In this meditative improvisation between biography and memoir, Scottish lesbian poet of color, Jackie Kay, reflects on Bessie Smith’s hardscrabble early life in Tennessee, the successful career she made and her transcendent artistry, while charting the arc of Kay’s own emerging sexuality and race consciousness. Kay describes growing up in suburban Glasgow as the adoptive daughter of white parents and her first introduction to the Blues through her father’s gift of a Smith compilation album, “Any Woman’s Blues,” and the pursuit for meaning this gift begat. She is an empathetic searcher for truth. In writing about the songs Smith wrote and sang, Kay intuits the truth of Smith’s life from the paucity of the extant facts. She finds truth contained in the timbre, the ache of Smith’s voice, and equally, the characters and stories within the lyrics—stories about down-and-out women who often take up with low-down men, or sometimes wild women, and the places into and out of which these itinerant souls wandered: Chattanooga, St. Louis, Chicago, New Orleans. In Kay’s account of the centrality of the Empress of the Blues’ legacy in her own life, she also argues that Smith is not only “Any Woman” but “Everywoman.”
Bessie Smith: A Poet’s Biography of a Blues Legend, by Jackie Kay. Published by Vintage. The editor is LuAnn Walther and the agent is Jacqueline Ko. Bessie Smith is a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction; the winner will be announced on May 11.