Bessie smith biography 1920s flapper
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Black History Month was established to recognize and honor African Americans’ contributions to American history and culture. Too often, women are not included on lists of notables and role models. NWHM recognizes women who have made a difference in history.
Bessie Coleman Flew Airplanes Upside Down
Bessie Coleman. 1922.
“Brave Bessie” Coleman became the world’s first female African American licensed pilot. Inspired by the Wright brothers and Harriet Quimby (the first American woman to fly a plane), Coleman believed that she could fly too.
While living in Chicago, Coleman attempted to enroll in flygning school but quickly funnen that no American school would enroll a black woman. She looked abroad instead. Coleman applied to French schools and worked long hours managing a chili parlor by day and studying French at night to prepare. She embarked for France in November1920. In 1921 she became the first kvinnlig African American pilot in the world when the French statsförbund Aerona
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This biography is reprinted in full with permission from the National Women’s History Museum (United States of America). NWHM biographies are generously supported by Susan D. Whiting. All rights reserved.
Born: 15 April 1894, United States
Died: 26 September 1937
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
Acknowledged as one of the greatest blues singers of the twentieth century, Bessie Smith reigned as the “Empress of the Blues” throughout most of the 1920s.
Smith was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee in the early 1890s. Her earliest performances were on the streets of Chattanooga where she and her brother Andrew busked for spare change. Smith left home in 1912 to join Ma and Pa Rainey’s Rabbit Foot Minstrels troop and traveled throughout the South on the minstrel and vaudeville circuit. Smith developed an expressive and distinctive style whose emotional intensity connected with audiences. Bessie didn’t just sing the blues; she told stories of love, loss, and h
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Bessie Smith’s first recordings
Her debut as a recording artist was, one might say, overdue. She was already widely known as a supremely talented popular singer in the blues genre and had been a professional for a decade. She had a following that ranged geographically from her hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee--where in childhood she had sung for nickels on the street--across the Deep South where she had performed in tent shows and theaters on the T.O.B.A. circuit, and up the eastern seaboard, particularly Philadelphia, where she had made her home.
The so-called "race record" market had blown open in 1920 with the unexpected commercial success of "Crazy Blues," sung by Mamie Smith accompanied by the tune's composer, Perry Bradford.
[Editor's note: NY1920 reported on Mamie Smith's influential recordings here, here, here, and here, and on her collaboration with Perry Bradford here.]
Following this hit recording, a profusion of female "blues shouters" (of both dark and pale