Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  Bessie and Ma Rainey hit the road together, but the former’s career went on to places the latter only dreamed of. In the beginning, Smith was rejected as “too rough” following early record-label auditions. But Columbia took a chance on her, and in 1923 she cut her first record: “Down Hearted Blues,” with the flip side of “Gulf Coast Blues.” A huge success, the record sold 780,000 copies. Between 1924 and 1929, according to a 1937 article in the Pittsburgh Courier, she sold four million records. She also influenced a generation of blues and jazz instrumentalists who played as her sidemen, including Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman.

  Bessie Smith was brown skinned, big boned, and an orphan. With so many strikes seemingly against her in a world that lusted after thin, light-skinned, demure fairy princesses with good pedigrees, how did she become such a big star? Of course, the answer is in her voice. Bessie hit notes like a boxer—no, perhaps boxing is too inelegant a term for the melodious precision with which she spun out her songs. Boxing is sometimes called the sweet science, and that poetic euphemism better captures the essence of her musical style—she was not like some singing street brawler or some brawny pugilist; she jabbed through songs with economy, with grace, with power, with a wink and a kiss. Right hooks, uppercuts, growls, and bent phrasing that could break your heart. Louis Armstrong once said, “She used to thrill me at all times, the way she could phrase a note with a certain something in her voice no other blues singer could get. She had music in her soul and felt everything she did. Her sincerity with her music was an inspiration.”

  There was an empathic quality to her music, as well; after hearing a Bessie Smith song, you didn’t just feel like you knew where she was coming from, you also felt as if she knew where you were coming from. Especially if you had ever been in a love affair that went wrong, or been wronged by a lover who had an affair, or been in love at all. Bessie, like Rainey before her, sang about women in trouble, women in need, women who had been turned on or turned out by their men. She also sang about fighting back, about shooting and slashing and hunting down men who had done her wrong. Some of her songs were addressed to other women—as if, with her performances, she wanted to create a community of caring.

  “When I was a little girl,” singer Mahalia Jackson once remembered, “I felt she [Bessie] was having troubles like me. That’s why it was such a comfort for the people of the South to hear her. She expressed something they couldn’t put into words.” This was at a time when lynchings were common (the Afro-American, on March 7, 1926, reported that “seventeen lynchings were recorded in 1925, showing an increase of one over the preceding year”) and ads for skin bleaching creams were plentiful (the same issue of the Afro-American featured an ad for Nadinola Bleaching Cream, which, claimed the manufacturer, “is the one bleaching cream and skin whitener that never fails … men admire you—women envy you”). Bessie Smith stood up for black people in general, for brown-skinned women in particular, and for down-and-out people everywhere (her song “Poor Man’s Blues” lamented the mistreatment of the poor by the rich), and she raised the spirits of the downtrodden simply by lifting her voice.

  “MA RAINEY”

  By Sterling Brown [1932]

  I

  When Ma Rainey

  Comes to town,

  Folks from anyplace

  Miles aroun’

  , From Cape Girardeau,

  Poplar Bluff,

  Flocks in to hear

  Ma do her stuff;

  Comes flivverin’ in,

  Or ridin’ mules,

  Or packed in trains,

  Picknickin’ fools …

  That’s what it’s like,

  Fo’ miles on down,

  To New Orleans delta An’ Mobile town, When Ma hits

  Anywheres aroun’.

  II

  Dey comes to hear Ma Rainey from de little river settlements,

  From blackbottom cornrows and from lumber camps;

  Dey stumble in de hall, jes a-laughin’ an’ a-cacktin’,

  Cheerin’ lak roarin’ water, lak wind in river swamps.

  An’ some jokers keeps deir laughs a-goin’ in de crowded aisles,

  An’ some folks sits dere waitin’ wid deir aches an’ miseries,

  Till Ma comes out before dem, a-smilin’ goldtoofed smiles

  An’ Long Boy ripples minors on de black an’ yellow keys.

  III

  O Ma Rainey,

  Sing yo’ song;

  Now you’s back

  Whah you belong,

  Git way inside us,

  Keep us strong…

  O Ma Rainey,

  Li’l an’ low;

  Sing us ‘bout de hard luck

  Roun’ our do’;

  Sing us ‘bout de lonesome road

  We mus’ go…

  IV

  I talked to a fellow, an’ the fellow say,

  “She jes’ catch hold of us, somekindaway.

  She sang Backwater Blues one day:

  ‘It rained fo’ days an’ de skies was dark as night,

  Trouble taken place in de lowlands at night.

  ‘Thundered an’ lightened an’ the storm begin to roll

  Thousan’s of people ain’t got no place to go.

  ‘Den I went an’ stood upon some high ol’ lonesome hill,

  An’ looked down on the place where I used to live.’

  An’ den de folks, dey natchally bowed dey heads an’ cried,

  Bowed dey heavy heads, shet dey moufs up tight an’ cried,

  An’ Ma lef’ de stage, an’ followed some de folks outside.”

  Dere wasn’t much more de fellow say: She jes’ gits hold of us dataway.

  Although some observers depicted Smith as a loud, lewd singer, accounts in the black press from the 1920s tell a different tale. The Afro-American, in an interview with Smith dated March 27, 1926, wrote that “Miss Smith says her greatest ambition now is to carry her marvellous voice into the small towns and villages so that young people of our race may be inspired to use their talent and develop themselves.” The article goes on to describe her fashion style: “Miss Smith might best be described as buxom. Her clothes are made and fitted well, and together with her smooth brown skin, which is not rouged, she presents a very attractive appearance.” In a review of her show at the Royal Theatre from the same issue, the critic writes, “It is impossible to describe or imitate the eerie moaning quality of Miss Smith’s ‘blues’ voice.” The review goes on to note: “Indeed, the whole show is clean and ought not offend so many folks as its predecessors have.” Smith was the Empress of the Blues, but she didn’t have to work blue.

  But a mere decade later, tastes had changed. The Empire State Building had opened, and Al Capone had been closed down; talking pictures were all the rage, and Joe Louis was the new heavyweight champ. Prohibition had been tried and repealed; the Nazis were on the march across Europe, and a second world war was brewing. In music, the blues was waning, and swing was swinging.

  By the late 1930s, newer, younger jazz stars were replacing the aging blues queens. On October 23, 1937, less than a month after Bessie Smith’s death, the Afro-American ran an interview with the next rising singing star, Billie Holiday, dutifully noting that the young vocalist did her own hair, her own nails, and wore “a black satin underslip trimmed with rhinestones at the neck.” Another article in the same issue reported that Holiday’s success was considerable given her age: “To do this at twenty-one is no small feat, but Billie Holiday is intelligent, she has a splendid disposition, she’s unaffected, and it’s a ten-to-one bet that there are even bigger things in store for Billie Holiday.” The press had a new darling; she could sing as well as Bessie, and people cared about her undergarments.

  Still, when Smith died, the black press and the music press turned their attention back to the Empress. The rumors about her death—about racism and refusal of care, of shadowy doings down South, and a blues diva left bleeding by the side of Highway 61—started with an article that the h
ighly respected music journalist and producer John Hammond published in Down Beat in November 1937. Wrote Hammond, “A particularly disagreeable story as to the details of her death has just been received from members of Chick Webb’s orchestra, who were in Memphis soon after the disaster… When finally [Bessie] did arrive at the hospital, she was refused treatment because of her color and bled to death while waiting for attention.”

  That’s the part of Down Beat’s coverage of Bessie’s death that tends to get replayed. But Hammond, in that same article, actually went on to say, “Realizing that such tales can be magnified greatly in the telling, I would like to get confirmation from some Memphis citizens who were on the spot at the time. If the story is true it is but another example of disgraceful conditions in a certain section of our country…” In December 1937, Down Beat ran a front-page followup, stating, “Bessie Smith did not bleed to death from lack of medical attention.”

  The generally agreed-upon facts of the Bessie Smith accident are these: While being driven by Morgan, Smith’s car ran into a large truck whose driver had apparently pulled off Highway 61 to check his tires and had just started to pull back on. A white surgeon, Dr. Hugh Smith, traveling along that same road with a man named Henry Broughton (the two were on a fishing trip), came upon the wreck of Bessie’s car; Morgan waved them down. It was approximately 2 a.m.

  Dr. Smith gave the following account to the Clarksdale Press Register on September 26, 1957, the twentieth anniversary of the crash: “My associate and I jumped out of the car, and I examined the colored woman in the light of my headlights. Her left arm, at the elbow, had been torn completely loose at the joint … in essence, a traumatic amputation, except that the main artery was still intact. She was bleeding profusely. A tourniquet was applied. Obviously, this woman had severe internal injuries to her chest or abdomen but she was conscious.”

  After Dr. Smith and his companion got out to help, another car, carrying a white man and a white woman, crashed into Dr. Smith’s car. Dr. Smith told the Clarksdale Press Register in an interview published on October 3, 1957: “Now we had three patients on our hands, all lying on the grass beside three wrecked automobiles. At approximately this time, traffic began to pile up a bit, but simultaneous with this, the ambulances began to appear, and all three injured people were promptly dispatched to Clarksdale in two different ambulances.”

  Albertson, in Bessie, suggests that the stories about the white hospital turning away Bessie Smith are probably false, largely based on what Dr. Smith told him. He quotes Dr. Smith as saying, “The Bessie Smith ambulance would not have gone to a white hospital, you can forget that. Down in the Deep South cotton country, no colored ambulance driver, or white driver, would even have thought of putting a colored person off in a hospital for white folks. In Clarksdale, in 1937, a town of twelve to fifteen thousand people, there were two hospitals—one white and one colored—and they weren’t half a mile apart. I suspect the driver drove just as straight as he could to the colored hospital.” In fact, according to the October 2, 1937, Defender and other news reports from the period, Bessie Smith was taken to the G.T. Thomas Afro-American Hospital; the hospital closed in 1940 and was re-opened a few years later as the Riverside Hotel. Frank Ratliff, the hotel’s owner, says his establishment has a Bessie Smith Room on the first floor to memorialize and pay tribute to the singer, but no documents relating to her time in the hospital have been kept, if any were ever there.

  According to Frank Bolden, who was starting his career as a journalist for the Pittsburgh Courier in the late thirties and is now considered an expert on the subject of the black press, black newspapers routinely covered stories of black patients being turned away by white hospitals during that period and for years afterward. The book Patterns of Negro Segregation, by Charles Spurgeon Johnson, also says that in rural and small towns at the time, blacks were systematically banned from white hospitals, as well as from white libraries, swimming pools, and drinking fountains. Charles Tisdale, the longtime publisher of the Jackson Advocate, a black newspaper based in Jackson, Mississippi, said in a February 2003 interview that “in Clarksdale in the 1930s, they didn’t let black people in the hospitals at all.”

  Dr. Smith’s account also seems to suggest that at least one potential Good Samaritan passed on a chance to come to Bessie’s aid. Dr. Smith told the Clarksdale Press Register on September 26, 1957, that the truck that had pulled over and set off the chain accident drove away without helping the wounded singer. Dr. Smith said, “The truck driver had informed the injured people that he was carrying U.S. mail and was also carrying the Sunday morning Commercial and had a time schedule and had to go on, but he told the colored man that he would go on into Clarksdale and send an ambulance back to pick them up. He had departed the scene for two or three minutes when we arrived.” Was race a factor in the trucker leaving the accident scene and going about his business? If that driver had seen a white woman lying by the side of the road, her left arm nearly ripped off, would he have carried her for help? Would a load of Sunday newspapers and the U.S. mail have been more important than a white female victim? And might Bessie Smith have lived had the truck driver taken her for help immediately instead of speeding off to complete his mail run?

  Jack Gee Jr., the adopted son of Bessie Smith and her estranged husband, Jack Gee, charged in the Baltimore Afro-American in 1938 that he had heard that Dr. Smith told a spectator at the scene that the reason he didn’t transport Bessie Smith in his own car (a brand-new Chevrolet) is that he didn’t want his car to get “too bloody.” The younger Gee tells this story about the moment transportation finally arrived: “About this time Morgan came back with the ambulance. As the men were about to take the stretcher out to take my mother, somebody in the crowd said, ‘Wait, let’s see what’s the matter with this white woman first.’ The doctor then administered first aid to the white woman, and then put her in the ambulance and sent her back to town. Morgan protested but could do nothing.”

  Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues

  Jack Gee Jr., in the article, supported the story that his mother was denied medical care: “We have never found out accurately yet how my mother was taken back to town, but we do know that she was taken first to a white hospital, which refused to administer first aid or take her in. She was then taken to the Afro-American hospital, a colored institution. This hospital didn’t have the proper equipment with which to operate. Physicians had to run all over town to get the proper equipment.”

  The younger Gee went on: “It was about 11:30 a.m. before they administered ether to her. She died at 11:45 a.m. No reason was given as to why she died, but we know clearly that she died from loss of blood and neglect. I believe that if the ambulance had taken my mother back to town, as it was proper for the doctor to have instructed the driver, since the ambulance was sent for her case, she might be alive today.”

  Certain aspects of Jack Gee Jr.’s story are contradicted by other witnesses. The ambulance driver who transported Bessie was located by the Clarksdale Press Register twenty years later, in 1957. The man, Willie George Miller, worked for the L.P. Gibson Funeral Home in Clarksdale. (According to Robert Birdsong, a local historian and tour guide in Clarksdale, black accident victims at the time weren’t allowed in ambulances and were instead driven in hearses sent by black funeral homes.) Miller said his memory of the event was “hazy” but believed that Smith “passed” while en route to the black hospital and that she wasn’t taken to a white hospital.

  Another player in the night’s events also contradicts the younger Gee’s take on the accident. Dr. W.H. Brandon, the man who signed Bessie Smith’s death certificate, told John Lomax in 1941 that the charge that Smith was refused treatment was an “absolute untruth.” Brandon also made a charge of his own, claiming that the man who was driving her “was apparently very drunk.” But Dr. Smith, who was on the scene, told reporters that the driver of the Bessie Smith car appeared to be sober.

  Dr. Smith died in 1989, but his widow, Mimi Smith,
told me in early 2003 that her late husband believed that Bessie Smith’s injuries would have been fatal no matter what kind of care she had received or how quickly it had been administered. Said Mimi Smith, “The one thing he wanted people to understand is that if the accident had happened outside of the city hospital, she wouldn’t have survived. Her injuries were that great.” But at least one news report from the time of the accident seems to contradict the claim that Bessie was beyond help. The October 2, 1937, Chicago Defender reported that “even in her last minutes Miss Smith maintained that real trouper spirit. She made a valiant fight against death and smilingly told friends at the bedside that she was certain she would be able to make the evening performance of the Winsted Broadway Rastus minstrels show in Memphis.”

  If the Chicago Defender anecdote is true, or partially true (it does sound apocryphal that a woman whose arm is half-missing would talk about going through with a gig), if Bessie did have some life left in her after the accident, that would lend more weight to the argument that the assistance she didn’t get (perhaps because of her race) but that she should have gotten—help from the truck that sparked the accident, a ride from Dr. Smith, even if it meant bloodying his Chevrolet (though, in fairness, the doctor’s vehicle was probably totaled before he could use it), or help from the white ambulance that may have arrived on the scene first, or care from the white hospital to which she may have never been taken but that was probably better equipped than the black hospital she was eventually brought to—all of those might-have-beens and should-have-beens could have saved her life.