MUSIC HISTORY - The Tragic Death of Bessie Smith

Smith's recording career began in 1923. She was then living in Philadelphia, where she met Jack Gee, a security guard, whom she married on June 7, 1923, just as her first record was being released. 

During the marriage, Smith became the highest-paid black entertainer of the day, heading her own shows, which sometimes featured as many as 40 troupers, and touring in her own custom-built railroad car.   She made 160 recordings for Columbia, often accompanied by the finest musicians of the day, notably Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Fletcher Henderson, James P. Johnson, Joe Smith and Charlie Green.

Both sides of her first record, "Downhearted Blues backed with "Gulf Coast Blues", were hits.

On September 26, 1937, Bessie was critically injured in a car crash. Her lover, Richard Morgan, was driving and misjudged the speed of a slow-moving truck ahead of him. Tire marks at the scene suggested that Morgan tried to avoid the truck by driving around its left side, but he hit the rear of the truck side-on at high speed. The tailgate of the truck sheared off the wooden roof of Smith's old Packard. Smith, who was in the passenger seat, probably with her right arm or elbow out the window, took the full brunt of the impact. Morgan escaped without injury.

The first people on the scene were a Memphis surgeon, Dr. Hugh Smith (no relation), and his fishing partner, Henry Broughton. After stopping at the accident scene, Hugh Smith examined the singer, who was lying in the middle of the road with obviously severe injuries. He estimated she had lost about a half pint of blood and immediately noted a major traumatic injury to her right arm; it had been almost completely severed at the elbow. He stated later that this injury alone did not cause her death. Although the light was poor, he observed only minor head injuries. He attributed her death to extensive and severe crush injuries to the entire right side of her body, consistent with a sideswipe collision.

Broughton and Smith moved the singer to the shoulder of the road. Smith dressed her arm injury with a clean handkerchief and asked Broughton to go to a house about 500 feet off the road to call an ambulance.

By the time Broughton returned, about 25 minutes later, Bessie was in shock. Time passed with no sign of the ambulance, so Dr. Smith suggested that they take her into Clarksdale in his car. He had almost finished clearing the back seat when they heard the sound of a car approaching at high speed. Smith flashed his lights in warning, but the oncoming car failed to stop and plowed into his car at full speed. It sent his car careening into Bessie's overturned Packard, completely wrecking it. The oncoming car ricocheted off Hugh Smith's car into the ditch on the right, barely missing Broughton and Bessie. (The young couple in the car did not have life-threatening injuries.)

Two ambulances then arrived on the scene from Clarksdale, one from the black hospital, summoned by Broughton, the other from the white hospital, acting on a report from the truck driver, who had not seen the accident victims.

Bessie was taken to the black hospital in Clarksdale, where her right arm was amputated. She died that morning without regaining consciousness. She was 43.

Her husband, Jack Gee, thwarted all efforts to purchase a headstone for his estranged wife, once or twice pocketing money raised for that purpose. Bessie's grave was unmarked until a tombstone was erected on August 7, 1970, paid for by the singer Janis Joplin and Juanita Green, who as a child had done housework for Bessie.

This is my favourite of Bessie's songs, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out":

Thanks for listening. Hope to see you again next time when we take a journey back in Music History.

(The information used in this post is from Wikipedia and AllMusic.com and  http://stomp-off.blogspot.ca/2010/10/death-of-bessie-smith.html. There you can listen to a recording of Dr. Hugh Smith recounting the accident.) 

Dominique "Nik" Petersen is an aficionado of old music and the author of The Dr. Hook Trivia Quiz Book. Read about it and her other books at the website: 

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