Bessie Smith
A RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK
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- 9,99 €
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- 9,99 €
Publisher Description
A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK
Bessie Smith: singer, icon, pioneer.
Scotland's National Poet Jackie Kay brings to life the tempestuous story of the greatest blues singer who ever lived.
'A gem of a book . . . beautiful.' BERNARDINE EVARISTO
'A wonderful writer on a magnificent singer.' ROBERT WYATT
'Kay's book is the amplifier that Smith's voice deserves.' SUNDAY TIMES
'The most vivid evocation of Bessie Smith I have ever read.' IAN CARR, BBC MUSIC
BESSIE SMITH was born in Tennessee in 1894. Orphaned by the age of nine, she sang on street corners before becoming a big name in travelling shows. In 1923 she made her first recording for a new start-up called Columbia Records. It sold 780,000 copies and made her a star. Smith's life was notoriously difficult: she drank pints of 'bathtub gin', got into violent fist fights, spent huge sums of money and had passionate love affairs with men and women. She once single-handedly fought off a cohort of the Ku Klux Klan.
As a young black girl growing up in Glasgow, Jackie Kay found in Bessie someone with whom she could identify and who she could idolise. In this remarkable book Kay mixes biography, fiction, poetry and prose to create an enthralling account of an extraordinary life.
'Biographies don't usually bring the subject to life again. This one did. I finished the book then started it again immediately.'
PEGGY SEEGER
'What a life! What gulpable storytelling! Exactly the kind of writing about music we need: personal, ardent, playfully confrontational, questioning, undogmatic. A love song to a complicated idol.'
KATE MOLLESON
'Pure joy: one trailblazing woman pays tribute to another. Jackie Kay finds the music in the short, dazzling, capricious life of Bessie Smith.'
HELEN LEWIS
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.
