Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, was the highest paid Black entertainer of her era and traveled in a custom-built 72-foot private railroad car. Yet after her death in 1937 she lay in an unmarked grave for more than thirty years, until Janis Joplin and a woman who had once done Smith's housework paid for a headstone in 1970. This episode maps her journey from busking outside the White Elephant Saloon in Chattanooga with her brother Andrew to signing with Columbia Records in 1923 and reorganizing the recording market around her success.

We look at her early years on the road with Ma Rainey, the brutal TOBA circuit, and why her powerful contralto was perfectly suited to the acoustic recording horns of the 1920s. The episode also examines her lyrics about chain gangs, the penal system, and women's autonomy, her openly lived bisexuality a ...