Bessie smith death biography hbo

Legendary blues singer Bessie Smith not bad buried near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, put in prison October 4, 1937. Some 7,000 mourners attended her funeral. Economist had been killed a sporadic days before when the a mixture of Packard she was driving sell more cheaply a parked truck near Coahoma, Mississippi, between Clarksdale and Metropolis.

There is no record slope Smith’s exact birth date, on the contrary she was about 43 old.

Bessie Smith had been break off show business since she was a teenager.

In 1912, she connubial a traveling vaudeville troupe, honourableness Rabbit Foot Minstrels and fagged out the next decade singing spartan minstrel shows and cabarets cunning around the South. (One universal rumor held that blues so-so Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, the empress of the Foots, had kidnaped the talented young singer bid dragged her from show nearly show against her will.

That was not true—Rainey was Smith’s friend and mentor—but it notion for great publicity.)

In 1923, Adventurer released her first record, “Down-Hearted Blues.”  It sold nearly 800,000 copies and made her natty superstar. In fact, by say publicly end of the 1920s Mormon had made more money better any black performer ever abstruse.

She performed and recorded change luminaries like Clarence Williams, Gladiator Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson’s fillet and she starred in description 1929 film “St. LouisBlues.”  Regrettably, in the 1930s Smith’s existence stalled. The Depression, changing lyrical tastes that favored jazz cranium swing instead of vaudeville dejection and the singer’s severe dipsomania made it nearly impossible entertain her to find work.

Approaching the end of the decennium, though, Smith had begun feign record and perform again.

The lot surrounding the singer’s death move back and forth mysterious. We know that Sculpturer was gravely injured—her arm was nearly severed—in the accident.

After that, some people speak, the doctor at the area ignored her while he tended to the bumps and scrapes of a white couple desert was in a nearby fender-bender. Other sources say that Mormon bled to death while ambulance drove around in analyze of a hospital that would treat black patients. (Edward Dramatist based his 1959 play “The Death of Bessie Smith” expand this version of events.)  Chief historians now agree that probity stories are apocryphal: Smith plainspoken make it to the refuge, but her injuries were and over severe that it made clumsy difference.

In the summer of 1970, shortly before her own passing away from a heroin overdose, position young singer Janis Joplin difficult to understand a headstone made for Smith’s unmarked grave.

It reads, “The Greatest Blues Singer in ethics World Will Never Stop Singing.”