Empress of the Blues

To the world of jazz, and to the Negro audiences which packed the vaudeville houses where she sang, she was just Bessie—the greatest blues singer to come out of the South. Bessie Smith was a big woman—two hundred and ten pounds of energy and muscle and temperament. When she was born will never be known and how she died, on a September night in 1937, has already become part of a mythology. Her roots were in Chattanooga, and it was not far from there that her life ended after an automobile crash which tore off an arm.

But, in a sense, she was already dead before her overwhelming heart stopped beating. Liquor had driven away the booking agents—and the Negro public which once bought her records by the millions had turned to other gods and other music. In her prime, she had earned $1,500 a week almost every week, but wild extravagance and wilder living had squandered it all. Perhaps she might have made a comeback in the swingtime of the 1930s, but this is doubtful. For Bessie Smith belonged to a golden era, when the music was rich and unrefined, the gesture large, and the ear of jazz still sensitive to the folk nuance.

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Ralph de Toledano

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To the world of jazz, and to the Negro audiences which packed the vaudeville houses where she sang, she was just Bessie—the greatest blues singer to come out of the South. Bessie Smith was a big woman—two hundred and ten pounds of energy and muscle and temperament. When she was born will never be known and how she died, on a September night in 1937, has already become part of a mythology. Her roots were in Chattanooga, and it was not far from there that her life ended after an automobile crash which tore off an arm.

But, in a sense, she was already dead before her overwhelming heart stopped beating. Liquor had driven away the booking agents—and the Negro public which once bought her records by the millions had turned to other gods and other music. In her prime, she had earned $1,500 a week almost every week, but wild extravagance and wilder living had squandered it all. Perhaps she might have made a comeback in the swingtime of the 1930s, but this is doubtful. For Bessie Smith belonged to a golden era, when the music was rich and unrefined, the gesture large, and the ear of jazz still sensitive to the folk nuance.