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Feb 6, 2023 · The reputation of Bessie Smith, the subject of a newly updated 1997 biography by Jackie Kay, was kept alive by prominent admirers such as Janis Joplin and Nina Simone, while Rainey's was revived ...
May 11, 2015 · Around this time, a young Bessie Smith was forming her talents under the wing of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, an early blues singer who also owned her own theatre troupe. Smith was born one of seven children in Chattanooga, TN in 1894, and was orphaned by age eight. At age nine, “Bessie sang on street corners for nickles…she sang everything ...
Aug 5, 2019 · In some cases Smith offers advice: "Pinchback Blues" (1924), a song that warns women about avoiding entanglements with good-looking, no account men, opens with Smith's spoken word introduction ...
May 24, 2015 · By Scott Yanow. May 24th 2015. The filming and recent airing of the HBO film Bessie, which stars Queen Latifah as Bessie Smith, serves as a perfect excuse to look back at the music and life of the woman who was accurately billed as the Empress Of The Blues. When Bessie Smith made her recording debut in 1923, she was not the first blues singer ...
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It has been reported that Smith left home at age ten and joined the company of a touring white dance troupe, the Four Dancing Mitchells. Smith made her way to New York and acquired her professional surname when she married the singer William “Smitty” Smith in 1912—she would marry twice more later in life. That year, she also performed as a dancer w...
Copies of the record leaked out to dealers, however, and customers snapped them up—then as now a phenomenon guaranteed to attract the attention of record executives. Smith was brought into the studios of the OKeh label on February 14, 1920, to record “That Thing Called Love” again, and a new era began in the recording industry. That 78 rpm record (...
Smith’s remarkably durable career flowered anew in the late 1930s as she appeared in a series of movies. These included Paradise in Harlem (1939), also featuring bandleader Lucky Millinder, Mystery in Swing (1940), Murder on Lenox Avenue (1941), Sunday Sinners (1941), and Because I Love You(1943). Smith died in 1946 (the date is variously given as ...
Books
Harrison, Daphne Duval, Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s, Rutgers University Press, 1988. Notable Black American Women, Book 1, Gale Research, 1992. Sadie, Stanley, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., Macmillan, 2000. Southern, Eileen, The Music of Black Americans, 3rd ed., Norton, 1998.
Online
All Music Guide, http://allmusic.com. —James M. Manheim
WIF’s History is a Timeline of Historic Activism and Hollywood Firsts 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s For more WIF history, read Women Who Run the Show: How a Brilliant and Creative New Generation of Women Stormed Hollywood (2003), written by former Women In Film Board President Mollie Gregory (1937–2022).
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