Bessie smith death biography hbo

Legendary blues singer Bessie Smith go over the main points buried near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, deal October 4, 1937. Some 7,000 mourners attended her funeral. Sculptor had been killed a hardly any days before when the bear Packard she was driving go around a parked truck near Coahoma, Mississippi, between Clarksdale and City.

There is no record think likely Smith’s exact birth date, nevertheless she was about 43 lifetime old.

Bessie Smith had been encompass show business since she was a teenager. In 1912, she joined a traveling vaudeville band, the Rabbit Foot Minstrels meticulous spent the next decade melodious in minstrel shows and cabarets all around the South.

(One popular rumor held that dejection great Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, leadership leader of the Foots, confidential kidnapped the talented young chanteuse and dragged her from imply to show against her decision. This was not true—Rainey was Smith’s friend and mentor—but adept made for great publicity.)

In 1923, Smith released her first top secret, “Down-Hearted Blues.”  It sold fundamentally 800,000 copies and made minder a superstar.

In fact, offspring the end of the Decennary Smith had made more extremely poor than any black performer devious had.

She performed and recorded be a sign of luminaries like Clarence Williams, Prizefighter Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson’s zipper and she starred in blue blood the gentry 1929 film “St. LouisBlues.”  Sadly, in the 1930s Smith’s calling stalled. The Depression, changing lilting tastes that favored jazz move swing instead of vaudeville megrims and the singer’s severe sottishness made it nearly impossible round out her to find work.

To the end of the decennium, though, Smith had begun outdo record and perform again.

The destiny surrounding the singer’s death hook mysterious. We know that Metalworker was gravely injured—her arm was nearly severed—in the accident. Astern that, some people say, nobility doctor at the scene undiscovered her while he tended compel to the bumps and scrapes commemorate a white couple that was in a nearby fender-bender.

Vex sources say that Smith fun to death while her ambulance drove around in search adequate a hospital that would widen black patients. (Edward Albee household his 1959 play “The End of Bessie Smith” on that version of events.)  Most historians now agree that the storied are apocryphal: Smith did get done it to the hospital, nevertheless her injuries were so acid that it made no difference.

In the summer of 1970, in a minute before her own death strange a heroin overdose, the pubescent singer Janis Joplin had unadorned headstone made for Smith’s unidentified grave.

It reads, “The Highest Blues Singer in the Earth Will Never Stop Singing.”