Let’s get this out of the way right now. Bessie Smith did not die from being refused treatment at a white hospital. No one at the scene of the accident even considered taking her to one. The first person at the scene was a surgeon, interestingly enough, who said she suffered severe crushing injuries—in the first accident at that scene that night—in addition to the near-severing of her right arm. It did, on the other hand, take almost half an hour for the ambulance to arrive at their location, and it seems likely that did not help her survive. The second car which came along and slammed into the surgeon’s car missed her, as she was on the side of the road at the time.

It is still a sad ending to the life of a woman dubbed not merely the queen but the Empress of the Blues. The 1900 census said she was born in 1892 in Chattanooga; she used the birth year of 1894 everywhere else. Either way, she was orphaned young and desperately poor and could not afford an education. She was no older than ten when she and a brother began busking in front of the White Elephant Saloon in Chattanooga’s black community. Another brother left Chattanooga with a musical troupe; the troupe returned when she was . . . a legal adult, and he got her an audition.

At first, she was a dancer, because Ma Rainey was already with the Moses Stokes troupe, and yeah. Still, Rainey appears to have taken the young Smith under her wing, helping her develop her own persona. Around 1913, she appears to have left Stokes and started her own act in Atlanta. By 1920, she was well established around the South and even further north. In 1923, she got her first recording contract. No one at the time was keeping real track of record sales, but it seems clear she was one of the biggest recording stars of the ‘20s.

Bessie Smith was openly lower class, which sounds a little snobby on my part but is really worth discussing. She made no excuses and did not claim to be classier than she really was. Allegedly, she was too “rough” for Black Swan Records, a label on whose board of directors W.E.B. DuBois sat, because she stopped singing to spit. She was also bisexual and not, from what I can tell, particularly interested in monogamy. And given what a lowlife her one legal husband was, who can blame her? This is a man who literally took the money people had raised for her tombstone and spent it on himself.

Bessie Smith only made one film in her short lifetime—she died at 43, making her another person I’m writing about who died younger than I am at writing about them—and her recordings are of uneven quality due to the technical limitations of the time. However, she has had a considerably greater influence. Yes, she’s gotten the biopic treatment, with Queen Latifah portraying her—and boy is it not surprising that she was an influence on Queen Latifah. But there are books and songs about her, and Janis Joplin finally got her a tombstone. Speaking of people who were obviously influenced by her, and, sigh, people who died too young.

Reward me for having finally remembered to put Janis Joplin on the schedule for Pride next year by contributing to my Patreon or Ko-fi!