When I heard this woman sing…I was shocked. Listen to the purity of her voice…she still amazes me. We cannot forget the pioneers of any genre. Artists like Mahalia Jackson, Janis Joplin, and Norah Jones have all given Bessie Smith credit as their inspiration.
It seems like the female singers I like the most have a growl to their voices. That includes Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, Willie Mae Thorton, and yes Bessie Smith.
Within 10 months of signing Smith, the Columbia label sold two million records. Over the next four years, her sales reached six million. But she sang a wider repertoire than most, in her traveling tent show, on theatrical tours, and, later, in jazz clubs. The blues made Smith the highest-paid black entertainer of her era, but she was just as adept at singing show tunes and more popular Tin Pan Alley songs, which became the basis of many early jazz standards. Those record sales don’t sound as high now but remember this was in the 1920s!
This song came out in 1923 and peaked at #6 on the Billboard 100… I just looked it up…Billboard first published a chart in 1894.
Whenever I hear Bessie Smith I hear pain and greatness all at once. I’ve written about her song No One Loves You When You’re Down And Out and I’ve been revisiting her lately. This song was written by Charles Warfield and Clarence Williams in 1919. It’s been covered by Louie Prima and Frank Sinatra.
I got into Bessie Smith from listening to Janis Joplin and reading about her. Bessie’s voice sends chills up my spine…that is my litmus test. This particular song grabs me because of Smith’s voice and the recording vibe. She sings it, means it, and she damn well lived it. The sound of the record and her voice is just unbeatable. Yes, we have digital now but digital could not give you this sound.
Smith took care of her own…she moved her sister and other family to live near her in Philadelphia and supported them financially when they squandered her money.
She died from injuries in a car accident in 1937, having not recorded a song in years, more than 5,000 people attended her funeral. Her grave had no headstone. There was money for a headstone apparently, but her estranged husband spent it on something or someone else.
Janis Joplin helped buy Smith’s headstone in 1971…two weeks before her own untimely death. But the real story was the other person who helped buy the stone. That was Juanita Green… a little girl whom Smith once told to give up singing and stay in school.
Louis Armstrong: “I say, ‘Look here Bessie, you got change for a hundred? And she say, ‘Sure my man.’ She raised up her dress standing and there was, like, [you know,] how a carpenter keeps his nails? Man, so much money in the apron under her skirt that killed me.”
Danny Barker a New Orleans musician: “If you have a church background, like people who came from the South as I did, you would recognize a similarity between what she was doing and what those preachers and evangelists from there did, and how they moved people … Bessie did the same thing on stage.”
Baby Won’t You Please Come Home
I’ve got the blues, I feel so lonely
I’ll give the world if I could only
Make you understand
It surely would be grand
I’m gonna telephone my baby
Ask him won’t you please come home
‘Cause when you’re gone
I’m worried all day long
Baby won’t you please come home
Baby won’t you please come home
I have tried in vain
Evermore to call your name
When you left you broke my heart
That will never make us part
Every hour in the day
You will hear me say
Baby won’t you please come home, I mean
Baby won’t you please come home
Baby won’t you please come home
‘Cause your mama’s all alone
I have tried in vain
Nevermore to call your name
When you left you broke my heart
That will never make us part
Landlord gettin’ worse
I’ve got to move May the first
Baby won’t you please come home, I need money
Baby won’t you please come home
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