April 15, 1894 - September 26, 1937
Birthplace: Chattanooga, Tennessee

Bessie Smith was the greatest and most influential classic blues
singer of the 1920s. Her full-bodied blues delivery coupled with a
remarkable self-assuredness that worked its way in and around
most every note she sang, plus her sharp sense of phrasing,
enabled her to influence virtually every female blues singer who
followed. During her heyday, she sold hundreds of thousands of
records and earned upwards of $2000 per week, which was a
queenly sum in the 1920s. She routinely played to packed houses
in the South as well as the North and Midwest. By the time the
decade had ended, Smith had become the most respected black
singer in America and had recorded a catalog of blues that still
stands as the yardstick by which all other female blues singers
are measured.

For many blacks, Smith was more than just a blues singer.
Thanks to an assertive personality and an emancipated, often
excessive life-style that included much drinking, frequent fistfights,
wild sexual encounters with both men and women, and little
tolerance of people who aimed to exploit her, Smith became a
black cultural symbol. To many blacks, her success represented
a triumph over white domination in the entertainment business.
She gave hope to oppressed black women and inspired
countless other singers. Smith influenced everyone from Billie
Holiday to Mahalia Jackson and Janis Joplin. Although she died
in 1937, still in the prime of her career, she left behind a legacy
that is wonderfully rich and practically unparalleled. She ranks
with the best artists the blues has ever produced.

Bessie Smith was born poor in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in
1894. Before she had reached womanhood, both her mother and
father had died. She was raised by a sister, Viola, but it was
Clarence, her oldest brother, who had the most influence on
young Bessie. A natural showman, Clarence encouraged Bessie
to learn how to sing and dance. After Clarence had joined a
traveling vaudeville show, Smith and another brother, Andrew,
began singing and dancing on Chattanooga street corners,
earning pennies from passersby.

With the help of Clarence, who had arranged an audition with the
same Moses Stokes Company for which he'd been working,
Bessie began her professional career in 1912 as a dancer.
Eventually Smith became a chorine and then a featured singer.
Since Ma Rainey, the so-called Mother of the Blues, was also
working for the Moses Stokes Company at the time Smith joined
the troupe, many blues historians have theorized that Rainey
taught Smith the basics of the blues and acted as her coach. The
revisionist line of thinking, however, is that by the time she met
Rainey, Smith was already familiar with the blues and had
developed much of the vocal charisma that would later make her
a great singer. Certainly it's safe to say that Rainey had at least
some influence on Smith in those early days. Rainey was a
powerful blues vocalist in her own right, and the two singers were
known to be friends. Watching Rainey sing the blues with all the
home- grown feeling that fueled her songs couldn't help but be
appreciated by Bessie, who was, by now, in her late teens.

Smith was an established star with black audiences throughout
the South by the time she moved to Philadelphia in 1921. Two
more years would pass before she began her recording career,
however. Shortly after moving to Philadelphia, Smith supposedly
auditioned for Okeh and other record companies. Each time the
talent scouts told her that her voice was "too rough" to record.
Finally, Columbia Records' Frank Walker signed Smith to a
recording contract and set her up in the studio on February 15,
1923. Nothing survives from Smith's very first recording date.
However, on the following day, Smith, accompanied by Clarence
Williams on piano, recorded "Gulf Coast Blues" and "Down
Hearted Blues." The record sold more than 750,000 copies that
year, making Smith a blues star on the same level as Mamie
Smith (no relation), a vaudeville singer who had recorded the first
blues song, "Crazy Blues," in 1920.

In all, Smith recorded at least 160 songs for Columbia from 1923
to 1933. Many of them, such as "Taint Nobody's Bizness If I Do,"
"Mama's Got the Blues," her self-penned "Back Water Blues," and
"Poor Man's Blues," are certified blues classics. Not only do they
illustrate Smith's firm vocal grasp of the blues and her ability to
evoke deep, soulfully phrased feelings, but they also tell us much
about black culture in the 1920s.

The lyrics to "Taint Nobody's Bizness If I Do" ("If I go to church on
Sunday, I Then just shimmy down on Monday, I 'Tain't nobody's
business if I do, do, do do") and Smith's vocal delivery of them
reflected her boldness and self-determination, two traits much
admired by her black fans. On "Mama's Got the Blues," Smith paid
tribute to the virility of black men over "brown-skinned" ones.
Smith wrote "Back Water Blues" after witnessing a flood destroy
homes and property. "Poor Man's Blues" detailed the differences
between the haves and have-nots in America in the 1920s. In the
song Smith pleads to "Mister rich man" to give "the poor man a
chance" and "help stop these hard, hard times."

Throughout the 1920s Smith recorded with a number of noted
musicians, including legendary guitarist Jethro T. Nuraw, pianists
Fletcher Henderson and James P. Johnson, cornetist Louis
Armstrong, saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and Don Redman,
and clarinetist Buster Bailey. Many ofher early songs featured
only a piano accompaniment, which allowed sole focus on Smith's
vocal dexterity. Yet the songs Smith cut with Armstrong-among
them a rendition of W.C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues" and the ragtime
gem "You've Been a Good Old Wagon"- featured the two most
prominent black recording artists of the 1920s working off each
other's talents and attested to the manner in which the best blues
vocalists could sing against a jazz backdrop without losing the
simplicity of their Southern blues roots.

In 1929 Smith recorded the haunting "Nobody Knows You When
You're Down and Out," a tune blues historian William Barlow
called Smith's "personal epitaph and a depression-era classic."
Columbia dropped Smith from its roster in 1931, but she did
record once more, this time in 1933, under the direction of talent
scout John Hammond. One song that was recorded, "Gimmie a
Pigfoot," included Benny Goodman on clarinet.

Smith continued to perform, mostly in the South, although the
classic blues era was clearly over. Smith's rough-cut brand of the
blues had succumbed to the polished, more mainstream sounds
of swing. In 1935, while driving with friend and lover Richard
Morgan through Clarksdale, Mississippi, their auto struck an
oncoming truck. The crash mangled one of Smith's arms and she
bled to death.

Bessie Smith was inducted into the Blues Foundation's Hall of
Fame in 1980 and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1989.