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Bessie Smith
by Jackie Kay - £10.99 Faber & Faber (2021)
paperback
ISBN 13: 9780571362929 | ISBN 10: 0571362923
Bessie Smith: singer, icon, pioneer.
Scotland's National Poet Jackie Kay brings to life the tempestuous story of the greatest blues singer who ever lived.
Bessie Smith was born in Tennessee in 1894. Orphaned by the age of nine, she sang on street corners before becoming a big name in travelling shows. In 1923 she made her first recording for a new start-up called Columbia Records. It sold 780,000 copies and made her a star. Smith’s life was notoriously difficult: she drank pints of ‘bathtub gin’, got into violent fist fights, spent huge sums of money and had passionate love affairs with men and women. She once single-handedly fought off a cohort of the Ku Klux Klan.
As a young black girl growing up in Glasgow, Jackie Kay found in Bessie someone with whom she could identify and who she could idolise. In this remarkable book Kay mixes biography, fiction, poetry and prose to create an enthralling account of an extraordinary life.
(Price & availability last checked: March 2023)
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