Blues Empress in Black Chattanooga: Bessie Smith and the Emerging Urban South

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Description

As probably the most first African American vocalists to be recorded, Bessie Smith is a prominent figure in American popular culture and African American history. Michelle R. Scott uses Smith’s life as a lens to research broad issues in history, including industrialization, Southern rural to urban migration, black community development within the post-emancipation era, and black working-class gender conventions.

Arguing that the upward thrust of blues culture and the success of female blues artists like Bessie Smith are connected to the rapid migration and industrialization within the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Scott focuses her analysis on Chattanooga, Tennessee, the large industrial and transportation center where Smith was once born. This study explores how the expansion of the Southern railroads and the development of iron foundries, steel mills, and sawmills created vast employment opportunities within the postbellum era. Chronicling the growth and development of the African American Chattanooga community, Scott examines the Smith circle of relatives’s migration to Chattanooga and the preferred music of black Chattanooga all over the first decade of the 20th century, and culminates by delving into Smith’s early years at the vaudeville circuit.


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