Synopsis
Bessie Smith was certainly the greatest blues singer who lived and probably one of the greatest and most influential singers of the twentieth century. Her blues songs mirrored her tempestuous life as she travelled across America performing and making records, taking both male and female lovers, achieving great wealth and stardom until her eventual decline during the years of the depression. She died in a car crash in 1937 aged 43.
Reviews
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.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
In this engrossing olio of biography, autobiography, poetry, and fiction, Kay creates an edgy atmosphere by switching focus by means of narrative jumps in and out of Smith's life and music--a chancy strategy, but it works, facilitating the interaction of Kay's and her subject's stories with minimal disorientation. Smith's reputed lesbianism is made prominent, for this book is part of the Outlines series "on leading gay and lesbian writers and creative artists," yet her music and career are amply and lovingly detailed as well. Indeed, this is primarily a warm, personable, evocative, and pleasing portrait of "the Empress of the Blues" that is also interesting as a study of two strong artistic female characters (Kay herself is the second) and the connections between their seemingly disparate lives. Blessed with a snazzy cover, interpolated poetry by Langston Hughes and Pablo Neruda (among others), and a rather abrupt but nice bibliography, this is quite a package, all told, for many sorts of readers. Mike Tribby
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