Bessie by Chris Albertson (All Editions)

Bessie by Chris Albertson is a biography of Bessie Smith, the blues singer known as the Empress of the Blues, who was the highest-paid African-American performer of the 1920s. Drawing on extensive interviews with Smith’s relatives, friends, and associates — including Ruby Walker Smith, a niece by marriage who toured with her for over a decade — Albertson writes candidly about both her career and her personal life. The book was first published in 1971 and has appeared in several editions, including a substantially revised and expanded version published by Yale University Press in 2005 that added new interview material, further detail on Smith’s early years, and a chapter covering responses to the original publication.

Genre: Autobiography/Biography; Grier Rated; Music

Subjects: African American women singers – Biography; Biography & Autobiography; Blues (Music); Singers – Biography – United States

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Comments

Bessie is widely regarded as the definitive biography of Bessie Smith and a landmark in blues scholarship. Albertson’s access to Ruby Walker Smith gave him material that no other biographer had, and his willingness to address Smith’s bisexuality — her relationships with women as well as men — was genuinely unusual for a mainstream music biography of the early 1970s. That candour is the primary reason for the book’s inclusion in the Grier checklist, and it remains the most substantive published account of that aspect of Smith’s life.

The 2005 Yale University Press edition is the most complete version of the biography and the one most likely to be useful to contemporary readers. It corrects errors in earlier editions, incorporates decades of additional research, and contextualises the book’s original reception. The earlier Stein and Day editions (hardcover 1972, trade paperback 1982) and the Abacus/Sphere trade paperback (1975) represent the book’s commercial life before the Yale revision and are of interest primarily to collectors tracking the biography’s publishing history.

For lesbian readers specifically, Bessie is significant as one of the earliest major-press biographies to treat a Black female subject’s same-sex relationships with seriousness rather than evasion or sensationalism. Bessie Smith’s place in African-American cultural history is unassailable, and Albertson’s biography remains the foundation for any serious engagement with her life.

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Publication History