Bessie Smith

Bessie Smith was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on the fifteenth of April 1894, the seventh of seven children of a Baptist preacher and a part-time washerwoman. Both parents died before Bessie was nine. She and her elder sister Viola Smith raised the surviving children together through their teens, supplementing the household with the coins Bessie earned singing on Chattanooga street corners.

She apprenticed under the singer Ma Rainey in the Moses Stokes traveling show in 1912. She signed her first contract with Columbia Records in February 1923. Over the next ten years she recorded one hundred and sixty sides for Columbia — including "Down Hearted Blues" (1923, two million copies sold in its first six months), "St. Louis Blues" (1925, with Louis Armstrong — also placed in this archive — on cornet), "Empty Bed Blues" (1928), and "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" (1929).

She was the highest-paid Black entertainer in the United States through most of the 1920s. She earned approximately two thousand dollars per week at her peak (equivalent to thirty-five thousand dollars per week in current terms), bought a custom railroad car to tour the segregated South in dignity, and performed for racially mixed audiences across the North.

The 1929 stock-market crash and the Depression that followed broke the recorded-music business; her last Columbia session was in 1933. She continued to tour through the 1930s.

She was killed in an automobile accident on U.S. Route 61 outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, on the twenty-sixth of September 1937, age forty-three. Her funeral in Philadelphia drew approximately ten thousand mourners.

She is honored here as the Empress of the Blues, whose voice shaped American popular music for the century that followed.