Books, Arts & Manners: Bessie, Satch & Little Jazz

I heard Bessie Smith once, in 1936, at the Famous Door on 52nd Street in Manhattan, when she was trying to make a Swing Era comeback. Before the Depression her records had sold by the millions, mostly to blacks, although whites who loved jazz and the blues also idolized her. Her voice was huskier than I had known it on her recordings, she seemed impatient, and that tremendous élan which in the past had carried her over good material and bad was somehow lacking. Perhaps she might have made it again, but the Butcher cut her down in an automobile accident.

In those days, you could come by Bessie’s records only by rummaging in the Harlem junk shops and the Salvation Army depots, and what you found was usually scratched and worn. Once the late Eugene Williams and I were allowed by a little old lady in a Lenox Avenue odds-and-ends shop she was friendly because we weren’t “like those other college boys”—to go over a stack of records, and we picked up two Bessies in mint condition. One of them was the superlative “Backwater Blues,” with James P. Johnson accompanying her.

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Ralph de Toledano

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I heard Bessie Smith once, in 1936, at the Famous Door on 52nd Street in Manhattan, when she was trying to make a Swing Era comeback. Before the Depression her records had sold by the millions, mostly to blacks, although whites who loved jazz and the blues also idolized her. Her voice was huskier than I had known it on her recordings, she seemed impatient, and that tremendous élan which in the past had carried her over good material and bad was somehow lacking. Perhaps she might have made it again, but the Butcher cut her down in an automobile accident.

In those days, you could come by Bessie’s records only by rummaging in the Harlem junk shops and the Salvation Army depots, and what you found was usually scratched and worn. Once the late Eugene Williams and I were allowed by a little old lady in a Lenox Avenue odds-and-ends shop she was friendly because we weren’t “like those other college boys”—to go over a stack of records, and we picked up two Bessies in mint condition. One of them was the superlative “Backwater Blues,” with James P. Johnson accompanying her.