Bessie Smith

Bessie Smith was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on the fifteenth of April 1894, one of seven children of William Smith, a laborer and part-time Baptist preacher, and Laura Smith. Loss came early and hard: her father died when she was an infant, and by the time she was eight or nine her mother and two brothers were gone as well. Her older sister Viola took charge of the household, and young Bessie and her brother Andrew sang and danced on the streets of Chattanooga to bring home coins.

She rose through the tent shows and Black vaudeville of the South, learning her craft alongside the great Ma Rainey and building a commanding stage presence. In February 1923 she made her first recordings for Columbia Records — "Down Hearted Blues" and "Gulf Coast Blues" — and the debut sold in staggering numbers, helping lift the struggling label and announcing a major new voice.

Crowned the "Empress of the Blues," Smith became the highest-paid and best-selling Black recording artist of the 1920s, cutting some 160 sides for Columbia between 1923 and 1931 and touring in her own custom railroad car. Her deep, unhurried, majestic voice — heard on "St. Louis Blues," "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out," and many more — shaped generations of blues and jazz singers who followed.

Her life was cut short on the twenty-sixth of September 1937, when she died of injuries from an automobile crash near Clarksdale, Mississippi, at the age of forty-three. May the Empress be honored: her voice still carries the sorrow and the strength of a people, unbowed and enduring.