Salut! Live

Andrew Curry writes: Although Salut! Live is largely a folk music site, Colin and I are also blues fans. And one of the greatest blues singers is the ‘Empress of the Blues’, Bessie Smith.

I didn’t know much about Bessie Smith until I read Jackie Kay’s book about her. I knew about her voice and her reputation, of course, and some of her classic tracks, but not much more than that.

Bessie Smith, re-published in a new edition in 2021, is part cultural history, part biography, and part memoir. It’s also a book by a fan. Jackie Kay is an acclaimed poet and writer, who was the Scots Makar (roughly equivalent to the British Poet Laureate) from 2016 to 2021.

As a child, she and her brother were adopted by a pair of Glaswegian communists who loved jazz and blues. Her adoptive father, to whom this edition is dedicated, bought her Bessie Smith’s Any Women’s Blues for her twelfth birthday. She listened to it over and over.

Bessie Smith's raw unplugged voice dragged you right down to a place you had never been... Her voice carried a kind of knowing that made you feel this woman knew everything about life and was not frightened of any of it.

As a black girl in a mostly white Glasgow suburb, this was something of a revelation:

It wasn’t long before I made her part of my extended imaginary family, before I felt not just as if she belonged to me, but as if I belonged to her. She felt like kith and kin.

So in some ways the book has been years in the making as Kay tries to understand what it must have been like to be Bessie Smith in the 1920s and the 1930s, to grow up poor and become a successful and rich blues singer—the undisputed best of the “blueswomen”—in a deeply racist America.

A sketch of her life might help. Bessie Smith was born in Chattanooga and orphaned young. At the age of nine she was singing on the streets for money. In her late teens she joined Ma Rainey’s troupe, initially as a dancer. By her mid-20s she had her own troupe, touring incessantly across the South and building up a huge following.

The jazz guitarist Danny Barker, who was a few years younger than Bessie, described her this way:

Bessie Smith was a fabulous deal to watch. She was a pretty large woman and she could sing the blues. She had a church deal mixed up in it. She dominated a stage. You didn't turn your head when she went on, you just watched Bessie... She could bring about mass hypnotism. When she was performing, you could hear a pin drop.

Her timing was good. Mamie Smith’s (no relation) hit recording of Crazy Blues unexpectedly demonstrated that there was a market for the “blueswomen,” as they became known. In 1923, at the age of 27, Bessie Smith made her first recordings, earning huge amounts of money during the 1920s as she recorded more than 160 sides for Columbia, playing with people like Louis Armstrong (notably on St. Louis Blues), James Johnson, Fletcher Henderson, and Coleman Hawkins.

When the blues boom collapsed with the Wall Street Crash, Smith continued to perform, adapting her style to the new swing bands—for example on one her most famous songs, Give Me A Pigfoot, with Jack Teagarden on trombone. But having spent much of her life on the road she died in a car crash in 1937 on the way to Clarksdale, Mississippi, at the age of 43.*

She was a big woman, in all senses of the word, and a complex personality. The scars of a poverty-ridden childhood never quite left her. She was an alcoholic who was generous with her money but was quick to use her fists to settle disputes.

She was bi-sexual, having affairs with both men and women, especially on the road. Her rough edges never left her. One test for a record company was cancelled when she stopped so that she could spit. But this roughness—channelled into her songs, especially the ones she wrote herself—was one of the things her audiences liked about her.

And then there was her husband, Jack Gee, who was a grasping, violent, controlling man who lived off her money during most of her high-rolling 1920s, until she eventually left him. He’d turn up at gigs unannounced to check up on her. He had a high profile affair with the singer Gertrude Saunders, and, by Kay’s account, kidnapped their son at one point. Even after Smith's death, he kept for himself the money raised at two separate benefit concerts to pay for a headstone on her unmarked grave.

This is 1920s America, and race runs all the way through the story. Smith failed to get some chorus line jobs in her teens because her skin was too black—promoters and producers preferred “brown-skinned girls”, as they were known.

Touring the South was hard for black performers, who found hotels and restaurants barred to them. Eventually she bought a Pullman train to take her troupe from town to town overnight. Once she faced down members of the Ku Klux Klan who were trying to sabotage the show tent, before going back inside to finish the gig.

The reason that the record companies were surprised by the success of Crazy Blues reflects this world. By Kay’s account:

[T]hey didn't think that the voice of an ordinary working-class black woman could or would ever sell records. They were, of course, wrong because they underestimated the amount of ordinary working-class black women that would buy Bessie Smith and the other blueswomen's records.

The record companies had little understanding of the world of ordinary black people, so didn’t understand how much black people would identify with the blues.

But Bessie Smith put her life into these songs, and they spoke to the lives of the women, especially, in her audiences.

Kay singles out some of her favourites. Downhearted Blues and Fletcher Henderson’s Send Me To The ‘Lectric Chair seem to channel her feelings about lying, cheating Jack. Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out prefigures her fall from her high-rolling 1920s. Kitchen Man is a long sequence of double entendres that must have had her audiences roaring with laughter.

They’ve almost faded from memory now, the blueswomen, and our images of the old blues singers are of men in patched clothes in the fields or a shack. But the blueswomen—Bessie Smith, and also Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, Ida Cox, Alberta Hunter, Memphis Minnie, and others—were all about performance. They knew how to put on a show. As Kay says:

The blues were changed by the blueswomen, no longer a folk music sung by folk in the fields... There they are in all their splendour and finery, their feathers and ostrich plumes and pearls, theatrical smiles, theatrical shawls, dressed up to the nines and singing about the jail house... They are all theatre.

There’s a coda to this story. In the early 1970s, the Philadelphia Inquirerlaunched an appeal finally to get a headstone for Bessie Smith’s unmarked grave. Two donations covered it. The first was from Juanita Green, the daughter of her former cleaner. The other was from the blues and rock singer Janis Joplin.

As it says on the headstone, unveiled in a small ceremony in 1970, 33 years after her death:

The greatest blues singer in the world will never stop singing.

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* John Hammond’s account—that she died because she was refused admission to hospitals because she was black—is famous but completely unreliable.