I Ain’t Gonna Play No Second Fiddle - peaked at #8 in 1925.After You’ve Gone - peaked at #7 in 1927.
Baby Won’t You Please Come Home - peaked at #6 in 1923.Lost Your Head Blues - peaked at #5 in 1926.Careless Love Blues - peaked at #5 in 1925.Gulf Coast Blues - peaked at #5 in 1923.Downhearted Blues - peaked at #1 in 1923.But is it popular today, still? Bessie Smith’s Top Hits Back in the Day (Ranked by Chart Position) However, it’s not a surprise that “Downhearted Blues” was her number one hit back in the day. And, while the Whitburn charts help out a lot, I’m not sure that every single she released is listed. Music charts such as Billboard didn’t exist when she released these wonderful songs. Now, it’s important to remember that Bessie Smith released A LOT of songs. Louis Blues (1929), banned for its realism and now preserved in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.Bessie Smith’s most popular song is “Downhearted Blues”, released in 1923, which peaked at #1 on the charts created by Joel Whitburn. Her tall figure and upright stance, and above all her handsome features, are preserved in a short motion picture, St. Her gradually increasing alcoholism caused managements to become wary of engaging her, but there is no evidence that her actual singing ability ever declined.Known in her lifetime as the “Empress of the Blues,” Smith was a bold, supremely confident artist who often disdained the use of a microphone and whose art expressed the frustrations and hopes of a whole generation of African Americans. In the late 1920s her record sales and her fame diminished as social forces changed the face of popular music and passed over the earthy realism of the sentiments she expressed in her music. The great tragedy of her career was that she outlived the topicality of her idiom. She made 160 recordings in all, in many of which she was accompanied by some of the great jazz musicians of the time, including Fletcher Henderson, Benny Goodman, and Louis Armstrong.Bessie Smith’s subject matter was the classic material of the blues: poverty and oppression, love-betrayed or unrequited-and stoic acceptance of defeat at the hands of a cruel and indifferent world. In February 1923 she made her first recordings, including the classic “Down Hearted Blues,” which became an enormous success, selling more than two million copies. After 1920 she made her home in Philadelphia, and it was there that she was first heard by Clarence Williams, a representative of Columbia Records. For several years Smith traveled through the South singing in tent shows and bars and theaters in small towns and in such cities as Birmingham, Alabama Memphis, Tennessee and Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia. About 1919 she was discovered by Gertrude 'Ma' Rainey, one of the first of the great blues singers, from whom she received some training. She may have made a first public appearance at the age of eight or nine at the Ivory Theatre in her hometown.
#BESSIE SMITH LOST YOUR HEAD BLUES INSTRUMENTS FULL#
It was said that, had she been white, she would have received earlier medical treatment, thus saving her life, and made this the subject of his play The Death of Bessie Smith (1960).Bessie Smith, in full Elizabeth Smith (b. Ap(1898?), Chattanooga, Tennessee -d. September 26, 1937, Clarksdale, Mississippi) was an American singer and one of the greatest of blues vocalists.Smith grew up in poverty and obscurity. She died from injuries sustained in a road accident.
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