Bessie Smith

Bessie Smith emerged as the foremost blues and jazz vocalist committed to disc and ranks among the genre’s most commanding voices, a stature that earned her the designation “The Empress of the Blues.” Even her earliest sides, cut in 1923, project an impassioned delivery that surmounts the era’s rudimentary sonic limitations and continues to resonate with present-day listeners—an achievement unmatched by any other performer of that period. Although blues material enjoyed widespread currency and countless vaudeville artists were hastily labeled blues singers, Smith encountered no serious rivals.

In 1912 she shared a bill with Ma Rainey, who became her mentor and provided extensive coaching. Rainey attained a degree of renown during her own career, yet her former charge soon eclipsed her. By 1920 Smith was headlining her own production in Atlantic City; three years later she relocated to New York. Columbia promptly placed her under contract, and her first release, Alberta Hunter’s “Downhearted Blues,” brought instant celebrity. Throughout the remainder of the decade she worked and recorded without interruption, drawing on leading instrumentalists such as Louis Armstrong, Joe Smith—her preferred cornetist—James P. Johnson, and Charlie Green.

Her summer tent revue Harlem Frolics enjoyed strong attendance from 1925 to 1927, and the 1928 production Mississippi Days preserved that momentum. By 1929, however, blues had fallen from favor; despite the fact that she was performing at the height of her powers and was still only thirty-five, her career entered a decline. That year she appeared in the low-budget short St. Louis Blues, the sole film footage of her to survive. Her hit recording of “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” anticipated the lean years of the Depression. Columbia ended its association with her in 1931, and her final session, limited to four titles, took place in 1933. She continued to perform, appearing at the Apollo in 1935 and substituting for Billie Holiday in Stars Over Broadway.

A return to prominence seemed probable, beginning with a scheduled appearance at John Hammond’s From Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall, yet an automobile accident in Mississippi claimed her life. Columbia has subsequently reissued her complete recordings, first in five two-LP volumes and later in five two-CD sets that also contain her five alternate takes, the soundtrack to St. Louis Blues, and an interview with her niece Ruby Smith. On the evidence of those recordings, “The Empress of the Blues” will never have to abdicate her throne.