#bessie smith

[ifelllikeastar]

Bessie Smith experienced a "wretched childhood". Her parents and a brother died while she was young. Her older sister Viola took charge of caring for her siblings and as a consequence, Bessie was unable to gain an education. To earn money for her impoverished household, Bessie and her brother Andrew busked on the streets of Chattanooga. She sang and danced as he played the guitar. They often performed on street corners for pennies, and their habitual location was in front of the White Elephant Saloon at Thirteenth and Elm streets, in the heart of the city's African-American community.

Bessie began forming her own act around 1913. Working a heavy theater schedule during the winter and performing in tent shows the rest of the year, Smith became the highest-paid black entertainer of her day and began traveling in her own 72-foot-long railroad car. Columbia Records publicity department nicknamed her "Queen of the Blues", but the national press soon upgraded her title to "Empress of the Blues". Smith's music stressed independence, fearlessness, and sexual freedom, implicitly arguing that working-class women did not have to alter their behavior to be worthy of respect.

Bessie Smith was born on April 15, 1894 in Chattanooga, Tennessee and died on September 26, 1937 in Clarksdale, Mississippi from critical injuries she suffered in a car crash at the age of 43

#bessie smith #love #music legend #vintage #tennessee #mississippi #queen of blues #the empress of blues #black lives #singer #actress

[citizenscreen]

Blues great Bessie Smith was born on April 15, 1894 #botd

#bessie smith #blues

[potato-lord-but-not]

Honestly criminal that half of these aren’t canon

#LIKE PLEASE SAPPHO AND LANGSTON AND MARY ?????? CMON #I’m not great at like. inserting these guys into canon it’s just like the IDEA yk #more gay clones pls #clone high #clone high s2 #clone high fanart #clone high oc #georgia o'keeffe #bessie smith #mary shelley #her design’s kinda rough. same with Hughes’ fit aha yikes #langston hughes #sappho #i shoulda gave Sappho pants. honestly she needs a better outfit too sorry lesbians I failed u

[mishflora]

"Tired of bein' lonely, tired of bein' blue, I wished I had some good man, to tell my troubles to. Seem like the whole world's wrong, Since my man's been gone. I need a little sugar in my bowl, I need a little hot dog on my roll. I can stand a bit of lovin', oh so bad, I feel so funny, I feel so sad. I need a little steam-heat on my floor, Maybe I can fix things up, so they'll go. What's the matter hard papa, Come on and save your mama's soul, 'Cause I need a little sugar, in my bowl, doggone it, I need a some sugar in my bowl. I need a little sugar in my bowl, I need a little hot dog between my rolls. You gettin' different, I've been told, Move your finger, drop something in my bowl. I need a little steam-heat on my floor, Maybe I can fix things up, so they'll go. Get off your knees, I can't see what you're drivin' at, It's dark down there looks like a snake! C'mon here and drop somethin' here in my bowl, Stop your foolin' and drop somethin' in my bowl!"

#bessie smith #blues #song #1920s #1930s #music #vintage #need a little sugar in my bowl #Youtube

[fuckyeahcostumedramas]

Queen Latifah as Bessie Smith in Bessie (TV Film, 2015).

#queen latifah #Bessie Smith #bessie #perioddramaedit #20th Century #Michael T. Boyd #1920s

[queerasfact]

Black History Month: Ma Rainey

I went out last night with a crowd of my friends, It must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men.

Prove It On Me Blues, Ma Rainey, 1928

Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1886, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey began performing at a young age, and by her late teens, was touring as part of Black minstrel shows around America’s south.

Know for her strong voice, she was one of the first performers to popularise the blues, and bring it to audiences around America. She recoreded over 92 songs with Paramount records, alongside well-known musicians such as Louis Armstrong.

Ma had a close relationship with fellow blues performer Bessie Smith, with Ma’s guitarist Sam Chatmon saying that “I believe she was courtin’ Bessie.” Some of Ma’s songs - like Prove It On Me Blues - also teased the idea of her queerness, which appealed to white audiences who saw blues as an exciting, risque, liberated genre.

Learn more

[Image: black-and-white photo of Ma Rainey, smiling, wearing a headband, pearls, beaded earrings, and a beaded dress; source]

#black history #ma rainey #blues #lgbt #lgbtq #bessie smith #queer history #bi history #lgbt history #black women #black history month

[joeinct]

Bessie Smith, Photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1936

#carl van vechten #bessie smith

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Bessie Smith was buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania. In 1970, singer Janis Joplin and NAACP leader Juanita Green Smith paid to have her tombstone erected. It reads: “The greatest blues singer in the world will never stop singing.”

[Follies Of God]

* * * * *

“She's no lady. Her songs are all unbelievably unhappy or lewd. It's called Blues. She sings about sore feet, sexual relations, baked goods, killing your lover, being broke, men called Daddy, women who dress like men, working, praying for rain. Jail and trains. Whiskey and morphine. She tells stories between verses and everyone in the place shouts out how true it all is.” ― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

#the blues #Bessie Smith #Sharon Hill Pa #NAACP #Janis Joplin #Follies of God #graves

[stringofpearlsx]

Janis Joplin had a gravestone erected for blues legend Bessie Smith, who was buried in an unmarked grave after she died in a car accident in 1937.

#janis joplin #bessie smith #1970 #rock and roll history #musician photography

[bossymarmalade]

One sweltering July night in 1927, Bessie Smith and her troupe were performing under a tent in Concord, North Carolina. When a member of the band slipped out for a breath of fresh air, he spotted half a dozen members of the Ku Klux Klan headed their way. The musician ran inside, and told Bessie to run.

Bessie wouldn't hear of it.

She stormed out of the tent, ran toward the Klansmen instead, shaking her fist and cursing. "I'll get the whole damn tent out here," she shouted. "You just pick up them sheets and run."

Faced with Bessie Smith and a tent full of her loyal fans, the Klansmen fled. Smith returned to the bandstand and began again to sing.

jazz, ep 3 "our language"

#chromatic voice #bessie smith #queer culture

[musickickztoo]

Bessie Smith

April 15, 1894 – September 26, 1937

#bessie smith #april 15 #september 26

[lisamarie-vee]

#bessie smith #blues music #1920s #b&w

[silentdivasblog]

Bessie Smith ❤️

#1920s music #blues singer #harlem renaissance #bessie smith #american stage performers #vintage beauty

[jazzdailyblog]

Billie Holiday: The Voice of Jazz

Introduction: Billie Holiday, born Eleanora Fagan, remains one of the most iconic and influential jazz vocalists of all time. With her unique voice, emotive delivery, and deeply personal approach to singing, Holiday’s music transcended genres and touched the hearts of listeners around the world. In this blog post, we will explore the life, music, and legacy of Billie Holiday, highlighting her…

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#Artie Shaw #Bessie Smith #Billie Holiday #Count Basie #Jazz History #Jazz Vocalists #John Hammond #Louis Armstrong

[ozkar-krapo]

Bessie SMITH

"Any Woman's Blues"

(2LP. Columbia. 1970 / rec. 1923-30) [US]

#bessie smith #1923 #usa #blues #records #Youtube

[manwalksintobar]

if we’ve gotta live underground and everybody’s got cancer/ will poetry be enuf?  // Eisa Davis to Ntozake Shange

         dear ntozake,

I got sacks of mercury under the skin beneath my eyes either cried too much or i’m abt to the cool war’s burnin up my retina again does poetry start where life ends? i know i’m supposed to be cool: i wear corrective lenses that feature high definition tragedy. baby in the dumpster       ethnic cleansing assassinations       multinational mergers i’m supposed to shake my head write a poem believe in ripples. but i ain’t cool. i emit inhuman noises i imagine terrorist acts as i flick my imaginary ash onto the imaginary tray i imagine going insane with a purpose and writing it down feels sorta unnecessary does poetry end where life begins? berkeley girl       black girl        red diaper baby born of the blood of the struggle but with reaganomics and prince pickin up steam in ‘81 nothing came between me and my calvins 10 yrs old       unpressed hair       playin beethoven readin madeleine l’engle       got scared in my pants when i heard this girl testifying ‘TOUSSAINT’ in the black repertory group youth ensemble i was just sittin in a rockin chair pretendin to be 82 and talkin like I knew all bout langston’s ‘rivers’

i wasn’t as good as her and i definitely wadn’t cool so i gave up drama and decided to bake soufflés zake you wda beat me up in the playground if we’da grown up together and you did eighth grade       ‘he dropped em’ at the regional oratorical competition i saw another fly honey rip it this time it’s ‘a nite with beau willie brown’ i was bleedin on the ground i became yours no more soufflés i jacked for colored girls right off my mama’s shelf my mama fania who was sweatin with you and raymond sawyer and ed mock and halifu osumare dancin on the grass       back in the day in you i found a groove never knew i had one like that did that monologue over and over alone in my room my bunk bed the proscenium arch 13 yrs old       screamin and cryin abt my kids gettin dropped out a window didn't know a damn thing about rivers but i knew abt my heart fallin        five stories you were never abbreviated or lower case to me you just pimped that irony that global badass mackadocious funkology you not only had hígado you had ben-wa balls in yr pussy

betsey brown on my godmother's couch nappy edges in mendocino at the mouth of big river spell #7 after the earthquake in silverlake the love space demands had to be in brooklyn yr poems are invitations to live in yr body love letters yr admirers dream they coulda written themselves no one cd find a category that was yr size blackety black but never blacker than thou you teased me into sassiness when i had none to speak of made profane into sacred but never formed a church sanctified women's lives whether we were reading nietzsche or a box of kotex we were magical and regular you many-tongued st louis woman of barnard and barcelona you left us the residue of yr lust left us to wander life as freely as sassafrass cypress and indigo and even the unedumacated could get yr virtuosity cuz you always fried it up in grease you built an aqueduct from lorraine hansberry's groundwater and it bubbled straight to george c wolfe you never read what the critics said and you scrunched up the flesh between yr eyebrows like everybody else in my family

but zake is poetry enuf?

i beg the question cuz you grew me up you    and adrienne kennedy     and anna deavere smith and all my mothers you blew out the candles on my 26th so when there's mercury under the skin beneath my eyes and the world ain't so cool do you write a poem or a will?

like leroi jones said     if bessie smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music so do we all write like amiri baraka does or do we all get our nat turner on?

i beg the question cuz i wanna get my life right do some real work and i really don't want to kill any white folk i mean     can we talk abt this maybe it's just my red diaper that's itchin but i still got that will to uplift the race sans bootstraps or talented tenths or paper bag tests this time we uplift the human race and i know the rainbow might be but is poetry enuf?

it's a naive question but i'm old enuf to ask them once in a while if we do finally unload the canon clean it out stock up on some more colorful balls ain't we only gettin the ones that are available at a store near you? doesn't the market end up setting the new standards anyway? is poetry enuf if it ain't sellin? if ain't nobody readin it? can poetry keep a man     who can't read from droppin his kids out a window?

and how can i call a ceasefire to this cool war in stanzas of eights when we've declared poetry a no fly zone? we have learned to protect it and its potential politics like a mother shoot down anyone who might overdetermine a poem's meaning (while we poets divebomb everyone else's politics with impunity like we're the United States or something)

if poetry is just poetry we save it from the conservatives but doesn't that mean it's of no use to the progressives?

is poetry enuf? cuz that's all i'm doin. makin up stories    on stage     on the page keepin the beat and that's all my friends are doin and that's what a lot of folks my age are doin

but if we've gone and burnt up everything in the sky if there's nothin else to eat but landfill stroganoff if we've gotta live underground and everybody's got cancer will poetry be enuf?

my aunt angela says i can do my thang and keep swinging left hooks to oppression if i stay up stay into it stay involved just one form of praxis will do. it's just my guilt that thinks i need twenty-two what's enuf?

shouldn't i (or somebody) be our secular bodhisattva become a real power player but skip the talk show can't we stabilize, rekindle collectives and cooperatives and collaborations therapeutic communities that double as creative juggernauts a publishing house     a theatre where the plays cost less than the movies get the neighborhood coven back together take dance breaks in the cubicles sing until the flourescent lights burst into snow i ask you because you changed me zake you changed thousands of women and i know poetry can't be enuf if you drunk

i ain't tryin ta walk off wid alla yr stuff and i got nuttin but love for ya so that's why i gotta know i'm sittin on my bed encircled by every book you've ever published they're open like fans marking pages with the flint of genius all i want is for this circle to grow so tell me:

is this where poetry and life are twins? i felt so crumpled up when i started writing you poetry seemed so useless and dingy next to all the bright red bad news but now that the poem is over i feel wide open like an infant of the spring just tell me how to feed this light to my responsibilities and poetry just might be enuf           love           eisa

#poetry #Eisa Davis #Ntozake Shange #is poetry enuf? #American poetry #feminist poetry #feminism #for colored girls #Amiri Baraka #Leroi Jones #Black American poetry #Bessie Smith #Angela Davis #mothers & daughters #girls & women #politics #poems of protest #poems of rage #growing up #despair #loving the world anyway #letter #advice #letters to a young poet #radical art