Empress Of The Stage

"In the recent passing of Bessie Smith, 'Queen of the Blues,' a brilliant chapter in the history of the theatre came to a close." It's the first sentence of St. Clair Bourne's reflection on Smith's legacy, published in the New York Amsterdam News a few weeks after her 1937 death. And it's a strange way of introducing someone most often thought of as a musical star — but Bourne apparently saw nothing unusual in exploring Smith's formative influence on blues and swing while also describing her as "royalty among theatrical performers."

Nor was Bourne an outlier: Black women blues performers were regularly referred to as "actresses" in the black press — particularly before, but also after, the so-called "race records" industry made them household names. Though the fields of "music" and "theatre" now have their own critics, their own publications and their own academic departments, the two were not always held at such a distance. In spite of my own graduate training in theatre history, I was confused when, blearily propped in front of a microfilm reader, I first saw Smith and her mentor and friend, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, called actresses (and, at times, as dancers, producers, wardrobe mistresses, monologists and comediennes). These descriptions appeared in "Thein the early decades of the 20th century. The discovery piqued my curiosity (so much so that I built a book around it). Though actresses have historically been associated with sexual immorality and duplicity, taking the actress label seriously — as Bessie Smith did — draws out two important aspects of early blues performance. First, Bourne's emphasis on "the history of theatre" reminds us that, as scholars Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff have persuasively demonstrated, blues emerged in the popular theatre of the rural South. Second, we see how an of the category of actress allowed Smith and her peers to refashion possibilities for black women and girls on stage at a time when those possibilities were exceptionally constrained.