Bessie Smith: Empty Bed Blues (ASV Living Era) : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

She sang of pain and of torment as truly as anyone ever did. There was little humor in her songs as there was little humor in her life. But there was plenty of hurt in both.

She was flamboyant. She had the power and she was as self-destructive as any artist who ever faced the anonymity of the mechanized medium. "If blues was whisky, babe, I would be drunk all the time," one of her poetic children sang. And she was. Most of it.

You can say all of those things about Bessie Smith but it doesn't give you even a glimpse of the incredible concentration of emotion which wells up through all of her songs. Her music swells from below, from something deeper and perhaps even apart from the possibilities of the song itself. It doesn't make very much difference, once you have tuned your ears in to her frequency, whether or not she is singing a good song or a banal one nor whether or not the track on the album ends up being one of her more effective performances. Bessie Smith, like any artist, was never limited to one level at a time. Nor was she ever obvious.

Connee Boswell, who was a member of the Boswell Sisters, a vocal group which in the Thirties had great success, said it very plainly about Bessie Smith: "I listened for the sound, not the lyrics." And Billie Holiday, whose own vocal style was essential to American popular music of the Forties and Fifties, said that she too got her inspiration from Bessie's sound.

She was erratic. Art is never consistent and sometimes she would sing a song or make a record that she couldn't dig into with the same quality of fervor as she could others. But beneath the mere performance of even lesser songs, going down from that level to another one which is almost mystical, Bessie Smith always, in everything she ever recorded, communicated that timeless feeling of frustration and of torment that has marked the role of women in this world.

"If he can stand to leave me/ I can stand to see him go."

What a line! But Bessie's music was full of lines like that, with their echoes of almost medieval language cadence and expression of the endless seasons of the earth. By and large, the Bessie Smith records are folk songs, but that is not what makes them important. Their value lies in the fact that they can effect change and make impression upon artistic talents and thus carry an impact for the future in more ways than merely by their own direction. James Baldwin, John O'Hara, Carl van Vechten. Those are merely a few of the names of artists who were not musicians who were affected by what she did. The list in music is all but endless and it rings right down through the years from Louis Armstrong to Randy Newman whose songs and sound today could not be what they are were it not for Billie Holiday and Billie's sound could not have existed without Bessie.

When she was at her prime, Bessie's audience was almost totally black., Her records found their way into shacks and boarding houses in urban ghettos throughout the US. She made the circuit of shows and clubs and theaters long before Lou Rawls tabbed it "the chitlin' circuit." She came from there and she sang of the people in those audiences, giving back to them–at her best–stories of their own lives.

It was no accident that Janis Joplin paid her homage in the final months before she died, herself a victim of the ancient women's role in art. Janis knew where she came from even if her audience did not.

Bessie Smith's voice was deep and heavy. She sang with a rhythmic pulse that pre-dated the gospel triplets and 6/8 time and she didn't snap and twitch with accents as do the singers who came after her. But her era was a slower one and she is closer to Robert Johnson and Blind Willie than to Muddy or their urban descendents. Closer in pulse, that is; they are all the same family, she is but the older sister with slightly different ways.

Recording in the professional studios of the time, Bessie Smith took with her some of the trappings of vaudeville, of the T.O.B.A. (Tough on Black Asses) circuit. She sang with a piano and horns rather than with guitar. And the voices of the horns, especially the trumpet, ritualistically played an obbligato to what she sang. When the horn player was Louis Armstrong, the result was not only different but qualitatively better than when it was Joe Smith or any of the others who accompanied her. But the essential elements never changed. Not even when she went out of her way to try, when her career was collapsing, to adjust to what she was persuaded was a changing time.

When Bessie Smith was recording, no records were available to the general public in anything like the quantities they are today. Records were sold only in special music stores. There were only a handful of labels. The retail dealers were franchised, which meant you never found two outlets selling the same labels in the same neighborhood. And if the artist was black and the music classified as "race records" (which was the jim crow bag Bessie was placed in) then the records were not available at all in the white sections, at the big department store record counters or anywhere at all outside the ghetto. Despite that, she was a hit artist. Despite that, her music–like Louis Armstrong's music–made a deep and lasting impression upon the world. That alone to some degree measures its strength.

Today, in a project that has the same kind of artistic value as does the reprinting of the complete novels of Faulkner, Columbia is making available the full list of 160 performances by Bessie Smith which are archives. Her work began in the early days of the phonograph record before electric recording devices and Columbia has arranged them in an order which begins at each end of her career and comes back to the middle. There are to be five two-LP sets in all; three have already been issued and with the first (or by sending a post card to P.O. Box 5258, Terre Haute, Indiana 47805) you get a biography (free) of Bessie Smith which includes almost every known detail of her life.

Time is the best critic of all and the Bessie Smith records have stood that test superbly. It does not make much difference at which point one enters the music she created. Many of her white devotees from the Thirties began their acquaintance with her by way of "Empty Bed Blues", a remarkable performance on two levels, at least. It was cut at the end of the Twenties and it sold for years and was especially popular with the underground audience of the Eastern colleges at that time because, in a world in which sex was never referred to openly ("It," they called it–Clara Bow had "It"), Bessie Smith's record let it all out.

The success of this disc (and of some of her others with the same audience) has led some critics to think of her as a black woman singing suggestive songs (whatever they are) for a white audience. But it is open to question whether or not that audience, of which we now know through the works of O'Hara and others, ever made itself known to the artist at all. She did know she had wide acceptance among jazz musicians of all colors. They showed up wherever she sang and Bix Beider-becke's legendary gesture of throwing a week's salary on the floor of a Chicago speakeasy to hear her sing one number is true even if it never happened.

The way to listen to Bessie Smith is to get any of the Columbia packages (all of them eventually, of course) and just let the music play. It will take a bit of adjustment for some because of the ancient recording technique, (although they have done wonders with the remastering). But ears which can accept the rural blues singers of that same period can accept Bessie Smith with a little patience. Once accustomed to both her sound and the recording, her records–all of them–bear repeated listening as more and more comes from them with familiarity.

One of the levels on which her records surprise on initial listening is the encounter with dozens of phrases from the blues rhetoric which are now current. It will take scholars generations, one supposes, to establish who sang them first, if that is important. What I think is important is that once you hear Bessie Smith sing them, they are hers.

Colin MacInnes once wrote that Billie Holiday's music took on everybody's sorrow for them. Bessie Smith does that too. Entering into her world through these records is a way to ease the pain. Knowledge of them is not essential to existence, nor to creativity. But knowledge of them can enhance both and we are all in Columbia's debt for making them available once again. And specifically we are all indebted to John Hammond Sr., who made Bessie's last records as well as Bob Dylan's first, for pushing this project through.