing (there are rumors she kidnapped her, but…) and taught her how to sing the blues. Smith learned well. Very well:
“None of the others could sing with her combination of field holler and Jazz Age sophistication. None could throw her voice from the stage — without a microphone — and make a balcony seat feel like the front row. None made such an artistic impression on her contemporaries in jazz, or her disciples in rock 'n' roll.”
“Smith's version of ‘Downhearted Blues’ sold a reported 780,000 copies in 1923, a minor miracle for a song that had already hit nationwide for a variety of different artists.”
“In Smith's case, they amount to a woman whose life makes a liar out of every subsequent performer claiming to have had an original experience in the music business. She was the first bisexual, alcoholic, horsewhipped-by-segregationists, beat-out-of-songwriting-royalties, lemonade-making, dark-skinned singing-sensation whose husband cheated on her with a light-skinned ‘Becky with the good hair.’”
All those came out of a solid history of Smith that NPR put together, which makes better reading than Wikipedia’s entry on Smith - and I’ll get to the “Becky.” Her story parallels Rainey’s - e.g., she hit the Theater Owners Booking Association circuit (“T.O.B.A.,” or “Tough on Black Asses” as Ma Rainey called it) - performing the same kinds of shows in front the same (largely) segregated audiences. After nearly a decade in vaudeville, Smith signed with Columbia Records in 1923 and recorded her first singles: “Cemetery Blues,” “Downhearted Blues,” and “Gulf Coast Blues.” With that, she joined one of the “gold rushes” in modern music industry history: once people in the phonograph business discovered a market existed for Black, female blues singers, they started signing anyone who used “Ma” for a nickname. Smith stood out from that crowd, becoming one of the most bankable recording artists of 1920s - white, black or other. In her best years, she was the best-selling artist for the year - e.g., 1927 with her cover of Irving Berlin’s already classic “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (written 16 years earlier) - and Columbia promoted her first as “Queen of the Blues,” then “Empress of the Blues.”
Something else Smith shared with Rainey: both flagrantly broke convention, though it appears only Smith got saddled with the phrase “rough woman.” When Smith approached the Black Swan Records (W.E.B. Dubois was on the board), they passed on signing her because she paused to spit while singing. Like Rainey, though, and other performers, presumably, she sang vividly about life as she knew it…which went as expected (NPR, again):
“…she incorporated commentary on social issues like poverty, intra-racial conflict, and female sexuality into her lyrics. Her lyrical sincerity and public behavior were not widely accepted as appropriate expressions for African American women; therefore, her work was often written off as distasteful or unseemly, rather than as an accurate representation of the African-American experience.”
Whatever the scolds thought, Smith’s sales said more about what audiences wanted to hear. In her hey-day, she toured via a personalized rail-car, and worked with many of the decade’s biggest names - e.g,. Louis Armstrong (on the and her famous “St. Louis Blues”), Coleman Hawkins, Joe Smith, and Charlie Green; a Biography history adds Sidney Bechet, Fletcher Henderson, and James P. Johnson to the list (all them, regrettably, artists and players I won’t cover in this little series). Smith recorded what was arguably her biggest hit with Johnson, “Backwater Blues.” She helped some of those guys break through - there’s a great anecdote about Louis Armstrong needing change for his first-ever $100 after a 1925 recording session; when he asked Smith, she lifted her dress and revealed what amounted to a portable change drawer (“like a carpenter’s belt,” was how Armstrong recalled it in 1956).
Smith married at the beginning of it all - which makes introductions to the darker side of her story. Her husband, Jack Gee, was a night watchman, who probably didn’t marry Smith for money - but a short history by Blackpast.org reports that both he, and an early collaborator/pianist named Clarence Williams commenced to skimming when the money did come around. Smith set Columbia’s sales soaring - they hit 2 million sales the year after signing her - but general opinion holds that they kept more for themselves than they paid Smith. The marriage didn’t go great and both Gee and Smith cheated, but the “Becky Incident” involved a singer named Gertrude Saunders, a star in a show Gee produced. (Fun side note: Saunders earlier starred in Eubie Blake’s ground-breaking musical, Shuffle Along.) The fact both partners cheated didn’t mean much to Smith: she assaulted Saunders at least twice. She cut Gee loose eventually, though the couple only separated, but never divorced.
The last recording at peak of Smith's popularity, “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” came in 1929, just two weeks before the stock market crashed. Columbia terminated her contract a couple years later, making her both a victim of a shift in popular tastes and another casualty of the Great Depression. Okeh Records approached her in 1933, to re-record a bunch of her earlier hits, but at $37.50 per side (these were 78 rpm, shellac records), a pittance in the context of her career. A couple of the numbers - “Take Me for a Buggy Ride” and “Gimme a Pigfoot (and a Bottle of Beer)” - became hits and she took a stab at playing with those new sounds on several of the recordings. With the world’s belt tightened, nothing caught traction.
When Smith died in 1937, the circumstances surrounding it were fucked up enough that Edward Albee wrote a play about it. While riding in the passenger seat of a car with her lover, Richard Morgan, he misjudged the speed on a truck and rammed her side of the car into it at velocity. Smith “took the full brunt of the impact,” leaving her with crush injuries all over, massive blood loss and her right arm severed below the elbow. A Memphis surgeon showed up, got Smith to the side of the road, rendered first aid called for an ambulance. While all that was happening, a second car collided with the surgeon’s car, sending that flying toward Smith’s now-totaled Packard and barely missing Smith and another man attending to her. Two ambulances finally arrived at the scene - one from a white hospital, and another from a black hospital. In a disputed account - the one Albee borrowed from - Smith was refused at the white hospital. The surgeon disputed that story and for the terrible, but probable reason that a white ambulance driver wouldn’t have loaded Smith into his ambulance, not in “the Deep South Cotton Belt.” Smith died the next morning without ever having regained consciousness.
Her death was mourned by thousands - 10,000 passed her casket when it came to Philadelphia, and 7,000 attended her funeral. Few people attended her burial - possibly because her estranged husband both received and kept all the money forwarded for it…as they say, even in death. The story ultimately ended well, or at least with an appropriate tribute:
“That Janis Joplin helped buy Smith's headstone in 1971 — two weeks before her own untimely death — is well-known. But the other person who helped buy the stone was Juanita Green: the little girl who Smith once told to give up singing and stay in school. Green became a nurse and a businesswoman in Pennsylvania, which suggests that the breadth of Smith's influence should never be confined solely to music.”
About the Sampler
For the second post in this series, I went with a mix of songs that made Bessie Smith famous (laced into the above), or that marked something notable in her career (she wrote “You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon,” a sly bugger of a song, btw), and songs I like - e.g., “Me and My Gin,” “Jazzbo Brown from Memphis Town,” “Weeping Willow Blues,” Smith’s smooth reworking of another oldie, "There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” and the very clever “I Ain’t Goin’ to Play Second Fiddle.” Another thing to note - and it’s something you might hear between the earlier selected recordings - e.g., the very on-brand “Tain’t Nobody’s Bizness If I Do” and a later recording like “Take Me for a Buggy Ride” - Smith started recording electronically with 1925’s “Cake Walkin' Babies from Home,” which improved the sound and expanded the range of tones (and instruments) you can hear in the recordings.
And, let’s see, what songs haven’t I mentioned yet…uh, “After You’ve Gone,” “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl” and…”Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair.” That’s everything. Hope you found it educational and entertaining!
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