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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

It may already be almost a hundred years since she made her most significant recordings – she is from an era before amplification – and yet her unfailing capacity to hold the listener’s attention, to ...

Smith was barnstorming the South, performing her act under a canvas tent for Black audiences or in segregated theaters. One sweltering night in July, it took her to the heart of Concord’s Black ...

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 ...

The most popular female recording artist of the 1920s, singer Bessie Smith was nicknamed “Empress of the Blues” for good reason. Smith’s soulful contralto renditions of standards and her original ...