Therese:

That’s Bessie Smith Singing her famous version of St. Louis Blues.
Our podcast today will be focusing on the early career of Bessie as a child, in
her home of Chattanooga Tennessee. Concentrating on what Steven Feld
addressed in his paper of 1994, an ecology of music. Building upon the ideas of
Sarah Cohen, we will be mapping out Bessie’s musical landscape, or
musicscape, through the unpacking of Chattanooga’s musical ecology.

She was born in 1894, at a time when Chattanooga was becoming a

major urban centre for the South. According to Michelle Scott: “the geographic
location of Chattanooga and its involvement in railway manufacture had
allowed the city to advance its entertainment industry with numbers of
troupes and performers visiting on a regular basis.” Charles Wolfe also remarks
that a with the various kinds of people travelling from all over the country, a
distinct musical climate was developing and Chattanooga was a hub for the
crossroads of different musical styles.

As an orphan by the age of eight, Bessie was then on the streets singing
and dancing for pay. A song she was known to sing as a busker was ‘Bill Bailey’.

Vy:
This song was a standard for many of the Black Vaudeville troupes that
were travelling across the US. By the first encounter Bessie had with these
groups, the performance style was at the start of its apex. Captivated by these
popular tunes, Bessie took this music into her early repertoire as a young girl.

Despite coming from a low-income black family, Bessie had many

opportunities to watch some of the most popular professional African
American entertainers of the era. Throughout the city, many parades would
march down the streets for free, in hopes of increasing ticket sales for
upcoming shows. Actors, singers, and band members would advertise by
playing their medleys of classical and popular tunes from the show.

Therese:
Well who did she see did she see in these parades?

Vy:
Some examples would have been Pat Chapelle’s theatre company A
Rabbit’s Foot and Primrose and West’s Minstrels. However more notably,
Bessie would have seen many instances of African American female
performers taking the stage. Groups such as Black Patti’s Troubadours would
have offered Bessie one of her first examples of African American women
featured prominently on stage. The example would have been reinforced by
other per- formers such as Ada Overton Walker and local performers like Alice
Ramsey, Evelyn White, and Maude Browne.

Therese:
Oh, she had plenty of role models, and with fun.

Vy:
For sure, these women who were in the professional world earning
money and being successful would have offered Bessie a glimpse of what the
entertainment profession could be like and the favourable response she might
receive from a welcoming crowd

Therese:
There’s one other thing that makes up Bessie’s early musicscape.

Vy:
What’s that?

Therese:
Coca-Cola. For good or ill, Chattanooga was also the first major bottling
centre for Coca-Cola, with a guarantee of 9 grams of cocaine in every bottle.
According to the article by Elizabeth Palermo and Michael Cohen in his paper
‘Jim Crow’s Drug Law’. Not only did Bessie fought fight being orphaned, poor
and according to Chris Albertson in his biography – being raised by cruel
siblings, we can safely say that by the age of 11 she was addicted to cocaine
and caffeine. Her later husband Jack Gee, according to the same sources, could
always ‘be made sweet’ if he brought home 6 bottles of coke for her.

Vy:
It was a hard time to be growing up, especially as a young black woman.
Luckily Bessie was amid the growing Chattanooga recreational culture. Music
was the place of solace. All the high class professional music we mentioned
before required some degree of money; money which Bessie did not have in
the early days. However, the soundscape of Chattanooga was still filled with
plenty forms of amateur music; music of the everyday. Her father, William
Smith, was part-time Baptist and gospel preacher. This occupation gave Bessie
exposure to black spirituals and songs of worship.

Therese:
Bessie’s family were never part of the black middle class living in Blue
Goose Hollow. Where her neighbours lived, they worked (especially the
women) and where they worked, they sang.
While the “classic blues” format that Bessie and her counterparts would
later popularize in the early 1920s was only emerging as the twentieth century
began, she probably heard her first strains of the precursors to classic blues on
the streets of her Blue Goose Hollow neighbourhood in the form of
washerwomen’s worksongs.

Vy:
According to Lawrence Levine those African American worksongs “were
characteristically marked by the realistic depiction of the worker’s situation”.
And Bessie took this to heart, as many of her later compositions complied with
this notion, especially when asked to write her famous flood song: ‘Backwater
Blues’.

The hook in “Backwater Blues” that provides the meaning, commentary,

critique, or evaluation is always about displacement. “I woke up this morning,
can’t even get out of my door; there is enough trouble to make a poor girl
wonder where she want to go.”

Therese:
There is evidence that Bessie was headlining by 15 years of age in
Vaudeville. This means she probably began in the chorus behind Ma Rainey
around 13 years of age. According to (Quote: The Dark Pathways – use the Ad).
So, to Bessie’s early musical ecology. Well, she had all the very best and in
quantity – that Chattanooga and the black south could offer at the time. And
gave her the aptitude and courage to become a later leader in blues and jazz.
And the highest paid and recording start of the 1920s.
Bibliography

Feld, Steven, 1994. ‘From Ethnomusicology to Echo-Muse-Ecology: Reading R Murray

Schafer in the Papua New Guinea Rainforest.’ In The Soundscape Newsletter, #8,
June. Banff, Acoustic Ecology Institute.

Cohen, Sarah, 2012. ‘Urban Musicscapes: Mapping Music-making in Liverpool.’ in

Roberts, Les. Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice, Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.

Levine, Lawrence W. 1977. Black Culture and Black Conciousness: Afro-American Folk
Through from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mizelle, Richard M. 2014. Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African
American Imagination. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Scott, Michelle R., 2008. Blues Empress in Black Chattanooga. Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press.

Wolfe, Charles: Qtd. By Bruce Bastin.

Bastin, Bruce. 1985. Red River Blues: The Tradition in the Southeast. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.

Abbott, Lynn and Doug Seroff, 2007. Ragged but Right. Black Travelling Shows, “coon
songs” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.