Moving to Harlem from Tennessee in 1923, the woman known as the "Empress of the Blues" made her presence felt from the local beer gardens to the Harlem Opera, breaking out as an artist with the song, "Down Hearted Blues," on Columbia Records. As the highest paid African-American performer of the time, the hard-drinking, plain-spoken Smith attracted the attention of many gentlemen, as well as a few female admirers. After many fortunate years in the twenties, Smith's success was cut short by the Depression of the 1930's, but she headed for a rebound in her career, changing her image (trading her country blues for formal songs like Jerome Kern's "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes"), recording an album and touring the country in the late years of that decade. As fate would have it, a tragic car accident cut her comeback all too short. Bessie Smith was buried in an unmarked grave in 1937. Over three decades later, Janis Joplin helped finance a tombstone erected on Smith's grave with the engraving, “The greatest blues singer in the world will never stop singing.”
The above is a reprint of a Harlem Bespoke post from a couple of years back in recognition of Pride Month. Another current Bessie Smith connection is that the outgoing singer was a big fan of the many Harlem Beer Gardens that were still around the neighborhood in the 1930s as told in the singer's bio:
LINK. Archival photo of Bessie Smith
via Amazon
May I stray out of my usual domain and into questions of sexuality and identity? I always balk before identifying Bessie Smith and some of the other Blues Queens as lesbian. She was after all married (though that isn't conclusive "evidence" of anything) and had many relations with men (ditto). We'll never know what her "real" identity was, though I try to put the following spin on this question: not to diminish the struggle for gay rights (viva Bayard Rustin!) but someone like Bessie Smith just doesn't fit neatly and obediently into ANY easy categories, musically, sexually, etc. Does anyone?
ReplyDeleteBy the way, as some of you know, I now live in the Netherlands, and Anne Frank is never claimed by the gay and lesbian community here, the way she is in America.
Unlike the ambiguous Langston Hughes, the Bessie Smith's love life has been somewhat documented so that is why the LGBT community sees her as an important figure. One particular affair with showgirl Lillian Simpson (that enraged her husband) seems to particularly come up.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Ulysses--you're right, and right on target, as usual. There's certainly a book, or many books, to be written on sexuality and Black music in America. In the meantime, I'm not Angela Davis's biggest fan, but her book about the Blues Queens of the 1920s is excellent--if for no other reason than its transcriptions of so many lyrics--some of which are so ribald as to make gangsta rappers seem coy...
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