Bessie Smith, ‘The Empress of the Blues’, photographed by Carl Van Vechten in February 1936, a year before she died in an auto accident in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
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Wow…that photo with the Marionette head may be the personification of the Blues…
Oh, these pix…Here’s Bessie in her only film appearance, as (of course) the woman done wrong in the 1929 short “St. Louis Blues”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Djq1JQ_k1eg(There’s a better-quality version on YT, but it’s maimed by poster’s watermark throughout. And this one has redhotjazz.com’s informative writeup.)
Thanks so much for posting all these every day, Josh. And between these spectacular pictures and the sight and sound of Bessie they sent me to, my day’s suddenly a lot richer.
She didn’t die IN an auto accident; she died after her injured body was hit by another passing driver in the protracted time (more than half an hour) it took for a designated “Colored Only” ambulance to arrive from the nearest African-American hospital.
I became a fan of Bessie Smith about 20 years ago when that big Complete Columbia Recordings CD set came out in the early '90s. I’ve listened to all the CDs in the set several times since, including earlier this year. She was truly one of the greatest American singers ever.
The colored/white ambulance/hospital part of the story is now generally believed to be apocryphal.