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She was born on April 15, 1894 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States, of poor Negro parents, William and Laura Smith. By the time Bessie was nine, her mother and a brother had also died. Her older sister Viola took charge of caring for her siblings. She herself remembered little of her early life.
As a child, according to a newspaper interview in 1936, she appeared in school plays .
She made her first professional appearance at the age of nine in the Ivory Theatre, Chattanooga. She toured the South and Midwest during the early 1920's in carnivals and tent shows such as those of Charles P. Bailey and Pete Werley's Cotton Blossoms.
Her real popularity began in 1923 when she made her first phonograph record: "Gulf Coast Blues" and "Down Hearted Blues" (Columbia 3844). It was a sensational success, and between 1924 and 1927 she made over eighty others which sold some six million copies in the Negro market. During these peak years she commanded a salary of $2, 000 a week and toured the Negro vaudeville circuit known as the T. O. B. A. (Theatre Owners and Bookers Association) as its star attraction.
Bessie Smith sang about the facts of Negro life in the deep South with a wry, salty humor that laughed to keep from crying. By 1929 Bessie Smith's voice and sales of her records were slipping - the former the result of heavy drinking, the latter as part of the general collapse of the phonograph industry under the impact of radio and the depression. By 1930 she had broken her agreement with the manager, Frank Walker, who had helped her to success. Soon afterwards she ceased recording.
Shortly before she was to return to New York for a new recording session, however, Bessie Smith was fatally injured in an automobile accident near Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Bessie Smith was the most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s, was a major influence on other jazz singers. She made 160 recordings for Columbia, often accompanied by the finest musicians of the day, notably Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Fletcher Henderson. Smith made her only film appearance, starring in a two-reeler, St. Louis Blues. The U. S. Postal Service issued a 29-cent commemorative postage stamp honoring Smith in 1994. Three recordings by Smith were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Her "Downhearted Blues" was included in the list of Songs of the Century by the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts in 2001.
A large, handsome woman, Bessie Smith made great and enduring use of blue tonality in her singing; that is, she approached the third and seventh notes in the scale with a wide and controlled variety of slurs, scoops, slides, and glisses, which gave her voice a moaning, shouting, and praying quality. Her singing had a full-blown authority, a casual but enormous strength, and a heart-breaking earthiness which fully justified her billing as "the Empress of the Blues. "
On June 7, 1923, she married John Gee, a policeman. By 1930 she was separated from her husband. Smith later entered a common-law marriage with an old friend, Richard Morgan, who was Lionel Hampton's uncle. She stayed with him until her death.
