Bessie: Revised and expanded edition
ISBN: 9780300127065
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Yale University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Smith Bessie 1898?-1937; Singers -- United States -- Biography;

The definitive biography of musical legend Bessie Smith: "A landmark in the writing of jazz history . . . First-rate" ( The Washington Post ).

Known as the "Empress of the Blues," Bessie Smith was a successful vaudeville entertainer who became the highest paid African American performer of the Roaring Twenties. This revised and expanded biography debunks many of the myths that have circulated since her untimely death in 1937.

Writing with insight and candor about the singer's personal life and career, the author supplements his research with dozens of interviews with her relatives, friends, and associates--in particular Ruby Walker Smith, a niece by marriage who toured with Bessie for over a decade. Also included in this updated edition are more details of Bessie's early years, new interview material, and a chapter devoted to events and responses that followed the book's original publication.

"The product of painstaking research . . . Devastating, provocative, and enlightening." -- Los Angeles Times

Christiern Gunnar Albertson was born in Reykjavik, Iceland on October 18, 1931. He became a disc jockey for Armed Forces Radio in Keflavik before moving to the United States in 1957. He worked as a disc jockey at a radio station in Philadelphia. He moved to New York in the 1960s and became a producer for Riverside Records. He spent one year as a radio station manager in 1964. He was also writing liner notes for jazz albums and was a critic with Stereo Review magazine.

He produced a multivolume reissue of Bessie Smith's recordings. The five two-disc sets were released between 1970 and 1972. He received a Grammy Award for best liner notes for Bessie Smith: The World's Greatest Blues Singer. His biography, Bessie, was published in 1972. He was found dead on April 24, 2019 at the age of 87.

(Bowker Author Biography)


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