[1] Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Smith was young when her parents died, and she and her six siblings survived by performing on street corners.

[2][3][4] The 1910 census gives her age as 16,[5] and a birth date of April 15, 1894, which appears on subsequent documents and was observed as her birthday by the Smith family.

In 1904, her oldest brother Clarence left home and joined a small traveling troupe owned by Moses Stokes.

[13] Working a heavy theater schedule during the winter and performing in tent shows the rest of the year, Smith became the highest-paid black entertainer of her day and began traveling in her own 72-foot-long railroad car.

Smith's music stressed independence, fearlessness, and sexual freedom, implicitly arguing that working-class women did not have to alter their behavior to be worthy of respect.

[15] The businessmen involved with Black Swan Records were surprised when she became the most successful diva because her style was rougher and coarser than Mamie Smith.

[19] Musicians and composers like Danny Barker and Tommy Dorsey compared her presence and delivery to a preacher because of her ability to enrapture and move her audience.

[20] She made 160 recordings for Columbia, often accompanied by the finest musicians of the day, notably Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Fletcher Henderson, James P. Johnson, Joe Smith, and Charlie Green.

[21][22] Smith's career was cut short by the Great Depression, which nearly put the recording industry out of business, and the advent of sound in film, which spelled the end of vaudeville.

In November 1929, Smith made her only film appearance, starring in a two-reeler, St. Louis Blues, based on composer W. C. Handy's song of the same name.

The band included such swing era musicians as the trombonist Jack Teagarden, the trumpeter Frankie Newton, the tenor saxophonist Chu Berry, the pianist Buck Washington, the guitarist Bobby Johnson, and the bassist Billy Taylor.

Benny Goodman, who happened to be recording with Ethel Waters in the adjoining studio, dropped by and is barely audible on one selection.

He estimated she had lost about a half pint of blood, and immediately noted a major traumatic injury: her right arm was almost completely severed at the elbow.

He attributed her death to extensive and severe crush injuries to the entire right side of her body, consistent with a sideswipe collision.

Dr. Smith dressed her arm injury with a clean handkerchief and asked Broughton to go to a house about 500 feet off the road to call an ambulance.

The jazz writer and producer John Hammond gave this account in an article in the November 1937 issue of DownBeat magazine.

As word of her death spread through Philadelphia's black community, her body had to be moved to the O. V. Catto Elks Lodge to accommodate the estimated 10,000 mourners who filed past her coffin on Sunday, October 3.

[32] Jack Gee thwarted all efforts to purchase a stone for his estranged wife, once or twice pocketing money raised for that purpose.

[34] Dory Previn wrote a song about Joplin and the tombstone, "Stone for Bessie Smith", for her album Mythical Kings and Iguanas.

The Afro-American Hospital (now the Riverside Hotel) was the site of the dedication of the fourth historical marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail.

[35] In 1923, Smith was living in Philadelphia when she met Jack Gee,[8] a security guard, whom she married on June 7, 1923, just as her first record was being released.

To meet this need, establishments were created by and for African Americans called Buffet Flats, which featured expensive food, free-flowing booze, and sex shows (see also, Prostitution in Harlem Renaissance).

[36] Smith frequented Buffet Flats after concerts with friends, including drag queens and gay men who viewed it as a safe haven.

[37] What becomes evident after listening to her music and studying her lyrics is that Smith emphasized and channeled a subculture within the African-American working class.

Smith's work challenged elitist norms by encouraging working-class women to embrace their right to drink, party, and satisfy their sexual needs as a means of coping with stress and dissatisfaction in their daily lives.

Smith advocated for a wider vision of African-American womanhood beyond domesticity, piety, and conformity; she sought empowerment and happiness through independence, sassiness, and sexual freedom.

[15] Although Smith was a voice for many minority groups and one of the most gifted blues performers of her time, the themes in her music were precocious, which led to many believing that her work was undeserving of serious recognition.

African American queer theorists and activists have often looked to Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith as "gender-bending" role models of the early 20th-century blues era.

Given those historic limitations, the digitally remastered versions of her work deliver noticeable improvements in the sound quality of Smith's performances, though some critics believe that the American Columbia Records compact disc releases are somewhat inferior to subsequent transfers made by the late John R. T. Davies for Frog Records.

She was the subject of a 1997 biography by Jackie Kay, reissued in February 2021 and featuring as Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4, read in an abridged version by the author.