Bessie's Blues

The hangings parted and a great brown woman emerged--she was the size of Fay Templeton in her Weber & Fields days, and she was even garbed similarly, in a rose satin dress, spangled with sequins, which swept away from her trim ankles. Her face was beautiful, with the rich, ripe beauty of southern darkness, a, deep bronze brown, like her bare arms. . . . She began her strange rites in a 'voice full of shoutin' and moanin' and prayin' and sufferin', a wild, rough Ethiopian voice, harsh and volcanic, released between rouged lips and the whitest of teeth, the singer swaying slightly to the rhythm.

Thus, in Vanity Fair in 1926 wrote Carl Van Vechten, pioneer literary drumbeater for U. S. Negroes. Author Van Vechten had just been to a vaudeville house in Newark, N. J. to hear the greatest of Negro blues singers, Bessie Smith. Vanity Fair added an innocent editorial note to his article: "Soon, doubtless, the homely Negro songs of love-sickness known as the Blues, will be better known and appreciated by white audiences." Actually, of course, Bessie Smith was old and revered stuff to many a U. S. jazz lover. But in 1926 she was at the height of her career, making nearly $2,000 a week. Last September, still trouping but almost forgotten by the U. S. public, which has in the past three years taken to hot music with an intensity surpassing even the mania of the late 1920's, Bessie Smith died after a motor accident in Clarksdale, Miss. Last week Columbia Phonograph Co. issued a Bessie Smith Album, containing re-pressings of six of the 80-odd records she made between 1922 and 1929.

Big (200-lb.) Bessie Smith was born some 41 years ago in Chattanooga, Tenn. At 12, as a protegee of "Ma" Rainey, pioneer blues singer, she was moaning in tent shows like the Rabbit-Foot Minstrels. With a big, vibrant voice which survived even her last hard-drinking days, she sang blues songs long before the War brought the blues (and jazz) north, lived to see strict blues singing yield popularity to the sophisticated torch singing typified by the art of Ethel Waters. But Bessie Smith left her mark on jazz. Hot instrumentalists like Benny Goodman and the late "Bix" Beiderbecke, listening to her in Chicago night clubs, never forgot the mood and timing of her songs, or the way she taught her accompanists to perform.

Columbia's Bessie Smith selections, from the numerous discs it cautiously labeled "race records" and ceased issuing about 1929, include: St. Louis Blues, simple and powerful, and Reckless Blues, accompanied by Louis Armstrong on the cornet and Fred Longshaw on a portable organ. Fletcher Henderson, who played the piano for her Weeping Willow Blues, with Joe Smith on the cornet, calls this the greatest blues record ever made. Careless Love is W. C. Handy's arrangement of what is almost a U. S. folk song. Trombone Cholly, with the late Trombonist Charlie Green playing among Bessie Smith's "Blue Boys," is a classic for all connoisseurs of the "sliphorn." For Backwater Blues, James P. Johnson, teacher of "Fats" Waller, furnishes an able piano accompaniment. Only three of the twelve sides in the Bessie Smith Album are devoted to Broadway songs: Muddy Water, Alexander's Ragtime Band, There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.

"A permanent monument to swing" is RCA Victor's phrase for its latest jazz album, A Symposium of Swing. Its four twelve-inch discs contain selections by four swing bands: Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, "Fats" Waller, Bunny Berigan. Familiar to fans who have listened to the four in their native haunts, on the air or on records, the selections are characteristic but, to experts, not the top choices. Best disc: Benny Goodman's Sing, Sing, Sing, a free fantasia in swing, based on the tune Christopher Columbus, with Drummer Gene Krupa battering out an expert tympanic melody.

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