Miss Bessie's Blues

The first time John Hammond heard Bessie Smith sing was in October 1927 at the Alhambra Theater in Harlem. He was 16, and, at his parents' insistence he went to the 6 o'clock show and got home early. "Bessie didn't mess with the mike," Hammond recalls. "She was just up there belting. She had come up before the days of the microphone, and so she had developed a pair of pipes you couldn't believe. Billie Holiday and Mildred Bailey--the ones that came after her--all had small voices. You couldn't hear them without a mike. But Bessie had power."

Bessie had a lot more than power, as Hammond soon realized. Subtlety, intuition, presence, drama, compassion--all those and more made her the greatest female blues singer who ever lived. Six years later, on Nov. 24, 1933, when Bessie's star --and fortune--had all but vanished, Hammond, who began working for Columbia Records after two years at Yale, produced what turned out to be her final recording session. It was no easy matter: the Depression had left Columbia virtually bankrupt. All the money that Hammond could raise for the session was $150 for Bessie ($37.50 for each of the four sides she cut), and $150 split among such sidemen as Benny Goodman, Jack Teagarden and Chu Berry. Still, the session meant a lot to Bessie, and she showed it by the way she tore into Down in the Dumps:

I'm always like a tiger,

I'm ready to jump,

I need a whole lot of lovin'

'Cause I'm down in the dumps.

Now Hammond is embarked on an even bigger rescue mission --the reissue of every one of Bessie's 160 records. Columbia, somewhat wealthier these days, is releasing them in a series of five two-LP albums, each containing 32 songs, each priced at an attractive $5.98. The first album, containing Bessie's first acoustic recordings (1923) and her last electrics (1930-33), has been out five weeks and has already sold more than 35,000 copies. That is an unprecedented feat in the history of reissues, and a surprise to everyone but Hammond. An executive producer with Columbia and the discoverer of such diverse talents as Billie Holiday, Count Basie and Bob Dylan, Hammond has a knack for making the unexpected pay off. Actually, Project Bessie Smith is timed perfectly. Blues dominate the pop music scene today in much the same way that jazz did in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

When Bessie Smith sang the blues, every misery, lust and hostility that had ever racked her fleshy 5-ft. 9-in., 200-lb. frame came out in the music. Her sense of pitch was phenomenal. She could hit a note right in the middle when she wanted to, but she could also shade a vowel with any one of a thousand different flat slurs that seemed always at her disposal. Her message came out with a clear diction few lieder singers could match. She shaped a song as though its architecture were sonata form, not repetitious twelve-bar patterns.

The sound of trouble that always hovered in her voice undoubtedly had its origins in her drastically abridged childhood. Born into poverty in Chattanooga, Tenn., before the turn of the century (1898 is the probable year, although there are no records), Bessie lost her father when she was an infant, her mother when she was nine. At age eleven, she joined the touring Rabbit Foot Minstrels, where Gertrude ("Ma") Rainey --the primogenitress of all female blues singers--began to school her greatest offspring.

Bessie's first record, Down Hearted Blues, sold 800,000 copies (at 75-L- each) in 1923. It was Columbia's first pop hit and inspired the company to start its Race Series, aimed at the black market. Billed as the Empress of the Blues, Bessie soon had a $20,000-a-year in come from Columbia and was pulling down from $1,500 to $2,500 a week on the black concert circuit in the north east and south.

The Crash. By the time of the Depression, Bessie's drinking was as legendary as her singing. In 1932, "Miss Bessie" was convinced the blues were finished, and at the time, she was right. Most blacks were turning toward more sophisticated, white-oriented musical values. It was not long before Bessie was touring in the South, for maybe $140 a week. One night in September 1937, on a highway outside Clarksdale, Miss., she was injured fatally in an automobile accident. Nobody knows exactly what happened after the crash. For years the legend was that Bessie was turned away at the door of a "whites-only" hospital. That version has been largely disproved now, although she probably had to wait for a "blacks-only" ambulance. Whether she could have survived her injuries is impossible to say; the doctor who treated her at the scene doubts it.

For Hammond, and countless other listeners as well, Bessie Smith "was the greatest artist American jazz ever produced." By applying the word jazz to a blues artist, he was referring to her wondrous capability for improvisation -- to the fact that she wrote many of her own songs, and never sang one the same way twice. By necessity, Volume I of the new reissue series does not document Bessie's different ways with single songs, but it does document just about everything else, including the bawdiness that was an inescapable facet of the blues scene in the 1920s and 1930s. Sample, from Need a Little Sug ar in My Bowl:

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.

By next spring Columbia will have issued four more of Miss Bessie's double albums. In its scope, the project is the most ambitious reissue job ever at tempted. Further, the LP transfers engineered by Hammond and his associates (notably Blues Expert Chris Albertson) are gems of sound restoration. Not only have the clicks, pops and other surface noises from the shellac originals been eliminated -- a routine procedure now -- but more important, the original sound has been given new luster and immediacy without the usual resort to artificial echo or phony stereo. "Bessie never got the acclaim she deserved," says Hammond. Not until now, when Bessie seems a cinch to get much more -- that whole lot of lovin' she always hungered for.

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