walking upstream…
Bessie Smith
sourcesNPR -- How Bessie Smith Influenced A Century Of Popular Music (career overview, race-records market, later influence on Holiday and Joplin) · NPR Morning Edition -- Celebrating 100 years of the music of Bessie Smith (Down Hearted Blues session, Dee Rees on Smith's leverage as a performer) · Library of Congress -- Now See Hear! · The Syncopated Times -- In 1920 Mamie Smith's Crazy Blues paved the way for Black Music (race-records market origin, Handy's pre-existing blues compositions)
"I don't think anybody in the world will ever be able to get as much hurt into one song," singer Alberta Hunter said of Bessie Smith -- a verdict that stuck. Orphaned by nine, she sang for coins on Chattanooga street corners before joining a touring troupe in 1912 as a dancer. She spent a decade on the Black vaudeville circuit before Columbia Records -- chasing the market Mamie Smith's 1920 "Crazy Blues" had proven existed -- recorded her in 1923; her debut single, "Down Hearted Blues," sold hundreds of thousands of copies and pulled the label out of a slump. She became the "Empress of the Blues," the decade's highest-paid Black artist, touring in her own railroad car until the Depression ended the run. She died in a 1937 car wreck near Clarksdale, Mississippi -- not turned away from a white hospital, as the myth holds, but beyond saving.
the sound in question
1923
Down Hearted BluesBessie Smith
walk the tributaries ↓
Ma Rainey1920s · Blues / Classic female blues / Vaudeville
Around 1912, a teenage Bessie Smith talked her way into the Moses Stokes Company, a Black vaudeville troupe touring out of Chattanooga, and was hired as a dancer -- the singing spot already belonged to the show's headliner, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey. Biographer Chris Albertson, drawing on decades of original interviews, is blunt about what Rainey actually gave her: "The story goes on that Ma Rainey taught her how to sing, but people who heard Bessie at the time said that nobody needed to teach her... If anything, Ma Rainey taught her stage presence." What Rainey did settle, Albertson adds, was direction -- she "got Bessie on the blues track."
listen: upstream & heresource: Jerry Jazz Musician -- Chris Albertson, author of Bessie (2003 interview; Moses Stokes/Ma Rainey account, Mamie Smith/race-records account, death myth correction) ↗
1923
Bo-Weavil BluesMa Rainey
1924
Bo-Weavil BluesBessie Smith
listen forPlay Rainey's 1923 Paramount recording first: a call-and-response moan pushed along by a small backing band, sung with the loose, hollering showmanship of the tent-show stage that made her the "Mother of the Blues." Then put on Smith's own version, cut the following year for Columbia -- same title, same lyric comparing a cheating man to the boll weevil chewing through a cotton crop, but slower, and worried over instead of tossed off. It's the one confirmed instance of the two women recording the same song, and the gap between them is the influence made audible.
W. C. Handy1910s–20s · Blues
W. C. Handy, the bandleader who turned the twelve-bar blues into sheet music with "St. Louis Blues" in 1914, picked Smith himself in 1929 to sing his song in her only film role, the two-reel short St. Louis Blues. The Library of Congress notes that Handy "wrote the song in September of 1914 and said that with the song he had tricked dancers by breaking abruptly from a tango introduction into a low-down blues." By then Smith had already made the tune hers on record, four years earlier, and it stayed the composition most identified with her career.
listen: upstream & here
1922
St. Louis BluesW. C. Handy
1925
St. Louis BluesBessie Smith
listen forHandy's own 1922 band recording is brisk and orchestral, cornets and clarinets trading the melody at dance-hall tempo -- the tango-into-blues trick he built the song around. Smith's 1925 version strips that away: just her voice against Louis Armstrong's cornet and Fred Longshaw's wheezing organ, the tempo dragged down until the tango is barely a memory and the blues is all that's left. Listen for how far she pulls the song from Handy's dancehall arrangement toward the bare, mournful reading that made it hers.