An Immortal Reflection Of Bessie Smith, In Feeling And Form

In 1974, the artist Romare Bearden made a collage with a woman at its center. One arm bent above her head, yellow flowers in her hair to match her skirt and heels, she casually yet clearly commands an orchestra of men. The image, titled Empress of the Blues, paid homage to Bessie Smith, and it captured Smith's ability to rule the glamorous stages of Jazz Age Harlem no less than the juke joints and tent shows of the rural South. But on another level, Bearden's creation of this collage in the 1970s also reflected Smith's commanding afterlife, the sway she still held over black artists several decades after her death.

While Smith was among the most famous and highly paid black entertainers of her day, that status alone does not explain her impact on Bearden, who included her in several collages, or over the many other African American artists who cited Smith's influence on their work. Richard Wright and James, where a black man tells a white femme fatale, "If Bessie Smith had killed some white people, she wouldn't have needed [her] music." The poet and critic Sherley Anne Williams published a long poem devoted to Smith in 1982. The black Scottish writer Jackie Kay wrote her own Smith-inspired book-length meditation on art and identity in 1997.