Bessie Smith Birthplace — Chattanooga, Tennessee

Bessie Smith was born on April 15, 1894, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the Blue Goose Hollow neighbourhood — a poor Black community in the city. She was orphaned young, began singing in the streets for money with her brother Andrew, and was recruited into a travelling show at the age of seventeen by Ma Rainey, who became her early mentor. She moved through the touring circuit of the American South and eventually settled in Philadelphia, where she became the highest-paid Black entertainer in America during the 1920s. Her recordings for Columbia Records — "Downhearted Blues," "St. Louis Blues," "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" — sold in the hundreds of thousands.

Smith was the Empress of the Blues: a performer of devastating emotional power, a voice of raw, commanding authority that could fill a large hall without amplification and reach listeners across the breadth of the acoustic spectrum. Her influence on Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, Janis Joplin, and virtually every subsequent blues and soul singer was direct and acknowledged. She lived hard — her sexuality was openly bisexual in an era when that carried enormous social risk, and her drinking was legendary — and performed with an abandon that matched the extremity of her personal life.

Smith died on September 26, 1937, following an automobile accident near Clarksdale, Mississippi. She is buried in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania; her grave, long unmarked, was eventually given a headstone funded by Janis Joplin and Juanita Green in 1970. Chattanooga has a Bessie Smith Cultural Center in the city's MLK district, and her birthplace neighbourhood is acknowledged with historical markers. She was one of the first inductees into the Blues Hall of Fame.