The Empress of Blues

Bessie Smith began her professional singing career at the age of eighteen in 1912, earning eight dollars a week. For many years she toured on the minstrel and vaudeville show circuit until she made her first recording in 1923. “Down Hearted Blues,” which sold over 750,000 copies in the first year, thereby making her the most successful black performer of her era. Her stage performances then earned fifteen hundred dollars per session, a tremendous sum at the time, although she received no royalties from the recordings; Bessie Smith received only thirty dollars per record of the one hundred sixty she recorded. Although many would now consider that she was duped into signing such a recording contract, Bessie was a hard-drinking, swaggering woman who reportedly would get into a knockdown fight over the slightest insult. The woman known as Empress of the Blues lived hard and fast. She died at the age of forty-three in 1937, in Mississippi. The speeding car she drove in as a passenger slammed into the rear end of a truck. Her arm was nearly severed, and she died of trauma and blood loss. Her bootlegger boyfriend, Richard Morgan, the driver of the car, was unharmed. No Breathalyzer tests were available to determine the root cause of the accident. Newspaper reports suggested that Bessie Smith died because she was taken to a segregated white hospital that refused treatment. However, records confirm that she was transported directly to Clarksdale’s, a black hospital, where she died six hours later.