Bessie Smith | Biography, Songs, Music, Death, & Facts (2024)

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What are some musical facts about Bessie Smith? ›

Bessie Smith was one of the greatest blues vocalists ever. She made 160 recordings in all, in many of which she was accompanied by some of the great jazz musicians of the 1920s and '30s, including Fletcher Henderson, Benny Goodman, and Louis Armstrong.

Her first recording was “Down-hearted Blues,” written by blues singer Alberta Hunter and pianist Lovie Austin. The 1923 song was a major hit and it launched Smith into the national spotlight.

On September 26, 1937, Bessie was in a terrible car accident in Coahoma, Mississippi. Her long-time companion Richard Morgan was driving and lost control when he did not see a truck on the road. Bessie suffered severe injuries when she was thrown from the car. She died at the hospital shortly after.

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 ...

On September 26, 1937, Smith was en route to a show in Memphis, Tennessee with her companion of many years, Richard Morgan, when he sideswiped a truck and lost control of their car. Smith was thrown from the vehicle and badly injured. She died of her wounds in a Clarkdale, Mississippi hospital. She was 43.

Smith had informally adopted a son—a six-year-old boy, who she had named Jack, Jr. Even Jack Gee had welcomed the addition at first, according to biographer Jennifer Warner in Queen of the Blues: The Life and Times of Bessie Smith.

Smith had been killed a few days before when the old Packard she was driving hit a parked truck near Coahoma, Mississippi, between Clarksdale and Memphis. There is no record of Smith's exact birth date, but she was about 43 years old. Bessie Smith had been in show business since she was a teenager.

Bessie Smith is buried in Mount Lawn Cemetery in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania.

In 1937 Bessie Smith was buried in an unmarked grave because Jack Gee, her violent, estranged husband, who after her death grew rich on the royalties of her songs, was too greedy to pay for a headstone. Jackie Kay said of this: "For 33 years after she died, Bessie Smith was nobody.

Who wrote the death of Bessie Smith? ›

The Death of Bessie Smith is a one-act play by American playwright Edward Albee, written in 1959 and premiered in West Berlin the following year.

She joined a traveling vaudeville show as a dancer, but it was soon apparent that her singing talent outshone her dance ability. Inspired by Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie found that her deep, soulful voice was ideally suited to the new blues music. She quickly became a favorite entertainer on the theater circuit.

Bessie Smith had a low voice and relatively narrow range, but sang with attitude, feeling, soul, and bluesy inflections. She had clear intonation and could sing with a variety of expression.

Within a reported 10 months of signing Smith, the Columbia label sold two million records. Over the next four years, her sales reached six million. But she sang a wider repertoire as a featured performer in vaudeville, in her traveling tent show, on theatrical tours, and, later, in jazz clubs.

The first blues singer is impossible to identify; though, the first recorded blues singer (and categorizing the word “blues” as the real blues which is recognized today) would probably go to Sylvester Weaver or Papa Charlie Jackson.