But Smith's singing voice, of course, is the element that remains, the element that made her a legend. Her onstage costumes of gowns, wigs, plumes and elaborate headdresses communicated glamour and wealth, and she carried herself with a regal bearing that fit her nickname. An all-around entertainer, she developed an act that consisted of songs, dances, jokes and sketches. She learned how to hold the attention of an audience in the makeshift rural venues and city theaters where touring black artists performed throughout the South in the early 20th century. Orphaned by age 9 and raised by older siblings, Smith sang for spare change on the street corners of her hometown of Chattanooga, Tenn., and went out on the road when she was 16. As black feminist critics Daphne Duval Harrison and Angela Davis have explained in their books on the classic blues, Smith's songs are tales of liberated women who are not afraid to speak openly about what they want, what they need and what they are tired of.īy the time she became the bona fide superstar whose influence earned her the nickname "The Empress of the Blues," Smith had been singing for decades. This is a defiant stance, especially for a poor, black woman to assume, and one that surely resonated with black female listeners. Smith's protagonist presents herself as a person with power and agency, someone who can choose and refuse, someone who will no longer be put upon or accept whatever she is handed. I'm gonna hold it until you men come under my command I got the world in a jug, the stopper's in my hand Bessie Smith's sound and her attitude, rooted in a distant era, are with us in the 21st century. She was the highest-paid African American artist working in music and the first African American superstar. With her subsequent recordings, Smith was one of the artists who propelled the fledgling "race records" market of music targeted to black audiences that had launched a few years earlier in 1920 with Mamie Smith's hit "Crazy Blues." Through the rest of the 1920s, Bessie Smith became one of the earliest stars of recorded music and a leading figure of what came to be called classic blues (a genre dominated by African American women). Her first single, "Downhearted Blues" - written by two women, pianist Lovie Austin and blues singer Alberta Hunter - was a major hit in 1923, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and helping her label, Columbia Records, out of a financial slump. Singer Bessie Smith's recording career lasted only 10 years, but during that time she created a body of work that helped shape the sound of the 20th century. Bessie Smith poses for a portrait circa 1925.
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