This is the first prose book by Jackie Kay, as opposed to her poetry that I have read. The next book by Kay 'Trumpet' is what started me reading this book. In the foreword of 'Trumpet' Ali Smith recommends to the reader that they read 'Bessie Smith' first, since that first prose work, written and published before 'Trumpet', informed the writing of 'Trumpet'. Both books cenre on music, and how black musicians and jazz musicians resisted the implicit and explicit assumptions in their identity, where white people talked in cliches about how black people live, which they havce no personal experience of.
In 'Bessie Smith' Jackie Kay starts with her earliest recollections of finding Bessie. When Kay was as a teenager in the 1970s, including confiding to miming to her Bessie Smith albums in her bedroom, with her hairbrush as the microphone. From this starting point Kay feels her way into Bessie Smith's life with the basic facts and comments than could only be speculative. Kay treads lightly on the early known facts of Bessie Smith's life, because the identifiably personal facts are so few. In the back of the book there are several apendices including a brief chronology of those bare-bones facts that the main text fleshes out.
According to later documents Bessie was born in 1894, in Chattanooga and grew up with little to no no sense of being part of a family, as she led a hand to mouth life. Her parents died when she was a child, so the barefoot life of a sharecropper was all she had to hold on to, well nearly all. In the early 1900s there was one way out of the racism of the croppers life, one uncertain haven against the Jim Crow laws: the theatre. Which meant several things, black male blues singers singing about the ills of being black in what seemed like crude musical and literary howls of pain, often played on instruments that the musicians made for themselves. Easier to accomodate on the ear were the minstrel shows where for modern readers to read about them they have to suspend every last critcal value they had. Early minstrel shows consisted of white males blackenng their faces whilst singing parody songs about black suffering - a more ironic description of the lives of black slaves, where the whites pretend to join them to mimic their suffering in jolly tones could hardly be imagined. It was form of entertainment where the word 'schadenfraude' had never been invented, but it should have been. The irony was deepened when black men and women wanted to join the shows. They too blacked up. Because this parody of blackness, and the suffering and inequality of slavery, had to be maintianed through the make up, the pretence. But black people's voices and intonation could not be rendered white. The first black blues woman to be famous in her own right was 'Mother of the blues' Ma Rainey (1886 - 1939).
From the impenitrable jet black irony of the minstrel shows, where singing about suffering and division through slavery was prefferable to actually living out that suffering, there was a path developed for the most talented and toughest black men and women who could create their own relative autonomy, led by their abilities as performers. This parh existed where no such autonomy was meant to be possible. This is shown in one of the appendices where Bessie Smith's tour itinerary is detailed in map form at the back of the book. The modern rock music industry is well known for it's dishonest and violent managers of musical talent, where the talent itself was a creative talent and they prefered the dishonesty of their management to the bigger dishonesty of the venue management and tour promoters. For Bessie Smith the management of song writing, recording, and touring when race laws dictated where a perfrormer might stay after the performance finished naturally led to the sterotype of 'the hustling husbands' who as the managers of their talented wives, their property, were less interested in the marriage and more engaged with the financial rewards the asset they managed could bring in, which was to be syphoned off, unseen from the person who attracted the wealth.
But I have yet to hear the song title 'Irony Blues' it would be too 'meta' for it to be a proper blues song. So I will plough on here..... One of the interesting paradoxes is how many of the women who took the blues to the stage and gave it a sass and satin makover that the men who sang the blues could not were all called Smith, Mamie, Clara, Bessie, Laura and Trixie. None of them were related to each other. Smith was the sir name a slave owner gave to their families long before, Many talented women across the world of the 19th and 20th centuries found the recognition of their talent was reduced, as they married and took on their husbands names, their talents were subsumed into their hussbands reputations and business affairs, as the patriarchy marched on into the future leaving a trail of wreckage many would call 'history' behind it. With their voices, song writing talent, and the name Smith to support them these black women punched well above any level that they could ordinarily be expected to achieve, whilst their sir name gave them a distinction.
They would all have gone a lot further than they did too, where they had the support of a strong sisterhood, which because she could, Bessie created for herself.
Why Bessie earned the Empress of The Blues is explained in the chapter about the pullman train coach that she bought with the wealth she earned from her live performances, as her recordings spread her fame. She was the first black person to have such a mobile palace. For her to be able to play live, and live off stage the way she wanted to - as if she was a restless teenager who did not have to be settled, even now, is a dream that today's teenagers could still reach into and draw from. The pullman coach was her refuge. It gave Bessie and her touring entourage a unique haven from the racism that recycled, repeated, and reinforced iself across America. This luxury pullman coach also gave her freedom from prohibition era laws that even as they were ineffective in prohibiting the distribution of alcohol, outwardly had to be followed to the letter of the law, whilst the law was breached.
And what is there to say about promiscuity and lesbianism and male homosexuality? In todays 21st century we talk about 'safe spaces', knowing that they are spaces that allow room for thought, where we can choose how to act. But in Bessie's world the public space where she felt safest was on stage, the private space she and her entourage felt safest offstage was the pullman carriage when everyone thought that he violent husband, Jack, was not around. In that private space they could drink all the alcohol they wanted and live out their own sexual license. All, mostly without fear of arrest. This privacy was luxury indeed. That Bessie's husband was the one person Bessie and her entourage feared would visit the pullman carriage unannounced was preferable to having any other authority to fear. That he was 'good with his fists'.... Well men had to be that way back then. When men could be violence towards each other and to the women that with the blessings of the law they felt they had the right to beat up who they chose when they chose. Women like Bessie had to be strong in different ways, like knowing when to watch and what to be watchful for. Bessie was physically strong enough to beat Jack up, which became part of the roller coaster of life on tour, where the touring was all of the life that was there to be had. But when Jack and Bessies seperated, with the property and custody laws being in his favour he could beat Bessie hands down via the law in how he seperated Bessie from who she loved the most, her closest female lover, other members of her touring entourage, and the child she semi-legally adopted. That the seperation came amid the Wall Street crash, which in turn collapsed the market for 'race records' as the recordings of black blues singers were known, proved to be a triple blow to Bessie.
If Jack and Bessie half knew their way around marriage and companionship, whilst both being from such rough backgrounds that often they could only be creative whilst fueled by alcohol, amid prohibition, then other musicians could take their chances around them amid the chaos. But, because of their background, Jack and Bessie did not notice it when Colombia records presented the pair with her first recording contract, when the executive who presented the pair with the contract he struck out the clause that would have paid Bessie performance royalties based on her record sales, rather than Bedssie being paid a flat fee to record a song. Career slips like this are inevitable, with the recording and performing industry being in an early stage of signing up black performers, when the record industry was like America, led by an infinitely white and distant corporate structure.
I was bowled over by the story of Bessie being invited to a party full of wealthy, polite, white people by writer Carl Van Vechten and pianist Porter Granger, where she downed a pint of whiskey to perform for the crowd, and was perfect with the situation as long as she was performing. When she finally stopped her nerves go the worse of her, and her ettiquete went out of the window. She left soon after, too.
What to do when the paty leaves you? With the 1929 crash the sales of 'race records' as blues 78 RPM records were sold as genre, collapsed, Bessie kept her Colombia recording contract (minus the royalties that had she signed away for lack of with a more lawyerly eye) until 1931. She still wrote songs, but her blues songs had become prophesies rather than ralling cries against the depth of the poverty that she had come from. With the recession the reord companies preferred newer recordings with lighter skinned black female vocalists. In 1933, the last year Bessie recorded, Billie Holiday made her first recordings. The tour promoters who Bessie worked with prevailed over whether Bessie toured atall, and when she did how her female backing singers had lighter skinned tones. The market for the full on blackness and the blues that Bessie wrote and performed shrank. The newer 'race records' artists were performed by either dark skinned men or lighter skinned women. This was how the race records market evolved, to keep sales bouyant. From 1933 Bessie was left to write lyrics for songs, for which she had the musicians who performed with her live. But she had no recording contract.
With distant hindsight, the chest these lyrics were stored in, along with her jewels and other most personal objects became an object of myth, it was said to be kept close to her when she was alive. It was never to be seen again after she died. Even the manner of her death because the cause of disagreement and we can only wonder at how callous the times became when fame and reputation could be so devalued so quickly that although it was known where her remains were buried, it took a white woman blues singer to give Bessie a gravestone, 33 years later. And that white blues singer would die younger than Bessie did, soon after. That singer was Janis Joplin, who died a few months later, herself. Janis is commemorated in one song in paritcular, which could memorialise both Bessie and Janis, hear it here.
Postscript: Jacky Kay did not suggest the following but I felt led to write it. Bessie Smith was a songwriter among here many other vaudeville talents. For many songwriters in later generations their songs are their children. Perhaps the best shortcut to discover the afterlife of Bessie Smith is to listen to the 1958 album 'Lavern Baker sings Bessie Smith', a modern early rock and roll era take on Bessie's songs that was part of the raised profile of her/revival of her, twenty years after her death. Another document worth exploring would be 'The Bessie Smith Song Book' (Penguin) where 38 of Bessie's songs are transcribed lyrics and basic melodies. And a lots of pictures of Bessie are added.
