Review of Bessie Smith by Jackie Kay

Bessie Smith by Jackie Kay
Empress of the blues

In 1904 Bessie Smith began singing on street corners, aged just 9. By 1923 she made her first recording with new start up, Columbia Records. It sold 780,000 copies and made her a star.

The getting there took years of hard work, travelling America, playing in segregated tents alongside Ma Rainey, (Mother of the Blues), singing her truth about everything from floods, sexual abuse to financial crashes and heartache of love gone wrong.

In this timely republication, Jackie Kay interweaves, her own personal coming of age story and love of Bessie’s music and voice. As a young woman of colour, growing up with her adoptive white parents in, 1970s Glasgow, Bessie was an icon she could relate and be inspired by.

I am the same colour as she is, I thought to myself, electrified. I am the same colour as Bessie. I had made a friend for life.

Jackie Kay highlights the double album Any Woman Blues’, sang by a woman for all women. Her voice carried a kind of knowing that made you feel this woman knew everything about life and was not frightened of any of it. It made me stop reading Anne of Green Gables and look up sharp and listen.

The songs told the young, Jackie Kay, about female suffering, domestic violence, and boundless freedom, on the road. Kay mixes biography, poetry and what – if imaginings to create an account of an extraordinary life. Smith’s life was notoriously difficult: she drank pints of ‘bathtub gin’, got into violent fist fights, spent huge sums of money and had passionate love affairs with men and women. She once single-handedly fought off a cohort of the Ku Klux Klan. Kay brings this all alive alongside the power of the music.

There are some people whose voices ring out across the centuries even after they have gone.

Review by Sarah O’Mahoney Feb 2021