Bessie Smith (July, 1892 or April, 1894 – September 26, 1937) was the most popular and successful female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s, and a strong influence on subsequent generations, including Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone and Janis Joplin.

Life
For the 1900 census, Bessie Smith's mother, Laura Smith, reported that Bessie was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee in July, 1892. However, for the following census (1910), her sister, Viola Smith, reported the date as April 15, 1894; that date appears on all subsequent documents and was the one observed by Bessie and her family. There remains a serious debate regarding the size of Bessie Smith's family. The 1870 and 1880 censuses report three older half-siblings, but the 1900 census reports data that is at odds with the recollections of her family and contemporaries.

That Bessie was the daughter of Laura (Owens) Smith and William Smith is not in dispute. William Smith was a laborer and part-time Baptist preacher (he was listed in the 1870 census as a minister of the gospel, in Moulton, Lawrence, Alabama) who died before Bessie could remember him. By the time Bessie was nine, she had lost her mother as well, and her older sister Viola was left in charge of caring for her sisters and brothers.

As a way of earning money for their impoverished household, Bessie and her brother Andrew began performing on the streets of Chattanooga as a duo, she singing and dancing, he accompanying on guitar; their preferred location was in front of the White Elephant Saloon at Thirteenth and Elm streets in the heart of the city's African-American community.

In 1904, her oldest brother, Clarence, covertly left home by joining a small traveling troupe owned by Moses Stokes. "If Bessie had been old enough, she would have gone with him," said Clarence's widow, Maud, "that's why he left without telling her, but Clarence told me she was ready, even then. Of course, she was only a child."

Bessie's turn came in 1912, when Clarence returned to Chattanooga with the Stokes troupe and arranged for its managers, Lonnie and Cora Fisher, to give her an audition. She was hired as a dancer rather than a singer, because the company also included Ma Rainey.

Career
All contemporary accounts indicate that Rainey did not teach Smith to sing, but she probably helped her develop a stage presence. Smith began forming her own act around 1913, at Atlanta's "81" Theatre. By 1920 she had gained a good reputation in the South and along the Eastern Seaboard.

In 1920, when sales figures for an Okeh recording by singer Mamie Smith (no relation) opened up a new market and had talent scouts looking for blues artists, Smith was signed by Columbia Records in 1923 to initiate the company's new "race records" series.

Scoring a big hit with her first release, a coupling of "Gulf Coast Blues" and "Downhearted Blues," which its composer, Alberta Hunter already had turned into a hit on the Paramount label, Smith's career blossomed. She became a headliner on the black Theater Owners Booking Association (T.O.B.A.) theater circuit and was its top entertainer in the 1920s.[7] Working a heavy theater schedule during the winter months and doing tent tours the rest of the year (eventually traveling in her own railroad car), Smith became the highest-paid black entertainer of her day.[8] Columbia nicknamed her "Queen of the Blues", but a PR-minded press soon upgraded her title to "Empress".

She would make some 160 recordings for Columbia, often accompanied by the finest musicians of the day, most notably Louis Armstrong, James P. Johnson, Joe Smith, Charlie Green, and Fletcher Henderson.

Broadway
Smith's career was cut short by a combination of the Great Depression (which all but put the recording industry out of business) and the advent of "talkies", which spelled the end for vaudeville. She, however, never stopped performing. While the days of elaborate vaudeville shows were over, Smith continued touring and occasionally singing in clubs. In 1929, she appeared in a Broadway flop called Pansy, a musical in which, the top white critics agreed, she was the only asset.

Film
In 1929, Smith made her only film appearance, starring in a two-reeler titled St. Louis Blues, based on W. C. Handy's song of the same name. In the film, directed by Dudley Murphy and shot in Astoria, New York, she sings the title song accompanied by members of Fletcher Henderson's orchestra, the Hall Johnson Choir, pianist James P. Johnson, and a string section — a musical environment radically different from any found on her recordings.

Swing era
In 1933, John Hammond saw Smith perform in a small Philadelphia club and asked her to record four sides for the Okeh label (which had been acquired by Columbia).

These performances, for which Hammond paid her a non-royalty fee of $37.50 each, were recorded on November 24, 1933. They constitute Smith's final recordings. They are of particular interest because Smith was in the process of translating her blues artistry into something more apropos to the Swing Era, and this session gives us a hint of what was to come.

The accompanying band included such Swing Era musicians as trombonist Jack Teagarden, trumpeter Frankie Newton, tenor saxophonist Chu Berry, pianist Buck Washington, guitarist Bobby Johnson, and bassist Billy Taylor. Benny Goodman, who happened to be recording with Ethel Waters in the adjoining studio, dropped by for an almost inaudible guest visit. Hammond was not pleased with the result, preferring to have Smith back in her old blues groove, but "Take Me For A Buggy Ride" and "Gimme a Pigfoot" (in which Goodman is part of the ensemble) remain among her most popular recordings.

Death
On September 26, 1937, Smith was severely injured in a car accident while traveling along U.S. Route 61 between Memphis and Clarksdale, Mississippi with her lover (and Lionel Hampton's uncle), Richard Morgan, at the wheel. She was taken to Clarksdale's black Afro-American Hospital where her right arm was amputated. She did not regain consciousness, dying that morning.

Bessie Smith's funeral was held in Philadelphia on October 4, 1937. It attracted about seven thousand people, according to current newspaper reports. Far fewer mourners attended the burial at Mount Lawn Cemetery, in nearby Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania. Jack Gee, her husband from whom she had been separated, thwarted all efforts to purchase a stone, once or twice even pocketing money raised for that purpose. The grave remained unmarked until August 7, 1970, when a new tombstone was placed, paid for by singer Janis Joplin and Juanita Green, who, as a child, had done housework for Bessie.

The Afro-American Hospital, now the Riverside Hotel in Clarksdale, was the site of the dedication of the fourth historic marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail.

Digital Re-mastering
Given the technical faults in the majority of her original gramophone recordings -- especially variations in recording speed, which raised or lowered the apparent pitch of her voice, misrepresented the "light and shade" of her superb phrasing, interpretation and delivery, and altered the apparent key of her performances (sometimes raised or lowered by as much as a semitone) and, also, the fact that the "centre hole" in some of the master recordings had not been in the true middle of the master disc, meaning that there were wide variations in tone, pitch, key and phrasing as the commercially released record revolved around its spindle -- there is a very significant and very positive difference in the performance that Smith delivers in the current digitally re-mastered versions of her work.