Bessie Smith

Before addressing the great vocals of Bessie Smith, the lack of numerous Jazz vocals catches the ear, and creates consternation. For the music seems almost boring to our music pounded ears. It is also difficult to grasp the meaning when words are sparse, the music created in a different era. Dancing is the important key. Most jazz was composed to dance to and if you imagine America as a dancing nation in a period much more alive then ours, in this respect, the heart of jazz comes out. Intense swing, new musical progressions with every piece, gave a culture of movement and rhythm. The lack of vocals came about not because of a lack of voices but as a sophistication past voices. Instruments now replaced voices to give different moods and feelings. In one song, I think it is Louis Armstrong, imitates the braying of a horse and other barnyard sounds with his instrument.

I am not musically developed unfortunately but I can understand the vocals to Back Water Blues with Bessie Smith and James P. Johnson on piano. This song is something of an ode to her inspiration for the blues. The blues led her, the spirit of the blues is so distinct that it has a force of its own. Like romance carrying a person away, "The blues done called me to pack my things and go". The sense of displacement being dealt with by the blues can be felt in the dropped note at the end of go. She is moving along but does not have anyplace to find rest and comfort, so rest and comfort come from the possibilities being free and rejected afford. In loneliness comes the ability to create and give rise to a new expression, "Ain't no place for a poor old girl to go". The tone is soothing, melancholically so. The ragtime playing against the sad overtones of the blues makes the rhythm and brings a great sad cadence. The artist cries out in a sense against the forces she cannot control, cannot work with, and cannot change; like the rising waters. She watches what she had being destroyed and proclaims, "I can't move no more".