Esther Bigeou

Billed as "The Girl with the Million Dollar Smile", she was one of the classic female blues singers popular in the 1920s.

Several members of her extended family were musicians; the drummer Paul Barbarin was her cousin.

[2] In 1913 she began touring in vaudeville with the performer and playwright Irvin C. Miller; they later married.

[2] The blues writer Chris Smith said that Bigeou was "a singer at the pop end of African-American entertainment" and that she "seems to have retired, aged only 35, to settle in New Orleans, where reports indicate that she died circa 1936".

[4] She actually died on November 15, 1934, at Charity Hospital in New Orleans of pulmonary congestion accompanied by marked emaciation and dehydration, as listed on her death certificate.