Bessie Author:Chris Albertson No one knows for cetrain when Bessie Smith's life began, but it ended abruptly and dramatically on a desolate Mississippi road, Sunday Morning, September 26, 1937. — The controversy surrounding Bessie's death obscured for many years the drama she created in life. And until now, for all the analysis of her tremendous influence on... more » American popular music - Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin acknowledged her as primary inspiration to their own careers - no one has penetrated the image of the dynamic performer to discover who Bessie really was.
The "Empress of the Blues" was strong-willed, defiant, tough, and intense. She could be generous to a fault, explosive when thwarted. Comparison or competition with other performers infuriated her. Recording companies and impresarios, alike exploited her talent, as they exploited most black performers of her time. Her love life was a study in promiscuity, embracing both sexes. "Bessie Smith," writes Chris Albertson, "cared remarkably little for the good opinion of others; she sought acceptance as a human being, but she would not alter her ways to gain it."
She never played the part of a superstar - she simply was one. She wore ermine coats and diamonds, but she preferred eating pigsfeet and drinking bad liquor in a ghetto alley to sampling canapes and cocktails in a white society that, in her later years, sought to woo her. A woman of extraordinary courage and self-determination, Bessie was black and proud long before that was the order of the day.
Combining previously published data with new facts and the intimate, personal recollections of friends and associates who knew Bessie well, Chris Albertson has produced a definitive portrait of the "Greatest Blues Singer in the World."« less