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Bessie Smith (1892): Empty Bed Blues
- University of Wisconsin Press
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28 Bessie Smith Empty Bed Blues Sam J. Miller Sometimes, gay men idolize divas who are always defiant, strong, and dominant. Ladies like Grace Jones or Mae West or Marlene Dietrich: we value them for their strength, for their uncompromising resistance to patriarchy and conservative morality. More often, however, the women who the gay community celebrates are more complex: they balance the strong and the weak, the defiant and the dominated. Madonna can be a gutsy kick-ass woman who shocks prudish male culture-makers and empowers her female listeners—but also a helpless little thing who sings of being “down on my knees,” reduced by lust and need to abject 29 helplessness. In The Wizard of Oz Judy Garland is “Dorothy Gale, small and meek”—but also plucky, brave, and fully capable of bitch-slapping a lion who threatens her loved ones. One of the reasons that “I Will Survive” has become the gay anthem is that so many gay men identify with the process of going from “at first I was afraid, I was petrified” to being proud and strong enough to say: “go on now go, walk out the door, just turn around now, you’re not welcome anymore.” The “Empress of the Blues,” Bessie Smith, stands as popular culture’s first expression of that dynamic. Her songs constantly straddle the line between oppression and empowerment. In “Aggravatin ’ Papa,” Bessie sings: If you stay out with a high-brown baby, I’ll smack you down, and I don’t mean maybe! But in the very next line: Aggravatin’ Papa, I’ll do anything you say . . . At once demanding and desperate, powerful and powerless, this persona has particular resonance with gay men who can identify with the sensation of victimization by patriarchy, and who can spend a lifetime developing a strong, gutsy, take-no-shit attitude in spite of it. Another element of Bessie’s appeal to gay men is her fierce front-and-center sex life. Her songs are full of lewd innuendo and frank explorations of the joys and miseries of sex. She revels in the fact that she owns her sexuality— I need a little sugar in my bowl, I need a little hot dog on my roll. —but lust has also brought her low; in many of her songs she warns young women of the pain that sex and love and loneliness can engender. Bessie Smith [3.235.75.229] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:40 GMT) 30 Like her mentor Ma Rainey, Bessie was bisexual. Both singers were quite radical by mainstream cultural standards of the 1920s, because they treated queerness as a normal part of life (Ma Rainey sings of losing her man to a sissy, and of dressing up like a man and going out with “women, ’cause I don’t like no mens”). And while Bessie has been hugely influential, and has a significant gay following, she has never been one of the Absolute Essentials that stir up tingly excitement in the gay community. She’s no Cher, no Donna Summer, no Bette Davis. The reason for this has a lot to do with the history of American racism and the way that American racism gets mirrored even within anti-oppression struggles like the gay liberation movement. In A Room of One’s Own, another fab dyke diva, Virginia Woolf, asks us to imagine if Shakespeare had an equally talented sister. Imagine how, while William tramped off for London to hustle around his plays and become an actor and set up a theater company, his sister was prevented from receiving an education, forced into an unhappy marriage, trapped in the domestic world, and unable even to travel on her own. For Shakespeare’s sister, madness and invisibility were the only options for artistic expression . While Bessie’s afterlife in the blues pantheon is secure, in life she was “invisible” to white mainstream culture, which puts her off the radar to this day. A useful comparison, to show just how thoroughly racism contributed to Bessie’s being shunted off to the sidelines of both gay and mainstream culture, is with Mae West, only fourteen months younger than Bessie. Both were big, proud, bawdy ladies. Both saw the stage as a way out of childhood poverty. And in the 1920s both became superstars in separate vaudeville worlds: Mae West scandalizing Broadway with her smutty plays and voluptuous Diamond Lil persona, and Bessie dominating the chitlin’ circuit...