Bessie Smith

As the saying goes, "you gotta pay the dues if you wanna sing the blues." In no other way than living the kind of violent, promiscuous, hard-drinking street life she sang about, could Bessie Smith have inspired in her audiences the powerful empathy that ultimately won her the title, "Empress of the Blues." Throughout her career, Bessie was respected for being a strong, independent African-American woman with tremendous talent and determination. She expressed great pride in her culture, and gladly participated in its earthy pleasures, regularly indulging her taste for alcohol and sex to extremes. Though her acclaim rapidly crossed racial boundaries, she shunned the icy affections and condescending embraces of the elitist white New York uppercrust, as well as fawning conformists from her own community. How ever much others tried to run roughshod over her, Bessie refused to submit to the slightest abuse without a knock-down, drag-out fight. With few exceptions, she held to her musical ideals with equal tenacity. Though musically illiterate, she regularly collaborated with her pianists to compose and write down her music,1 and her words frequently touched on pertinent events in her life. Her performance style, too, derives considerably from her own personal and cultural attributes.

As an adult, Bessie Smith stood about six feet and weighed some two hundred pounds. Her imposing physical size and strong voice helped her to carve out a niche in the wild, incipient 1920's blues world amongst tough competition and contending popular styles. According to Richard Hadlock in Jazz Masters of the Twenties, she could project a song more forcibly to large audiences than any other blues singer in the days before microphones and audio amplification.2 She exploited the strongest register of her naturally resonant voice using techniques pioneered by Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, the first known "classic" blues singer. Haddock points out Bessie's tendency, like Rainey, to create new melodies, or modify existing ones, by "centering" around pitches that lay in the loudest portion of her range (between fi and al). An example of this can be heard in her rendition of Alberta Hunter's Downhearted Blues which launched Bessie's recording career in 1923.3 The underlined words from the second verse below are sung on the dominant note in C. In addition to creating sheer volume, her frequent returns to gl, elongated and accented for emphasis, create a hypnotic, chant-like affect.

One of the greatest blues women of all time