Bessie Smith

£9.89

RRP: £10.99

Price-Match is available in-store for recommended titles in CCCU module handbooks

ISBN: 9780571362929

Products specifications

Attribute name	Attribute value
Author	Kay, Jackie
Pub Date	18/02/2021
Binding	Paperback
Pages	208

Publisher: FABER AND FABER LTD

Availability: Available for despatch from the bookshop in 48 hours

'She [Bessie Smith] showed me the air and taught me how to fill it ... she's the reason I started singing, really' - Janis Joplin '[Jackie Kay] offers the most vivid evocation of Bessie Smith I have ever read' - Ian Carr, BBC Music Bessie Smith was born in Tennessee in 1894.

Qty:

'The most vivid evocation of Bessie Smith I have ever read' - Ian Carr, BBC Music

'[Bessie Smith] showed me the air and taught me how to fill it ... she's the reason I started singing, really' - Janis Joplin

Bessie Smith: singer, icon, pioneer.

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, making 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 chapter 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.