Trouble, trouble, I've had it all my days,
Trouble, trouble, I've had it all my days.
In his book “Jazz Singing: America’s Greatest Voices from Bessie Smith to Bebop and
Beyond,” author Will Friedwald deconstructs Smith signature style:
Smith sings with a quality of harshness and at the same time with great passion but never
with irony or sarcasm. With Smith, the two seemingly incongruous attitudes are
compatible, a sort of tender invective. Smith sings about love without a trace of
sentiment, and of sex without guilt. She has an amazingly realistic attitude toward life
and love, and even in moments of heightened, not to say suicidal, despondency has a
sober, realistic view of life, devoid of self pity.
There is a fullness and robustness to Smith’s singing, even in the most downtrodden of lyrics, a
quality that one later sees replicated in the work of Billie Holiday and Etta James.
Musician and music critic John Hammond once said of Smith, “To my way of thinking, Bessie
Smith was the greatest artist American jazz every produced; in fact, I’m not sure that her art did
not reach beyond the limits of ‘jazz.’ She was one of those rare beings, a completely integrated
artist capable of projecting her whole personality into her music.”
Bessie Smith was a big girl who became a big woman; she stood five feet, nine inches tall and
weighed over 200 pounds. She was known to be rough and forceful and a little bit crude.
Legends abound: that she once beat her husband’s mistress unconscious on the streets of Harlem,
that she once ordered a group of Klansmen picketing her concert to pack up and leave (and they
did). Smith had voracious appetites—for music, alcohol and sex. In regard to the latter,
throughout her life, she often openly carried on various tumultuous, far from discrete affairs with
members of both sexes. Smith also had a taste for luxury and high-living. At the height of her
popularity, she traveled the nation in her own custom-build railway car.
If anything rivaled Smith’s lust for life, it was her musical output. There is not a classic blues
song or standard of the era that she did not cover or originate. Some of her recordings include:
“St. Louis Blues,” “I Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl,” “Tain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do,”
“Nobody Knows When You’re Down and Out,” “After You’re Gone,” “I Ain’t Got Nobody,”
“You’ve Got to Give Me Some,” “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home,” “A Good Man Is
Hard to Find,” “Tea for Two,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and numerous others. Though her
recording career was short—only 14 years—she recorded close to 200 songs, some written
herself, and many of them with the accompaniment of some of the best musicians in the business.
Some of her sidemen over the years included: Louis Armstrong, Joe Smith, Don Redman, James
P. Johnson, Charlie Green and Fletcher Henderson.
In 1929, Smith toured in her own vaudeville show, “Midnight Steppers,” and in 1933, she was
featured in the 17-minute Warner Brothers short subject “St. Louis Blues,” where she played a
wronged woman.
But, by the beginning of the 1930s, the Jazz Age was ebbing to an end. And Smith acutely felt
its downturn. That change in musical tastes, along with her ongoing problem with alcohol,
spelled new and difficult years for the Empress. She was still recording and touring, and hoping
for a comeback, when died from injures incurred in a car accident in 1937.
As was in keeping with her life, Smith’s funeral was lavish. Over 10,000 are reported to have
attended the services in Philadelphia. Still, 30 years after her death, her grave remained
unmarked. That is, until long-time admirer Janis Joplin helped purchase a headstone. On it is
inscribed: “The Greatest Blues Singer in the World Will Never Stop Singing.”