In Netflix's new film Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Viola Davis stars as the heavy makeup-wearing, velvety-voiced, super confident Ma Rainey. Based on August Wilson's play of the same name, most of the ...
In Netflix's new film Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Viola Davis stars as the heavy makeup-wearing, velvety-voiced, super confident Ma Rainey. Based on August Wilson's play of the same name, most of the ...
"The Empress of the Blues" gave voice the listeners' tribulations and yearnings of the 1920s and '30s. A new 10-CD box set collects the complete... The Mythic Power Of Bessie Smith Vocalist Bessie ...
Bessie Smith, also known as "Empress of the Blues," recorded her first record on Feb. 15, 1923: Down Hearted Blues. On this day, 100 years ago, Columbia Records held a recording session with a singer ...
Blues guitarist and vocalist Rory Block serves up an inspired portrait of and homage to Bessie Smith on A Woman's Soul: A Tribute to Bessie Smith. Block has recorded several "tribute" albums, ...
Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues, was the first African American superstar, an artist that mingled regal dignity with sensuality. We’ll sample her recorded legacy, talk with critics and hear ...
"The Devil's Music" is not much of a play, but it is a socko cabaret act. Subtitled "The Life and Blues of Bessie Smith," the 90-minute entertainment is set in a Memphis "buffet flat," an after-hours ...
This essay is one in a series celebrating women whose major contributions in recording occurred before the time frame of NPR Music's list of 150 Greatest Albums Made By Women. She was big and brown ...
Chris Albertson, who as a teenager in Denmark became captivated by the blues singer Bessie Smith and decades later produced a widely praised multivolume reissue of her recordings and wrote an equally ...