"Downhearted Blues" - Bessie Smith

On Honoring Your Ancestors

When we think of ancestry, maybe those family trees we constructed as fourth-graders come to mind. Or maybe it's the spit swabs we spend hundreds of dollars on so we can play DNA detectives. 

I don’t know much about my lineage. Memories on my mother’s side are fuzzy, and, as the child of a single parent, the only thing I’m sure I inherited from my father was his last name. I can think of many better ways to spend money than swabbing through history’s gene pool of colonizing white guys named Smith. 

As a queer person, I often think about ancestry through that lens. What’s the lineage of queer people who sacrificed to make life easier for me today? There’s no 23andMe for that. So I started a Substack. 

For years as a freelance writer, I often pitched a queer music history series. While no one took me up on the offer, it was a topic I couldn’t shake. 

Right before launching this Substack, I was laid off from my day-job of 19 years. That day also happened to be my anniversary. My wife and I kept our dinner reservation. And after a few consolation cocktails, a tarot card reader materialized along our walk home. Nervously, I sat down. 

Cards were shuffled. Immediately, I was informed that an abrupt change was happening in my life. 

OK, lady. Lucky guess.

I was also going to lead a more creative life now.

Sure. Any passerby could interpret that to mean something.

Then she said something truly strange: “Your ancestors are trying to talk to you. And you need to start listening. You’ll hear them through music. Turn on the radio. They’ll speak to you there.”

Now that’s an oddly specific fortune to toss out. I’d been pontificating to my wife for months about launching this queer music history newsletter. I had pipe dreams that it might evolve into a book or a radio show. 

At first, I told myself that I started the newsletter to stay busy — but it also satiated my deep sense of obligation to reclaim stories of queer people whose lives were never wholly painted. I also started meditating every day. In the silence, I pretend I’m talking to my queer music ancestors and ask them for inspiration. Here’s what’s weird: It’s working. 

Most weeks, I don’t have a plan for which artist to research. I wait. Then, someone shows up. This week, Bessie Smith literally came knocking on my door. A friend of mine dropped by unannounced after visiting a bookstore. He thought of me when his eye caught a Smith biography called Bessie Smith: A Poet’s Biography of a Blues Legend, written by queer author Jackie Kay. He drove the book straight to my doorstep. Later that day, seemingly unrelated, my 12-year-old goddaughter mentions that she’s been assigned a book report on the life of Bessie Smith. 

OK, Bessie, I get it. It’s your turn. 

If you’re writing a newsletter about the queer ancestors of rock n roll, Bessie Smith is an essential stop, and not just because we share a last name. The nucleus of rock is the blues. And Smith was considered its ruler - the Empress. But we actually have to trace our lineage back just a bit earlier to the Queen Mother,  Ma Rainey. Rainey was the first queer celebrity of the blues, and she sang openly about relationships with other women in tunes like “Bo-Weevil Blues,” “Sissy Blues” and “Prove It On Me.” 

Eight years Rainey’s junior, Smith became a protege when hired as a dancer in the same traveling tent show in 1912. Rainey coached Smith on developing her stage presence. It wasn’t long, though, before Smith’s larger-than-life onstage swagger (and offstage appetite for chorus girls) began to match Rainey. While Smith never hinted at her bisexuality in her music like Rainey, her affairs were well documented. Both Rainey and Smith were signed to major record labels in 1923. Rainey went to Paramount and Smith to Columbia as the growing demand for Black music skyrocketed with the invention of sound recordings on vinyl. Both helped propel the fledgling “race records” market (later named R&B) that launched in 1920. They became two of the biggest names of the blues, but Smith’s talent and success would eclipse every other musician. Smith would become the highest-paid Black entertainer, male or female, by the end of the 1920s. Her vocal style was powerful but agile enough to take on show tunes and Tin Pan Alley, which was the basis of many early jazz standards. 

Ma Rainey may have been the template of what would become rock n roll, but Bessie Smith was its biggest influence. Her career lasted only 10 years, but her body of work consisted of more than 160 recordings and shaped the course of popular music from blues to jazz to gospel to rock n roll to hip-hop. 

Smith’s first single, "Downhearted Blues" — written by queer blues singer Alberta Hunter — was a major hit in 1923, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, even helping Columbia Records out of a financial slump. Within 10 months of signing Smith, the Columbia label sold 2 million records. Over the next four years, her sales reached 6 million. A young Louis Armstrong recorded with her in 1925 and needed change for his first-ever $100 bill. "I say, 'Look here Bessie, you got change for a hundred?'" Armstrong recounted on Voice of America in 1956. “She said  'Sure my man’ and raised up her dress and there was, like, [you know,] how a carpenter keeps his nails? Man, so much money [in the apron under her skirt] — that killed me."

With the  Great Depression following the stock market crash of 1929, record companies were deeply impacted, and Smith’s career slumped as a result. Culturally, the popularity of jazz began to outfashion the more traditional blues sound, and up-and-coming jazz vocalists like Ethel Waters and eventually Billie Holiday would become the new pop stars. Rainey recognized the trend and retired from music in 1935. Smith decided to stick it out in show business until her tragic death in a car accident in 1937 at the age of 43. 

Smith’s legacy was already apparent during her lifetime, but her sound went further than anyone could’ve imagined, influencing some of the most prominent figures in blues, jazz, and eventually, rock n roll. If rock was born from the blues, then its family tree traces back to the genre’s first stars — two queer Black women named Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. 

And the lineage of queer ancestors is strong. 

Ma Rainey > Bessie Smith > Billie Holiday

From Bessie Smith, you get the direct bisexual descendent of Billie Holiday, who famously dated actress Tallulah Bankhead, among others. And, of course, there were queer contemporaries during Smith’s time, like Alberta Hunter, Gladys Bentley, and Ethel Waters. 

Smith made her final recordings in 1933 with producer John Hammond. Three days later, working with Hammond in the same studio, Billie Holiday cut her first record. Throughout her career, Holiday cited Smith’s formative influence, and she recorded “Taint Nobody's Bizness If I Do," one of Smith’s most popular songs. 

Through Smith, you also get “Godmother of Rock n Roll,” Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the queer singer who was billed early in her career as “Bessie Smith’s Younger Sister” because her influence on Tharpe was so obvious.

Tharpe then influenced queer icons Little Richard and Big Mama Thornton in the 1950s, who then ushered in straight, white rockers like Elvis, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles. 

You also get descendants, Nina Simone and Janis Joplin. On her 1967 album, Nina Simone Sings the Blues, Simone put her spin on "I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl," a double entendre tune that Smith originated as "Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl." Joplin cited Smith as such a powerful influence that she helped pay for Smith’s gravestone. Until then, Smith had been buried for over 30 years in an unmarked grave. 

The lineage of queer ancestry tracing back to Smith is too long to list in one sitting. That’s why this Substack exists — to more fully paint portraits of my queer music ancestors and to reclaim these stories, all from a lens of adoration and respect. 

“Turn on the radio and they’ll tell you what to do.”

Funny enough, after nine months of writing this publication, I’ve been given the opportunity to turn it into a radio show on two separate stations. Songs That Saved Your Life Radio can be found on both Radio Kingston and Kpiss.fm every single week. Thank you, Bessie Smith, and the rest of my beloved ancestors. 

Read more about Queen Mother, Ma Rainey.