Homeless Blues
Bessie Smith - Homeless Blues
Related Lessons
lesson:
The Blues: The Sound of Rural Poverty
How do the Country Blues reflect the challenges of sharecropping, racial injustice, and rural poverty in early 20th-century African-American life?
Related People
people:
Bessie Smith
(1894 – 1937) Dubbed the “Empress of the Blues,” Bessie Smith was one of the most successful black stars of the 1920s, and one of a handful of women singers of the era who brought the Blues to a wider audience. Born in 1894, Smith had lost her mother, father and a brother by the age of 9, and was raised by her older sister in Chatanooga, Tenn. With limited job prospects, Smith and her brother Andrew began playing for spare change on the street to support the family. In 1912, Smith joined a traveling vaudeville show as a dancer and...