Lucille Bogan

Bessie Jackson served as the alias adopted by Lucille Bogan, the classic female blues performer active throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Her lyrics address sexuality with a directness that continues to provoke reaction, even inside a field already more explicit than nearly any recorded music before the arrival of 2 Live Crew or Ludacris. Unlike the common blues practice of adopting alternate names merely to sidestep existing contracts, her shift appears to have been more deliberate: she altered both her name and her approach to performance, never returning to recordings under the name Lucille Bogan once the Jackson identity took hold. This occurred even though she had scored a hit single in the race market in 1927 with “Sweet Petunia” as Bogan, a success she may have wished to distance herself from.

Emerging from Birmingham’s thriving blues community of the 1920s, she was born Lucille Anderson in Mississippi and acquired the surname Bogan through marriage. She was the aunt of pianist and trumpet player Thomas “Big Music” Anderson. Her earliest sessions took place in 1923 in New York City for the OKeh label, yielding the vaudeville-styled numbers “Lonesome Daddy Blues” and “Pawnshop Blues.” Roughly a year later she relocated to Chicago, where she built a substantial following, before settling in New York City in the early 1930s and beginning an extended partnership with pianist Walter Roland. The two musicians complemented each other so closely that his piano work seemed inseparable from her vocal phrasing, regardless of the name she used at the time. Together they produced more than 100 recordings before she ceased recording activity in 1935.

Among the Jackson sides, “B.D. Woman’s Blues” remains particularly notorious; seventy-five years afterward it retains greater force than later lesbian-themed work by artists such as Holly Near or the Indigo Girls. The abbreviation stood for “bull dykes,” and the opening verse states the matter plainly: “Comin’ a time/women ain’t gonna need no men.” Accompanists included, besides Roland, guitarists Tampa Red and Josh White as well as banjo player Papa Charlie Jackson. She herself received an accordion credit on one early track, an uncommon choice for the style. As a composer she secured copyrights on dozens of pieces so distinctive that fellow blues artists often had to acknowledge her authorship rather than create close replicas. She continued writing after moving to California in later years; her last piece, “Gonna Leave Town,” proved prophetic when Smokey Hogg recorded it in 1949, the year after she died from coronary sclerosis. Far from fading into obscurity, her compositions have been revisited by Saffire: The Uppity Blues Women, by bandmember Ann Rabson on her solo outings, and by the Asylum Street Spankers.