BOOKS
IN the 1940s, with the Empress of the Blues already long dead, jazz writer Rudy Blesh persuaded two of Bessie Smith’s sisters and her poisonous second husband, Jack Gee, to speak to him for a putative biography. Blesh was promised access to a trunk of unseen material – photos, music, letters – only for Gee to nix the project with what seemed an outrageous last-minute demand for more money. The trunk promptly vanished.
Short on primary sources, later biographers managed to scratch togetherbrings no new material to light, but her new introduction makes a convincing case for the bisexual, unfettered blueswoman as a very modern kind of icon. “There isn’t anything that life could currently throw at her that would surprise her,” Kay writes.
