N the 1940s, with the Empress of the Blues already long dead, jazz writer Rudy Blesh persuaded two of Bessie Smith’s sisters and her poisonous second husband, Jack Gee, to speak to him for a putative biography. Blesh was promised access to a trunk of unseen material – photos, music, letters – only for Gee to nix the project with what seemed an outrageous last-minute demand for more money. The trunk promptly vanished. Short on primary sources, later biographers managed to scratch together rough portraits of the Jazz Age giant who recorded 150-or-so songs between 1923 and 1933, but Smith’s story remains tantalisingly blurry. First published in 1997, Jackie Kay’s portrait-cumcharacter-study Bessie Smith: Singer, Icon, Pioneer brings no new material to light, but her new introduction makes a convincing case for the bisexual, unfettered blueswoman as a very modern kind of icon. “There isn’t anything that life could currently throw at her that would surprise her,” Kay writes. An orphan from the age of eight, Smith helped to feed her siblings by singing on street corners in her hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee, before becoming a performer in travelling minstrel shows. Fired as a dancer for being too dark-skinned, she prospered once she found her voice. The success of early 78s like “Downhearted Blues” and “Gulf Coast Blues”, allied to her burgeoning reputation as a performer, meant that by 1925 Smith could afford to buy her own train carriage to take her entourage from show to show. Her sometime assistant Ruby Walker remembered Smith as “a strong, beautiful woman with a personality as big as a house” – and life on Smith’s train was certainly a giant leap away from the strictured mores of Prohibition-era America. Her personal appetites were reflected in her songs, which alluded to lesbianism, sadomasochism and bootleg liquor (as Kay puts it, “subjects the Spice Girls would run a mile from”). The Great Depression, changing fashions, and the brutish, controlling Gee led to Smith going off the rails at the end of the ’20s. Kay notes that while Smith kept performing, “She was still drinking the bad stuff even when the good stuff became legal again.” Just 43 when she was killed in a car crash, Smith lay in an unmarked grave until 1970, when Janis Joplin was among the grateful disciples who helped pay for her headstone. Aficionados may object to Kay’s long passages of imagined interior monologue, but her poetic licence helps to illuminate Smith’s work, examining her motivations and exploring how she might have lived. The contents of that Smith family trunk may be lost forever, but here is something almost tangible to remember her by.
I
REVIEWED THIS MONTH
BESSIE SMITH: SINGER, ICON, PIONEER JACKIE KAY FABER, £10
7/10
MONOLITHIC UNDERTOW: IN SEARCH OF SONIC OBLIVION HARRY SWORD WHITE RABBIT, £20
7/10
Smith was just 43 when she was killed in a car crash AMID the remorseless clank of post-war West Germany, Faust’s Jean-Hervé Peron heard a sound touched with the elemental and eternal: “The old Heidelberger – the cement mixer,” he enthuses to Harry Sword in Monolithic Undertow: In Search Of Sonic Oblivion. “For me, that is like the sound of the sea.” A history of drone-based music, Monolithic Undertow starts off with the revelation that the Big Bang actually sounded more like a deep hum, and celebrates several millennia of ritualistic, repetitive and often atonal sounds that captured the deep growl of the universe. Sword samples prehistoric echo chambers and the sound of Aboriginal bull-roarers; he considers the Master Musicians Of Joujouka who so bewitched Brian Jones, before telescoping forward via Ravi Shankar, La Monte Young, John and Alice Coltrane and krautrock to find resonances in modern doom, ambient techno and avant noise. Fans of Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler
and Copendium will approve of Sword’s everything-turned-up-to-eleven gush as he bigs up Popol Vuh and Hawkwind, but if he is covering reasonably familiar territory there, he becomes a more useful cosmic travelling companion when it comes to the acts who took the slo-mo punk of The Melvins to greater depths from the 1990s onward. He shows how Earth’s 1993 album Earth 2: Special LowFrequency Version was the clarion call for “ambient metal”, and applauds Sleep’s decision to take the down-tuned sludge of Black Sabbath to new extremes on 1996’s Dopesmoker. A one-track album, it exhorted listeners to “Drop out of life with bong in hand/Follow the smoke to the riff-filled land”. Considered unreleasable at the time by the band’s label, London, it ended up becoming an article of faith for a generation of disaffected metal kids, whose quest for the ultimate in room-shaking monotony led many to the extreme amp-worship of Sunn O))). Watching a Sunn O))) show in Amsterdam, Sword feels the rapture: “The churn unfolds at a glacial pace, the dry ice so thick you can’t see your own hands. The [sub-woofers], meanwhile, reach into the nasal cavities, chest, lungs, ribs, shake the hair follicles – your eyeballs vibrate in their sockets – it’s a sonic bodily excavation.” Extreme fun, but even hardened verse-chorusverse recidivists will find that Monolithic Undertow drones on entertainingly enough. JIM WIRTH MARCH 2021 • UNCUT • 109
CARL VAN VECHTEN COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
Bessie Smith, February 1936: a very modern kind of icon
