Bessie Smith: A Poet’s Biography of a Blues Legend by Jackie Kay

As a young black girl growing up in Glasgow, Scotland, Jackie Kay first became enamored of the music of Bessie Smith. After publishing many books of poetry, becoming National Poet of Scotland, and writing both a memoir and an award-winning novel, Jackie Kay combined all these literary forms to create a unique and compelling literary biography of Bessie Smith (1894-1937). Kay believes that all of today’s problems and challenges were addressed in her blues. Smith was born into an impoverished family of nine in Chattanooga and began singing for spare change at the age of nine after the death of her father. At the age of 18, she began to join various traveling musical troupes, and when almost thirty garnered a Columbia Records deal that catapulted her into fame and acknowledgement as the “Empress of the Blues.” In 1930 she began touring the South again, this time with her own Bessie Smith Revue, until her death in a car crash in Mississippi in 1937. "A uniquely lyrical book by an exception