Bessie Smith was an African-American blues singer widely renowned during the Jazz Age. Nicknamed the “Empress of the Blues”, she was the most popular female blues singer of the 1930s. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, she is often regarded as one of the greatest singers of her era and was a major influence on fellow blues singers, as well as jazz vocalists.
Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Smith was young when her parents died, and she and her six siblings survived by performing on street corners. Smith began forming her own act around 1913, at Atlanta’s “81” Theater. By 1920, she had established a reputation in the South and along the East Coast. At the time, sales of over 100,000 copies of “Crazy Blues”, recorded for Okeh Records by the singer Mamie Smith (no relation), pointed to a new market. The recording industry had not directed its product to black people, but the success of the record led to a search for female blues singers.
Hoping to capitalize on this new market, Smith began her recording career in 1923. Bessie Smith was signed to Columbia Records in 1923 by Fran Walker, a talent agent who had seen her perform years earlier. Her first recording session for Columbia was in February 1923; it was engineered by Dan Hornsby who was recording and discovering many southern music talents of that era. For most of 1923, her records were issued on Columbia’s regular A-series. When the company established a “race records” series, Smith’s “Cemetery Blues” (September 26, 1923) was the first issued. Both sides of her first record, “Downhearted Blues” backed with “Gulf Coast Blues”, were hits.
As her popularity increased, Smith became a headliner on the Theatre Owners Booking Association circuit and rose to become its top attraction in the 1920s. Working a heavy theater schedule during the winter and performing in tent shows the rest of the year, Smith became the highest-paid black entertainer of her day and began travelling in her own railroad car. Columbia’s publicity department nicknamed her “Queen of the Blues”, but the national press soon upgraded her title to “Empress of the Blues”. Smith’s music stressed independence, fearlessness, and sexual freedom, implicitly arguing that working-class women did not have to alter their behavior to be worthy of respect.
Despite her success, neither she nor her music was accepted in all circles. She once auditioned for Black Swan Records and was dismissed because she was considered too rough as she supposedly stopped singing to spit. The businessmen involved with Black Swan Records were surprised when she became the most successful diva because her style was rougher and coarser than Mamie Smith. Even her admirers—white and black—considered her a “rough” woman.
Smith had a strong contralto voice, which recorded well from her first session, which was conducted when recordings were made acoustically. The advent of electrical recording made the power of her voice even more evident. Her first electrical recording was “Cake Walking Babies [From Home]”, recorded in May 1925. Smith also benefited from the new technology of radio broadcasting, even on stations in the segrefated Southo audience. Musicians and composers like Danny Barker and Tommy Dorsey compared her presence and delivery to a preacher because of her ability to enrapture and move her audience. Sadly, her performing career was cut short by a car crash in 1937 that killed her at the age of 43.
