Bessie Smith

Bessie Smith was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1892, the daughter of Laura and William Smith, a laborer and part-time Baptist preacher. Her father died while she was too young to remember him, and by the time she was nine, her mother and a brother had also died, leaving her older sister Viola to care for the remaining siblings. Unable to attend school regularly due to her family's poverty, Smith and her brother Andrew busked on the streets of Chattanooga to earn money, with Smith singing and dancing while Andrew played guitar. Their regular spot was in front of the White Elephant Saloon at Thirteenth and Elm streets, in the center of the city's African-American community.

In 1912, Smith's older brother Clarence, who had joined a traveling troupe owned by Moses Stokes, returned to Chattanooga and arranged an audition for her with the troupe's managers, Lonnie and Cora Fisher. She was hired as a dancer rather than a singer, as the company already featured Ma Rainey. Though Rainey did not teach Smith to sing, contemporary accounts suggest she helped Smith develop her stage presence. Smith eventually moved into chorus line work, making Atlanta's "81" Theatre her home base, and became a major attraction on the black-owned Theater Owners Booking Association circuit.

Around 1913, Smith began developing her own act at the "81" Theatre, and by 1920 she had built a strong reputation across the South and along the East Coast. Her recording career with Columbia Records began in 1923, when talent agent Frank Walker, who had seen her perform years earlier, signed her to the label. Her first Columbia session took place on February 15, 1923, engineered by Dan Hornsby. Both sides of her debut release — "Downhearted Blues" backed with "Gulf Coast Blues" — were hits. Columbia's publicity department gave her the title "Queen of the Blues," though the national press soon elevated it to "Empress of the Blues," the nickname by which she became widely known.

As her popularity grew, Smith became the highest-paid Black entertainer of her day and traveled in her own 72-foot railroad car. She made 160 recordings for Columbia, frequently accompanied by prominent musicians including Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Fletcher Henderson, James P. Johnson, Joe Smith, and Charlie Green. Her 1927 recording of "Alexander's Ragtime Band" was among the best-selling records of that year. Musicians such as Danny Barker and Tommy Dorsey compared her stage presence and delivery to that of a preacher, citing her ability to move an audience. She possessed a strong contralto voice that recorded well from her earliest sessions and became even more powerful with the advent of electrical recording technology. Her first electrical recording, "Cake Walking Babies [From Home]," was made on May 5, 1925.

Smith's Broadway career brought her to New York in 1929, when she appeared in the musical Pansy. The production was considered a failure by leading critics, though Smith herself was singled out as its sole asset. That same year, in November 1929, she made her only film appearance, starring in the two-reel short St. Louis Blues, based on composer W. C. Handy's song of the same name. Directed by Dudley Murphy and shot in Astoria, Queens, the film featured Smith performing the title song alongside members of Fletcher Henderson's orchestra, the Hall Johnson Choir, pianist James P. Johnson, and a string section.

In 1933, producer John Henry Hammond invited Smith to record four sides for Okeh Records, by then acquired by Columbia. The Great Depression had severely curtailed the recording industry, and the rise of sound film had effectively ended vaudeville, cutting short the era of elaborate touring shows that had defined much of her career. Smith continued to perform, however, touring and singing in clubs throughout the period. She died on September 26, 1937, at the age of 45, following a car crash. In 1989, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.