Bessie Smith

Bessie Smith (April 15, 1894 – September 26 1937) in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA was the most popular and successful blues singer of 1920s and 30s, and a huge influence on the singers who followed her.

Rumours surrounding her death

Shortly after her death, Hammond stirred up controversy by suggesting, in a Down Beat article, that Smith was refused admittance to a white hospital and that she died as a consequence thereof. It was an unsubstantiated rumour that lingered for decades, fuelled by Edward Albee's 1959 play The Death of Bessie Smith. Although made aware of the facts, and shown the evidence, Hammond never recanted his story. It was only when biographer Chris Albertson's 1972 book Bessie featured an interview with the attending doctor, Hugh Smith, that the story was put to rest. Surprisingly, given the eminence of the author, the story was repeated as fact in Alan Lomax's 1993 book The Land Where the Blues Began. Lomax's perpetuation of the myth is all the more inexplicable when one considers a letter received by his father, John Lomax, in October, 1941. In the letter, Dr. W. H. Brandon, who attended to Smith, wrote, in part: Bessie Smith was injured in an automobile accident several miles out from Clarksdale and was brought to Clarksdale in a colored ambulance....She died some eight or ten hours after admission to the hospital. We gave her every medical attention, but we were never able to rally her back from the shock.

Related Topics:
Down Beat - Edward Albee - 1959 - Biographer - Chris Albertson - 1972 - Alan Lomax - 1993 - 1941

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:"They had heard about what happened to Bessie Smith in 1937 in their hometown," Lomax wrote. "Wounded in a local car wreck, the great blues singer was refused admission to three Clarksdale hospitals because she was black. In the end she bled to death without medical attention, while her friends pled with the hospital authorities to admit her. And this incident was typical of the Deep South."

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While Lomax claimed that this alleged incident was "typical" of racism in the South, the doctor who tended to Smith on the scene (quoted in Chris Albertson's book) confirmed that it was extremely unlikely that a black ambulance driver would have taken a black patient to a white hospital, especially when there was a nearby black hospital. The driver in question told writer George Hoefer, twenty years later, that he had taken Smith straight to Clarksdale's black hospital, which has been confirmed, but he also maintained that she had died en route, rather than bleeding slowly to death on a stretcher while waiting to be admitted. As we see, that part of his story was incorrect. Smith was in fact still alive when she was brought to the hospital, in the middle of the night, but she never regained consciousness, and died that morning at 11:50.

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