Bessie Smith, the Empress from East Ninth Street

The census of nineteen hundred lists Bessie Smith as a resident of Chattanooga, Tennessee, born in July of eighteen ninety-two. Her father William, a laborer and part-time Baptist preacher, died while she was too young to remember him. By the time she was nine, her mother and a brother had also died. Her older sister Viola took charge of the household. There was no money. Bessie and her brother Andrew took to the streets to earn some.

They worked the corners of the African-American neighborhood along Thirteenth and Elm streets, the area that Chattanooga knew as the Ninth Street district, its commercial and cultural heart. Bessie sang. Andrew played guitar. People dropped pennies. She was ready, those who knew her would later say, even then.

In nineteen twelve, her older brother Clarence came back to Chattanooga with a traveling show and arranged an audition. Bessie was hired, initially as a dancer because the troupe's featured singer was already a headliner. That singer was Ma Rainey. Bessie moved on, south and east and north, building a reputation across the Black theater circuit, until by nineteen twenty, she was one of the most recognizable names on the tour.

In nineteen twenty-three, Columbia Records signed her. Her first release, Downhearted Blues, sold nearly eight hundred thousand copies in less than a year. The press gave her a title: Empress of the Blues. She became the highest-paid Black entertainer of her era, traveling in her own seventy-two-foot private railroad car, filling houses from Chattanooga to New York to Chicago.

She died in a car crash in Mississippi in September of nineteen thirty-seven. She was forty-five years old. The city she came from did not mark her passing with much ceremony. That silence was its own kind of statement.