|
Chris Albertson,
author of
Bessie
*
Considered by many to be the greatest blues singer of all time, Bessie Smith
was also a successful vaudeville entertainer who became the highest paid
African-American performer of the roaring twenties.
First published in 1971, author Chris Albertson 's Bessie was described
at the time by critic Leonard Feather as “the most devastating, provocative,
and enlightening work of its kind ever contributed to the annals of jazz
literature.” New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett called
it “the first estimable full-length biography not only of Bessie Smith,
but of any black musician.”
Over thirty years later, Albertson polished his work, and includes more details
of Bessie’s early years, new interview material, and a chapter devoted
to events and responses that followed the original publication.
Albertson, the acknowledged authority on Bessie Smith, discusses the great
singer's career -- and the myths surrounding it -- in our September, 2003
interview.
Interview Topics
Albertson's initial interest
in Smith
Changes made for this edition
Smith's early career
Ma Rainey's influence
A classic Bessie Smith story
Her marriage to Jack Gee
Recording "St.
Louis Blues" with Louis Armstrong
Singing styles of Ethel
Waters and others
Her repertoire
Her music's appeal to Southern
whites
The marketing of black singers
Success in the
face of the decline of the blues
The myths of
Smith as perpetrated by John Hammond
The circumstances of Smith's
death
The
civil rights movement, rock and roll, and the rise of Smith's fame
What would have come?
About Chris Albertson
________________________________________
Bessie Smith
*
"She was a difficult and temperamental person, she had her love affairs,
which frequently interfered with her work, but she never was a real problem.
Bessie was a person for whose artistry, at least, I had the profoundest
respect. I don't ever remember any artist in all my long, long years
-- and this goes back to some of the famous singers, including Billie Holiday
-- who could evoke the response from her listeners that Bessie did.
Whatever pathos there is in the world, whatever sadness she had, was
brought out in her singing -- and the audience knew it and responded to
it."
- Apollo Theater owner Frank Schiffman
*
Listen to Bessie Smith sing
Do Your Duty 
________________________________________
JJM
Blues singer Alberta Hunter, a contemporary of Bessie Smith's, said
of Bessie, "I don't think anybody in the world will ever be able to get as
much hurt into one song." You write, "Bessie Smith's story unfolds during
a period when America was beginning to discover what the subculture she moved
in already knew: the impact of African-American culture on the entertainment
business. But no one could have predicted how far reaching that influence
would become. Bessie played a small but significant part in the history of
American popular music." What initiated your interest in Bessie Smith?
CA In 1947, I was a teenager living in
Copenhagen, and I just happened to hear a Bessie Smith recording on the radio.
At the time, I didn't understand a word she was singing, didn't know it was
the blues or that she was black I didn't know anything except that the
performance got to me in much the same way that Edith Piaf had gotten to
me. There was something compelling about the voice. I then found out that
it was a lady named Bessie Smith, and I started looking for her recordings.
They were not easy to find at the time, but I found some in a store that
sold used records and books. This discovery led to Louis Armstrong, Duke
Ellington and everybody else -- a whole new world opened for me. Bessie Smith
really sparked my interest in jazz and blues.
| JJM You write, "Early writers tended to
stereotype her as a big fat mama who drank a lot, fought like a dog, and
sang like an angel." What was your impression of her before writing this
book?
CA That was my impression, originally. By
the time I got to write the book, I had a reality check. While I had no intention
of writing a book -- that was something I was asked to do by a publisher
-- I did spend two years trying to persuade Columbia to put out the complete
Bessie Smith recordings, because they were the one company that owned all
of them. So, that led to the writing of the book, but by that time, of course,
I had become a big Bessie Smith fan, and I had moved to the United States
and begun to realize what she was all about, and what race relations were
all about. I was totally naive in Denmark. |
Black Mountain Blues |
JJM
Bessie was originally published in 1972, and is now being
re-released as a new edition. What changes did you make to this edition?
CA When the rights reverted to me, I reread
the book. I hadn't read it since I wrote it, and I was appalled at my own
writing, and sort of angry at my original editors for letting it go through.
I thought the writing was just terrible. So the first thing I decided to
do was to smooth it out and translate it into English, so to speak. Also,
I never stopped doing research on Bessie, even after the book was published.
After its publication, I heard from people who said they knew Bessie, and
they told me their own stories, so I learned a great deal more after the
book was published, and I began to wish I had known this while I was writing
it. I had organized a card file of my research, which I kept updating, thinking
that someday it would be useful. Subsequently, the things I learned were
put into the second edition of the book. I also added a chapter at
the end to update the reader about events following the printing of the first
edition -- the usual talk about movie deals, and what happened to the various
people in the book. So, the second edition is basically an updating and an
expansion of the first.
A young Bessie Smith
Downhearted Blues
*
Ma Rainey
Bad Luck Blues |
JJM My understanding is that the information
on Bessie Smith was scant and distorted, even in 1972. Is that right?
CA Yes. And because there were so many myths,
some took on a life of their own. Many of the people who wrote about Bessie
Smith -- whether it was an article or whatever -- did not bother to verify
the myths, so they perpetuated them. They had become so established that
they came to be regarded as fact. But some of them didn't make sense, and
when I started writing the book, the first thing I set out to do was to find
out what information about her is fact and what is myth.
JJM
We will get to these myths in a little while. It is interesting
to see who was involved in perpetrating these myths. How did her career begin?
CA It began when she ran away from her
Chattanooga, Tennessee home. Her older brother Clarence left with a show,
the Moses Stokes Company, which she also wished to join but she was too young
at the time. In the meantime she began singing and dancing in the streets
with her brother Andrew, and when Clarence and the Moses Stokes Company came
back to Chattanooga around 1912, she talked him into arranging an audition.
After the audition, they took her on as a dancer, not a singer. Ma Rainey
was with the show at the time, and she was the show's singer.
This is where one of the myths began. The story is that Bessie ran away,
and one writer actually had her kidnapped by Ma Rainey in a potato sack and
dumped at Ma Rainey's feet. The stories got pretty wild. The general belief
was that she had left with Ma Rainey, and became a member of her show --
but it wasn't Ma Rainey's show. The story goes on that Ma Rainey taught her
how to sing, but people who heard Bessie at the time said that nobody needed
to teach her how to sing, she already knew how. If anything, Ma Rainey taught
her stage presence. While I am sure that Ma Rainey -- being the older and
more experienced person -- had to have provided Bessie with some instruction
and mentoring, it wasn't singing that she taught. They don't sound alike
at all, either. |
JJM
It is said that Bessie Smith influenced the likes of Billie Holiday
and Janis Joplin. Who inspired her own singing style?
CA Perhaps it was Ma Rainey, although not
the style. I am almost certain that Ma Rainey got Bessie on the blues track,
but regarding her style, while she may have picked up a little here and there,
she certainly had her own approach to it. There wasn't much outside influence.
Ida Cox and Alberta Hunter -- great blues singers of that period -- both
told me that when they started, it was popular songs that they sang. The
first song Ida Cox remembers singing was "Put Your Arms Around Me, Honey,"
and Alberta sang "Where the River Shannon Flows," neither of which of course
had anything to do with blues. They called Ma Rainey the "Mother of the Blues,"
and I think rightly so, but her style was more akin to the male blues singers
who wandered around the South, accompanying themselves.
JJM Bessie Smith had quite a work ethic.
Where did that come from?
CA That came from her family. Her mother
and father died when she was very young, leaving several children behind.
The oldest of them, Viola, had to work very hard -- she took in laundry to
keep the family fed. She was apparently very strict when it came to her siblings.
There is a saying in Denmark, "a naked woman soon learns how to weave." I
think out of necessity the work ethic was prominent because it was a necessity.
JJM
Some of the stories in her life are legendary. She survived a knife
stabbing, often fought with her fists over lovers of both sexes, and even
stood up to the Ku Klux Klan. What is your favorite story of her?
CA As far as terrible things happening and
having to overcome adversity, the stabbing story was my favorite.
| JJM What were the circumstances of this
story?
CA She was recording for Columbia Records
at the time, and returned to Chattanooga as a star performer. While there,
she received numerous invitations to parties, one of which she accepted.
It was at a party held at a house on the outskirts of town, and she went
there with several of her chorus girls, including Ruby, who was her niece
by marriage and a major source of information for my book -- in fact, Ruby
was a person without whom I could not have written the book. They were having
a good time at the house when a drunk man asked to dance with one of Bessie's
girls. He grabbed at her, and Bessie got up and told him to stop that, which
he resented. Later, when they left the house, and after they had walked a
while, this man from the party came out of the shadows quite suddenly and
stabbed her, leaving the knife in her. He ran away and she ran after him
with the knife in her until he got away. She asked Ruby to take the knife
out of her, but Ruby couldn't do it. She was taken to the hospital but the
next day she was back to performing on the stage. Most people, of course,
wouldn't have been up to doing that.
After Ruby told me this story I went through the newspapers of the day and
actually found a slightly different account of what happened -- that she
had been robbed. This was a story that had not surfaced in any form previously,
so the biographers who preceded me did not do thorough research. Much of
the information on Bessie was there all along, waiting to be discovered.
JJM
How did her volatile marriage to Jack Gee affect her career?
CA It affected her career because their marriage
was such a roller coaster affair. When he was not there, she would go off
the deep end and drink a lot, have parties involving sexual liaisons, and
so forth. When he would suddenly appear -- and he had a tendency to show
up unexpectedly when they were on the road -- she would sober up and wouldn't
even want to talk about parties and things. Her marriage gave her life a
balance that it obviously needed. But he was so different from her. He never
got used to show business, but he liked the money.
JJM This stability provided her with a reason
to stay married to him.
CA Yes. He was the balance, and she needed
that.
JJM Because he didn't provide anything
monetarily.
CA Absolutely not. And other than being there
for her and providing her with some tenderness, he certainly did not contribute
materially in any way. He took a lot, on the other hand, and it could almost
be said that she bought that love. She would buy him expensive gifts, for
example. |
Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl
*
Jack Gee and Bessie Smith
*
"I know she gave him gifts just to butter him up, because that's
the only way she could get him to listen...I guess he would go
along with anything Bessie wanted, as long as she gave him fancy things --
and she did, all the time."
- Ruby Walker |
JJM She bought him a Cadillac at one time, paying
five thousand dollars cash for it.
CA Yes, that was a lot of money for a car.
You could buy a car for two hundred seventy dollars in those days, but this
was a special show room model, and it was a Cadillac. She kept a carpenter's
apron under her skirt, always filled with lots of cash, and when she bought
that car, she shocked the salesman by reaching under her skirt and coming
out with a fistful of money. Ruby told me about that apron, and -- after
the first edition of the book was published, I found an interview with Louis
Armstrong in which he also mentioned it. When they recorded "St. Louis Blues,"
he asked to borrow one hundred dollars from her, and she surprised him by
just dipping her hand under her apron and bringing out the money.
Louis Armstrong
St. Louis Blues
*
Ethel Waters
Stormy Weather |
JJM Talk a little bit about their performance
of
"St. Louis Blues."
CA Well, it is an extraordinary performance,
because you have two of the most accomplished artists jazz has produced,
and you have them playing together at the peak of their creativity. The result
is that you have a great singer accompanied by a great trumpet player, but
the result sounds more like a duet. Fortunately, Columbia recorded with good
equipment, so the performance is well preserved. She did several recordings
with Armstrong, although he was not her favorite trumpet player, Joe Smith
was.
JJM
How did the more refined styles of Ethel Waters and Josephine Baker
affect the material Bessie Smith chose to perform?
CA I don't know if the refined styles of
those singers affected it at all. Even when Bessie did non-blues pieces like
"After You've Gone," it almost sounded like a blues, because she gave it
that texture and that quality. Alberta Hunter and Ethel Waters were almost
like chameleons -- they could sing anything. Alberta's London recordings
from the early thirties with Jack Jackson's Society Band included songs like
"Two Cigarettes in the Dark" and "Miss Otis Regrets," which are stylistically
far removed from some of the early things she did with Armstrong, Bechet,
and Clarence Williams. Towards the end of Bessie's life, she started doing
that, but it wasn't because of Alberta Hunter or Ethel Waters or Josephine
Baker, it was because times and tastes were changing. Bessie did well singing
the blues long after the blues had been put to bed. But she realized that
there came a time when even she would have to abandon the blues, and as the
swing era of the thirties arrived, she started singing songs like "Tea for
Two" and other popular songs of the day. Unfortunately, we don't have any
recordings of her doing that, but there are eyewitness accounts from people
who say she did it very well, and I assume she did it with a little bit of
a blues feeling. |
| JJM
Did the improved recording technologies inspire any changes in her repertoire
or in accompaniment?
CA In accompaniment, yes. Bessie did not
like to record with drums, for instance, because the recording equipment
did not handle drums very well, so in that way it did affect the accompaniment.
But as you listen to Bessie's recordings, you will see that it didn't affect
her music. Recordings affected all music because of the three-minute time
limit. When performers like Bessie sang on stage, they didn't limit their
songs to three minutes, so in that way we have a slightly distorted impression
of the music from the pre-LP era.
JJM Were her songs autobiographical?
CA I think almost every song was
autobiographical. Honesty was a strength of hers, and it was one of the first
things that grabbed me about her. She wasn't just rendering words, she obviously
put some feeling into them. When Bessie sang about a broken love affair,
she certainly could relate to that, and the audience could sense that she
wasn't just singing them another song. She did a song called "Me and My Gin,"
and another called "The Gin House Blues" that many writers deemed
autobiographical, because she supposedly drank gin, but the truth is that
she never drank gin. She didn't even like gin.
JJM Yes, it was too high class and too high
style for her.
CA Yes, Ruby said that Bessie would say that
anything sealed made her sick, so she drank moonshine and what Ruby referred
to as "bad liquor." But at the time, blacks used gin as a generic term for
hard liquor, so all hard liquor was called gin. And she didn't write those
songs either.
JJM She also sang bawdy material, "Kitchen
Man" being an example.
CA There was a period there when blues was
slipping in popularity, and Frank Walker, who recorded and produced all her
recordings at Columbia, thought that if she started singing bawdy material,
it would boost her sales. Consequently, during that time she sang "Kitchen
Man" and another called "You've Got to Give Me Some," but it didn't do anything
for sales.
JJM Another one she sang was called "I'm Wild
About That Thing."
CA Yes, which is basically the same song
as "You've Got To Give Me Some," but with different lyrics. Walker later
recorded her singing some pseudo-religious songs with a gospel quartet behind
her. While she did that well, it didn't affect sales. |
photo by Sol Handwerger
"I had never heard anything like the torture and torment she put
into the music of her people. It was the blues, and she meant
it."
- Columbia Records executive Frank Walker
*
Me And My Gin
|
JJM
A reporter for the Pittsburgh Courier wrote of a special
1924 Bessie Smith performance for a white only audience in Atlanta, "The
program was greatly enjoyed by the white people who filled the house after
the regular performance. According to the management, practically all seats
in the house were taken for this special performance as early as Thursday
morning. Miss Smith is a great favorite in Atlanta." Why did her music
appeal more to white Southerners than black Northerners?
CA Because the blues was a Southern thing.
Whether you were white or black, when you grew up in the South, you grew
up with the blues. The blues were a Southern, rural phenomenon. In the urban
centers of the North, people felt that they had escaped psychologically from
a life that would inspire the blues. When I first came to the United States
in the late fifties, I got a job as a disc jockey at an all jazz station
in Philadelphia. I played everything, from Ma Rainey to John Coltrane, and
when I played the old recordings, whether it was the blues, or Clarence Williams
or Armstrong's Hot Fives, people would call and ask why I was playing "Mickey
Mouse music." Others called it "Uncle Tom music." Some African Americans
were discomforted by that, because it was something they related to a period
of widely accepted discrimination against black people. One of the callers
who called me regularly, by the way, was Bill Cosby. He used to call it "Uncle
Tom music." I only knew him as Bill until a couple of years later, when he
had his first album out and I was working at WNEW in New York. He visited
the station while promoting the record, and when we were introduced, he repeated
my name and asked if I were the Chris Albertson who used to play the "Uncle
Tom music" on WHAT.
Crazy Blues
|
JJM
When did it occur to the record companies that black singers
could be as marketable as white singers? Was this as a result of Bessie?
CA No, it was as a result of Mamie Smith.
Mamie Smith was not a blues singer, per se, but she recorded a song called
"Crazy Blues," which was originally titled "Harlem Blues." It was a gamble
that Eli Oberstein of the Okeh Record Company took, and the market took them
by surprise, because sales figures were high. The record industry assumed
that black people didn't own phonographs, which was the wrong assumption.
Black people in fact did own them, and were buying opera recordings and whatever
was available at the time. So as soon as there was something available that
they could relate to more, they started buying it. That started the whole
blues craze of the twenties, which is what brought Bessie into the mainstream. |
JJM Yes, the first record she put out -- featuring
"Down Hearted Blues" and "Gulf Coast Blues" -- sold eight hundred thousand
copies, which is a quite remarkable number. She must have made a ton of money
for her record company.
CA She absolutely did. They paid her more
than they paid the other singers, including white singers -- not that they
paid very much, and of course they didn't pay her any royalties.
JJM She just got paid, basically, for the
recording performance itself.
CA Yes, not even for the performance. She
got paid for each acceptable record. So, if she went into the studio and
recorded six but only four were actually released, she got paid a flat fee
for those four only. But it didn't matter to people like Bessie, because
she considered recordings to be a promotional tool. Artists did not look
to recordings as a source of direct income.
JJM It was a way to promote her live performances.
CA Yes, to bring people to the theaters
and to the tents.
JJM How did Bessie continue to succeed even in light
of the decline of the blues?
CA Her voice. No one had that voice. It wasn't
just a commanding voice, she also had a commanding presence. There are some
artists who don't have to do anything other than walk out on stage to create
electricity in the air, and Bessie was one of them. She never lost her voice,
and she never lost her ability to use it. It didn't really matter whether
the song she sang was a blues tune or a Cole Porter song, it was Bessie.
There was a Broadway show in 1929 called Pansy that wasn't doing very
well in rehearsals, so they hired Bessie to sing in it. She wasn't part of
the plot, she just came in between acts and sang a song. When the show opened,
the reviews were universally devastating. One of the reviewers said it was
as if the dancers were meeting each other for the first time on stage.
JJM Well, they were. Six performers never
showed up...
CA That's right. And Brooks Atkinson and
all the top white critics reviewed this show, and they all agreed that the
one saving feature of the show was Bessie Smith. Two of the reviewers mentioned
that when Bessie finished singing, the audience just went crazy and seemed
to desperately want to keep her on stage so the others wouldn't come back.
| JJM Columbia Records executive John Hammond seems
to have contributed greatly to the myths of Bessie Smith. Hammond -- via
Paul Oliver's 1959 biography of Smith -- claims that Bessie was down on her
luck when he met her, and that she had to sing "coon songs" and sell candy
to survive. Is that true?
CA Absolutely not. John Hammond contributed
a lot of the myths, but he was creating a myth around himself, so a lot of
those myths he created around people like Bessie were by products of that
one agenda. John had this image of the great white father. He had recorded
Bessie, Billie Holiday, and as Benny Goodman's brother-in-law, it was he
who integrated the Goodman band, and so forth. When I came over from Europe,
I definitely had the impression that John had probably done more to help
black performers than any other white man. Then, sometimes after you get
to know people and work with them, you see the truth. Not to say that John
didn't do a lot, because he did, but not as much as he wanted us to think.
He was dictatorial, for one thing. He wanted to keep artists down where they
were before, and did not like to see them advance stylistically. In fact,
during World War II, Leonard Feather wrote an article about John Hammond
the dictator in Metronome magazine. The article was entitled "Heil
Hammond," if you can imagine that. I actually saw that myself, and there
were many artists who would have nothing to do with him. Lester Young, for
example, absolutely refused to talk about him.
JJM It is hard to read some of his comments
without a degree of cynicism. Following Smith's death, for example, Hammond's
published claim that Bessie was refused care at the white hospital looked
to be an effort to evoke sympathy for her that would ultimately lead to greater
record sales.
CA Yes, and his story ended with a plug for
Columbia Records' reissue of her recordings. While Hammond did not invent
the story of Bessie being refused care at a white hospital, he did publicize
it. The whole story of her death never made sense to me. Why would an ambulance
take Bessie to a white hospital where she would be turned away, when there
was a black hospital within a half mile? |
*
"It seems that Bessie was riding in a car which crashed into a truck parked along the side of the road. One of her arms was nearly severed, but aside from that there was no other serious injury, according to these informants. Some time elapsed before a doctor was summoned to the scene, but finally she was picked up by a medico and driven to the leading Memphis hospital. On the way this car was involved in some minor mishap, which further delayed medical attention. When finally she did arrive at the hospital she was refused treatment because of her color and bled to death while waiting for attention."
- John Hammond in a November, 1937 Downbeat magazine article
|
"The Bessie Smith ambulance would
not have gone to a white hostpital,
you can forget that. Down in the Deep South cotton country, no
colored ambulance driver, or white driver, would even have thought of putting
a colored person in a hospital for white folks. In Clarksdale, in 1937, a
town of twelve to fifteen thousand people, there were two hospitals -- one
white and one colored -- and they weren't half a mile apart. I suspect
the driver drove just as straight as he could to the colored
hospital."
- Dr. Hugh Smith |
JJM
To fill the readers in, she was riding in a car driven by her lover
at the time, Richard Morgan, who rear-ended a truck that was parked along
the side of the road.
CA Yes. Morgan -- who was Lionel Hampton's
favorite uncle -- was driving Bessie's old Packard along Highway 61 in
Mississippi. It was a very dark road, there were no lights on the truck,
and they were upon it quickly. Morgan swerved in an attempt to avoid hitting
the back of the truck, but couldn't. Because Bessie's elbow was out the window,
the crash almost tore her arm off. The driver of the truck knew that something
had hit him, but he kept going, driving right into Clarksdale. Right after
this accident, Doctor Hugh Smith, who was on an early morning fishing trip
with a friend, came upon the scene. Bessie was lying in the middle of the
road, so the doctor had his friend go to a nearby house to call an ambulance.
Knowing that Bessie was black, he naturally called the black hospital. In
the meantime, the driver of the truck had stopped at the white hospital where
he reported the accident up the road.
While all of this was going on, a small car carrying a young white couple
came down the road and drove directly into the doctor's car, pushing it against
the wreck of Bessie's Packard. So now there were three wrecked cars on the
road. Subsequently two ambulances came, one from the white hospital and another
from the black one. The white one took the couple, and the black one took
Bessie. She had been bleeding very seriously internally, and they had to
remove her arm. She never regained consciousness, and died around ten o'clock
that morning. I interviewed Doctor Smith, who told me in great detail of
Bessie's condition. He said that even if the accident had happened right
in front of a Memphis hospital -- which was better equipped, of course, than
those in Clarksdale -- it is unlikely that she would have survived. |
If there was a hint of racism in those days, the black press played it up.
But there was no mention of racism when this accident was reported. It wasn't
until a couple of weeks later, in a Down Beat article written by John
Hammond, that racism was suggested to have played a role in Bessie's death.
Then all the press played it up and that is how this myth started. I asked
John how he could make such a claim without first speaking to Richard Morgan
or the doctors at the hospital about this, and he was sort of embarrassed
about it.
JJM Well, the truth would have ruined his
story.
CA Of course, that is what it is all about.
Even when he wrote his autobiography a few years later, he invented another
story to substantiate his fabricated story, which is amazing, but that is
John Hammond.
JJM Are you satisfied now that the circumstances
of her death have been properly sorted out?
CA Oh, absolutely, yes. I don't think that
there is any question. I found a letter at the Library of Congress written
by the doctor at the black hospital who attended to Bessie that said she
never regained consciousness, and that he had to amputate her arm, and the
death certificate supports that. And he said that she was taken directly
to his hospital, which by the way is now a small hotel called the Riverside
Hotel. It is a tourist attraction which people come to from all over the
world -- mostly from Japan -- to spend the night in the room Bessie died
in.
| JJM You wrote, "Bessie Smith became better
known for the way in which she had allegedly died than for what she had done
in life." Do you still feel that way?
CA Yes, unfortunately, although I am hoping
that my book will at least diminish the power of the myth of her death. The
myth of her death was very well known because in 1959, the playwright Edward
Albee wrote a play called The Death of Bessie Smith, which was based
on Hammond's account of her death. In that play resides the story of her
being turned away from a white hospital, giving the myth some impetus.
As an aside, I was good friends at one time with well-known radical civil
rights attorney named Flo Kennedy, who, among other things, handled the estates
of Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday. But for about three years she didn't
speak to me. One night we happened to attend the same film screening, and
I approached her about why she wouldn't talk to me anymore. She replied by
saying that I had no business printing that story about Bessie's death. I
told her it was the truth and she replied by saying she knew it was the truth,
but that I had no business printing it! I think that was an attitude
shared by some people, that I had ruined a good story. |
The Death of Bessie Smith
by Edward Albee |
JJM How did the civil rights movement
and the emergence of the rock and roll era affect her legacy?
CA The civil rights movement brought an awareness
of her music. Many of the people who used to call me on WHAT to complain
about "Uncle Tom music," realized that it wasn't that at all. They began
to understand the importance of the music. People no longer hid their gospel
records when white people came to visit them. An awareness of the music's
importance began to take shape. Then the folk music renaissance began, and
with it many of these blues singers were brought out of obscurity, and young
people who had been listening to pseudo-folk music got into the real thing.
I think that made a very big difference, as did the fact that Janis Joplin
was totally into Bessie Smith. When I was working on Bessie's LP reissue
at Columbia, she used to come downstairs to the editing room just to listen
to her.
When the book came out, there was renewed interest in Bessie, and somebody
discovered that her grave was unmarked. A little campaign to raise money
for a headstone was started by a Philadelphia paper, and Janis said she would
pay for it. Simultaneously, another person, Juanita Green, a well-to-do black
woman who owned several nursing homes, made the same offer, because she felt
she owed her success to Bessie. They ended up sharing the cost. Ms. Green
told me how when she was a little girl, she used to participate in a weekly
children's talent contest at the Standard Theater. One day, she came off
stage, having participated in a talent contest, and saw Bessie standing in
the wings. Bessie called her over and asked her if she was in school. When
Junita answered yes, Bessie said, "You better stay there, because you sure
can't sing worth a damn!" She always remembered that.
Smith in an evening gown in the mid-thirties
After You've Gone
*
"I'm convinced that if she had lived, she would have been right
up there with the rest of us in the swing music, she would have been a national
figure."
- Lionel Hampton |
JJM
You write of her final recording in 1933, "Of course no one could have
suspected it, but this was to be Bessie's swan-song recording: the session
affords us the only opportunity to hear Bessie with swing accompaniment,
the flexible rhythm of a string bass, and a saxophonist who doesn't sound
like a refugee from a dance hall -- a tantalizing hint of what might have
come." In your view, what would have come?
CA The Swing Era. Lionel Hampton was doing
a series of small group recordings for RCA Victor at the time, and he told
me he had planned to use her on some of them. By this time, she had changed
her appearance. She stopped wearing wigs and swept her hair back, wore beautiful,
plain evening gowns, and sang songs like "Tea for Two" and "Smoke Gets in
Your Eyes." During this time she performed at Connie's Inn for twelve
weeks, and many people heard her and saw that she had transformed herself.
So, there is no question that, had she lived, she would have been a part
of the Swing Era.
JJM Hammond claims that upon hearing Smith
in 1927 it was the first time he realized there was more to jazz than
instrumental improvisation. He said he was planning on recording her with
Count Basie. Is that believable?
CA Knowing John, it is not totally believable,
He would say things like that. I have been around John when people introduced
him as the man who discovered Bessie Smith, and his way of dealing with that
was to not deny it. But of course, when Bessie made her first recordings,
John was ten years old. But that is how myths get started. If it sounded
good to him and helped his career, he would let it be. On the other hand,
he might well have had plans to record her with Basie, because he definitely
was a fan of Bessie Smith's. |
JJM In his book, Early Jazz, Gunther
Schuller calls Bessie Smith the first important jazz singer. Clearly she
was moving in that direction.
CA Yes, although the first really important
jazz singer was Louis Armstrong. But Bessie recorded vocals before he did.
Some people make a distinction between the blues of Bessie Smith and the
singing of Louis Armstrong. I think it is all just music.
________________________________________
Bessie,
by Chris Albertson
About Chris Albertson
JJM Who was your childhood hero?
CA I don't think I ever had one. I grew up
in Iceland and Denmark, so I wasn't exactly surrounded by the media. There
was nothing really there to create a childhood hero for me. I think the closest
person answering to the definition of a hero would be my maternal grandfather.
*
Chris Albertson is the acknowledged authority on Bessie Smith. A
long-time contributor to Stereo Review, Down Beat, Saturday Review,
and other publications, he has written extensive liner notes for jazz and
blues albums and has produced a wide array of recordings, radio, and television
programs.
________________________________
Bessie Smith products at Amazon.com
Chris Albertson products at Amazon.com
_______________________________
Interview took place on September 22, 2003
*
If you enjoyed this interview, you may want to read our interview with Jelly Roll Morton biographer Phil Pastras.
*
Other
Jerry Jazz Musician interviews
* All photos from the author's collection unless otherwise noted
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