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By Root 768 0

that all she knew was that the blues had put her “in de money.” Bessie “was tall and brown-skinned, with great big dimples creasing her cheeks, dripping good looks—just this side of voluptuous, buxom and massive but stately too, shapely as an hour-glass, with a high-voltage magnet for a personality. When she was in a room her vitality flowed out like a cloud and stuffed the air till the walls bulged,” remembered Mezz Mezzrow, who met her in Chicago. “She lived every story she sang; she was just telling you how it happened to her.” All through the twenties, Bessie was a wanderer, touring with her band, the Harlem Frolics, in her own seventy-eight foot, two-story Pullman railroad car. It was like a traveling family circus, with Bessie’s brother Clarence and niece Ruby performing alongside her, and her husband Jack Gee sulkily handling their affairs, though Bessie never trusted him to be her manager. Everyone slept in the carriage, which also carried their marquee, sets and instruments and had its own bathroom, complete with flush toilet. In the kitchen-car Southern food like fried pigs’ feet and stews were washed down with homemade corn liquor—the type of soul food Smith sang about in “Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer.”

Themes of travel and transience, of rootlessness and alienation, have been part of musical cultures throughout history and across the world, but for blues and jazz in particular, formed by the experiences of the slave trade, of slavery itself and the Underground Railroad north, they express a profound sense of being uprooted and transplanted, of longing for a home that no longer exists and may never be reached again. Langston Hughes echoed them in “Blues Fantasy”:

Got a railroad ticket,

Pack my trunk and ride.

And when I get on the train

I’ll cast my blues aside.

Another blues refrain is unhappiness in love. Bessie Smith’s songs of lust, longing and betrayal were powerful because they were real. In the writer Carl Van Vechten’s words, when she sang it was like watching “a woman cutting her heart open with a knife until it was exposed for us all to see, so that we suffered as she suffered.”

Handsome Jack Gee was jealous of his wife’s success and hated her family, but he loved spending Bessie’s money. In 1924, when Smith was the best-known and highest-paid black star in the world, earning perhaps $1,500 a week, they were still together but Jack was frustrated by his lack of control over his wife. No matter how often he beat her up Bessie still sought her pleasures where she pleased, slept around, drank voraciously and sometimes disappeared for days at a time. Bessie’s sexual appetite was notorious. Her usual seduction technique was to lavish a member of her team—a handsome young dancer in her chorus, a piano player, her musical director, even a chorus girl—with expensive gifts. Bessie’s niece Ruby said, “She always liked them younger than she was, and it didn’t matter if they were men or women, as long as they could show her a good time—like I said, Bessie loved a good time.” Chasing away the blues they played was something of a jazzman’s specialty, on stage and off. Most musicians were heavy drinkers. Ruby said Smith never left a party “until all the liquor was gone.” Her drinking was inseparable from her personality and her performance: “She was good-hearted and big-hearted, and she liked to juice, and she liked to sing her blues slow,” said the jazz musician Buster Bailey.

Many others were regular pot-smokers, or addicted to cocaine or morphine. “Tea [marijuana] puts a musician in a real masterly sphere, and that’s why so many jazzmen have used it,” wrote Mezzrow. “You hear everything at once and you hear it right. When you get that feeling of power and sureness, you’re in a solid groove.”

The one addiction they all shared was jazz itself. Jelly Roll Morton observed that although Creoles saw music as a career path, black musicians played in the African tradition—for the sheer joy of it. Something of this passion communicated itself to the audience and back from them to the band in a constantly