The Makar of Scotland, their poet laureate, from 2016 to 2021, Jackie Kay discusses growing up Black and adopted in an all-white section of Glasgow. Her imaginary family included Bessie Smith. She ...

"Bessie" (8 p.m. Saturday, HBO) has a lot of history to live up to. Perhaps too much. This film biography of blues legend Bessie Smith (Queen Latifah), directed by Dee Rees and based on a story by ...

Miche Braden knows of what she sings. Or, at the very least, she’s able to summon at will the rebel spirit of the entertainer she so heartily embodies — Bessie Smith — in “The Devil’s Music: The Life ...

Bessie Smith was an American blues singer widely renowned during the Jazz Age. Nicknamed the "Empress of the Blues", she was the most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s. She is often ...

HBO’s biopic of blues singer Bessie Smith was an over 20-years-in-the-making project. It wasn’t until Pariah writer-director Dee Rees reworked the Bessie script and eventually landed the helming gig ...

Early on in “Bessie,” a new HBO biopic premiering Saturday and starring Queen Latifah as the singer Bessie Smith, Smith’s about-to-be mentor, Ma Rainey (played by Mo’Nique), offers a musicological ...

Chris Albertson, who as a teenager in Denmark became captivated by the blues singer Bessie Smith and decades later produced a widely praised multivolume reissue of her recordings and wrote an equally ...