In 1929, Bessie Smith made her only film appearance, starring in a one-reeler based on W. C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues". In the film, directed by Dudley Murphy and shot in Astoria, NY, she sings the title song accompanied by members of Fletcher Henderson's orchestra, the Hall Johnson Choir, pianist James P. Johnson, and a string section.
Bessie Smith was the most popular and successful female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s, and a strong influence on subsequent generations, including Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Janis Joplin.
According to 1900 census, Bessie Smith was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States in July, 1892.
In 1923, when sales figures for an Okeh recording by singer Mamie Smith (no relation) opened up a new market and had talent scouts looking for blues artists, Bessie Smith was signed by Columbia Records to initiate the company's new "race records" series.
Scoring a big hit with her first release, a coupling of "Gulf Coast Blues" and "Down Hearted Blues," which its composer Alberta Hunter already had turned into a hit on the Paramount label, Bessie's career blossomed. She became a headliner on the black Theater Owners Booking Association (T.O.B.A.) theater circuit and was its top entertainer in the 1920s. Working a heavy theater schedule during the winter months and doing tent tours the rest of the year (eventually traveling in her own railroad car), Smith became the highest-paid black entertainer of her day. Columbia nicknamed her "Queen of the Blues", but a PR-minded press soon elevated to "Empress".
She would make some 160 recordings for Columbia, often accompanied by the finest musicians of the day, most notably Louis Armstrong, James P. Johnson, Joe Smith, Charlie Green, and Fletcher Henderson.
On September 26, 1937, Smith was severely injured in a car accident while traveling along U.S. Route 61 between Memphis and Clarksdale, Mississippi with her lover, Richard Morgan, at the wheel. She was taken to Clarksdale's black Afro-American Hospital where her right arm was amputated. She did not regain consciousness, dying that morning.
The Afro-American Hospital, now the Riverside Hotel in Clarksdale, was the site of the dedication of the fourth historic marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail.
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