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Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964)
Bessie Smith   1936
Courtesy of the Carl Van Vechten Collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress

click to listen to audioBessie Smith (c.1898–1937)
Wasted Life Blues  1929
78 rpm record
Courtesy of the Library of Congress

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Library of Congress
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United States

Bessie Smith
c.1898–1937

Bessie Smith was perhaps the greatest and most influential blues singer during the 1920s—the heyday of the classic ‘blues’. Her renditions of songs about life in the American South earned her the title ‘Empress of the Blues’. She performed mainly in black theatres, but she did sing one evening in the New York apartment of Carl Van Vechten, a writer and amateur photographer who frequented Harlem nightclubs, and took this portrait photograph of her.

Smith’s first record, Down-hearted Blues, was an immediate success. It was issued in 1923, with Gulf Coast Blues on the flip side. By 1930, she had become the most respected African American singer. During the decade that followed, she recorded more than 160 songs, with her last sessions taking place in November 1933. Although her voice and her career went into a period of decline in the 1930s, her fortunes seemed to be changing in 1936–1937. Tragically, she died from injuries sustained in an automobile accident near Memphis, Tennessee, in September 1937.

Bessie Smith possessed an astonishing and innate musicality. She was praised for her broad phrasing, clear diction, blue-note inflections and emotional intensity. Her catalogue of recordings remains widely regarded as the standard against which all other female blues singers are measured. She is best known as a blues singer, but also recorded a number of jazz and popular standards. She also wrote or co-wrote at least 33 of the songs she recorded, including Wasted Life Blues, dating from 1929 and recorded that year.