📍M.L. King Boulevard, Chattanooga, TN 37403, USA
1894 – 1912“I was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, around 1894, and grew up in Blue Goose Hollow, a poor neighbourhood at the foot of Cameron Hill beside the Tennessee River. My family had come up from rural Alabama, and we all lived in a one-room shack. My father, a labourer and part-time Baptist preacher, died when I was a baby, and my mother died when I was nine, so my older sister, Viola, raised us, taking in washing to keep us fed. To help out, my brother Andrew and I went out busking on the streets of Chattanooga. I sang and danced, and he played the guitar, and our favourite spot was outside the White Elephant Saloon at Thirteenth and Elm. We made more money singing on the street corner than we could have doing any other work open to us. My older brother, Clarence, had run off to join a travelling show, Moses Stokes's troupe, and in 1912 he came back to Chattanooga with them and got me an audition. They hired me as a dancer, because they already had a famous singer, Ma Rainey, who took me under her wing. I travelled the South with tent shows and vaudeville, and in 1923 I made my first record, Downhearted Blues, for Columbia, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies. I became the Empress of the Blues, the highest-paid Black entertainer of my day, and I sang St. Louis Blues with Louis Armstrong. Chattanooga remembers me with the Bessie Smith Cultural Center and its annual Bessie Smith Strut, on the street where I once sang for coins.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today