Growing-up in the post-civil rights era, Bessie Smith’s tragic death on September 26, 1937 in Clarksdale, Mississippi following a car accident was often used to illustrate the brutality of the “separate but equal” Jim Crow laws in the South. Supposedly, after a Southern “white” hospital refused to admit the pioneering blues singer following the crash, Bessie bled to death on the side of the road. With her legend becoming a modern day folk tale that haunted many Black children, most of us had no idea who Smith was or what she represented. While this version of Bessie’s biography, written by legendary record man John Hammond in the pages of Down Beatmagazine, was later discovered to be a myth, it served as an introduction to not only Bessie Smith but the blues themselves.


Although Black history elders often schooled us kids about Smith’s demise throughout my childhood, I knew very little about her music until I was old enough to drink and cuss and carry my own blues burden in a Black sack over my aching shoulder. The blues might’ve served as the foundation for most modern day music, from soul to rock to hip-hop, but back in the day the form wasn’t respected enough by our educators, be them black or white, to be taught in school beside Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King. Most of what I knew about the blues came from reading interviews with rock stars (Eric Clapton, Janis Joplin) whom had no problem citing Robert Johnson or Smith for their contributions to the canon. Unlike “respectable” music such as classical or jazz, the blues was considered dirty music that was best left as a footnote, rather than something to be celebrated.

In the early 1990s, when Columbia Records (now Sony) released the first in a series of “complete recordings” by Smith, it served as my introduction to the talent of the woman called “the Empress of the Blues.” Turning off the lights and sparking a cigarette, I was ready to be transported back to an era of juke-joint fun straight out of The Color Purple (where the fictional Suge Avery seemed a stand-in for Bessie) as Smith sang about her man leavin’ her (“Down Heart Blues”), bad luck in her life (“Lady Luck Blues”) and getting locked down for thirty-days (“Jail-House Blues”).

Although the sound quality of these old recordings were primitive and scratchy as an ancient Victrola phonograph, I was enthralled by the material as much as I was by Smith’s hypnotic voice and lyricism. Bessie made grown folks music with a gritty tenderness to them. These were tunes to make love to, tell lies by or slice someone with the jagged edge of a broken moonshine bottle.

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