Bessie Smith
A Poet's Biography of a Blues Legend
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A beautiful genre-bending tribute to the larger-than-life blues singer Bessie Smith. Scotland’s National Poet blends poetry, prose, fiction, and nonfiction to create an entirely unique biography of the Empress of the Blues.
There has never been anyone else like Bessie Smith. Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1894 and orphaned by the age of nine, Bessie Smith sang on street corners before becoming a big name in traveling shows. In 1923, she made her first recording for the newly founded Columbia Records. It sold 780,000 copies and catapulted her to fame. Known for her unmatched vocal talent, her timeless and personal blues narratives, her tough persona, and her ability to enrapture audiences with her raw voice, the Empress of the Blues remains a force and an enigma.
In this remarkable book, Kay combines history and personal narrative, poetry and prose to create an enthralling account of an extraordinary life, and to capture the soul of the woman she first identified with as a young Black girl growing up in Glasgow. Powerful and moving, Bessie Smith is at once a vivid biography of a central figure in American music history and a personal story about one woman’s search for recognition.
A VINTAGE ORIGINAL.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In one of the more interesting volumes in the "Outlines" series on gay and lesbian creators, Scottish-born poet and woman of color Kay profiles the great American blues singer, whose life inspired some of the poems in Kay's recent collection of poetry, The Adoption Papers. Although Kay gives fairly short shrift to Smith's lesbianism or bisexuality, she speaks authoritatively as one black woman about another. More a personal impression than a historical work, this book interweaves poems with a repetitive prose style that nonetheless strikes a sincere note. The author relies entirely on secondary sources, such as Chris Albertson's pathbreaking biography Bessie, but disagrees where she feels like it, e.g., about the now-established fact that Smith did not die as a result of racist Southern doctors refusing to treat her after a car accident, as a legend had it. Kay prefers to side with writers like Edward Albee, whose play The Death of Bessie Smith helped promulgate the myth, because even if it didn't happen that way, it could have. The reader is tempted to grant the author this amount of poetic license in an otherwise appealing text.
