DESCRIPTION:
Bessie Smith is the best-known of the female "classic blues" (or "city blues") singers from the 1910s and 1920s (others include Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, Clara Smith, and Mamie Smith). Known as the"Empress of the Blues," Bessie Smith's first recording, "Down-Hearted Blues," from 1923, was very successful, and helped her to become the leading African-American performer of the time. She performed in various minstrel and black vaudeville shows, and as her reputation and fame grew, she performed with many of the other leading early jazz musicians of her time: Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, and James P. Johnson, just to name a few. Johnson was instrumental in the development of the piano style that emerged from Harlem in the 1920s known as "stride."

In the age before sound amplification and microphones, a successful singer needed to be able to project. Smith's voice not only had this quality, it also possessed a rich timbre and tremendous emotive power. Her ability to use "blue notes" and other vocal embellishments, along with a loose melodic phrasing, became hallmarks of jazz and blues inflection that other musicians (singers and instrumentalists) emulated. In this recording of "Backwater Blues," we can hear these techniques at work, and they stand in contrast to the very structured twelve-bar blues form of the song. Notice, however, that although the form remains the same throughout, pianist James P. Johnson's accompaniment style frequently changes during different verses of the song, as he interacts musically with Smith and attempts to depict the meaning of her lyrics through his playing.

Bessie Smith (vocal); James P. Johnson (piano)

Recorded in New York, February 17, 1927