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Known as the "Empress of the Blues,"
Bessie Smith, b. Chatanooga, Tenn., Apr. 15, 1894, d. Sept.
26, 1937, was the most successful female blues singer of the
1920s. She began her career as a singer in honky-tonks and
tent shows, but in 1923 went to New York for her first recording
session. She was an immediate sensation, and during the succeeding
decade she recorded and toured extensively. She was hearty,
forthright, and totally uninhibited in her performance as
well as in her life. Because of her impeccable rhythmic sense
and her ability to improvise around the structural confines
of the blues, Gunther Schuller, in his book Early Jazz, calls
her the first important jazz singer. The circumstances of
her death, in an automobile accident in Mississippi, were
the subject of a play by Edward Albee (The Death of Bessie
Smith, 1960).
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