Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, was the highest paid Black entertainer of her era and traveled in a custom-built 72-foot private railroad car. Yet after her death in 1937 she lay in an unmarked grave for more than thirty years, until Janis Joplin and a woman who had once done Smith’s housework paid for a headstone in 1970. This episode maps her journey from busking outside the White Elephant Saloon in Chattanooga with her brother Andrew to signing with Columbia Records in 1923 and reorganizing the recording market around her success.

We look at her early years on the road with Ma Rainey, the brutal TOBA circuit, and why her powerful contralto was perfectly suited to the acoustic recording horns of the 1920s. The episode also examines her lyrics about chain gangs, the penal system, and women’s autonomy, her openly lived bisexuality and volatile marriage to Jack Gee, the buffet flats that served as underground sanctuaries, and the persistent myth that she died after a white hospital refused to treat her.

• How Ma Rainey taught her stagecraft rather than singing, and why Black Swan Records turned her down as too rough
• The recording industry’s discovery of Black audiences after Mamie Smith’s hit, and how Frank Walker brought Smith to Columbia
• Her adaptation to the Great Depression through Broadway, the 1929 short film St. Louis Blues, and 1933 sessions with John Hammond and Benny Goodman
• The September 1937 crash on Route 61 in Mississippi as documented by surgeon Dr. Hugh Smith, and her death at 45 in Clarksdale
• Why the debunked hospital story endured for decades, and her recognition through the Grammy and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame and a U.S. postage stamp