Am I Blue?
Jan 4th, 2009 by oldfogey
Ask any jazz buff who was the greatest black female vocalist of the 1920s and he will unhesitatingly say Bessie Smith. And listening to that majestic voice, and its raw power, over the three minutes of any one of her 78 rpm recordings, it’s hard not to agree. But after more than three or four of her records you may, as I do, find her unrelenting and unsubtle. The ear begins to tire. It’s hard to imagine Bessie Smith smiling.
I could listen to her contemporary, Ethel Waters, all day. Ethel sang in the same vaudeville theatres as Bessie Smith. But her voice was flexible and lighter. Her range was much wider. She could do the low down, dirty blues that Bessie Smith did - her ‘My Handy Man’ is full of smutty allusion and double entendres - but she could also do the sophisticated show tunes of Irving Berlin, Jimmy McHugh, Harold Arlen and Cole Porter. And, like Ella Fitzgerald after her, there was always a smile in her voice.
Here she is, at her best, in 1929 singing ‘Am I Blue?’, with Mannie Klein on trumpet and the Dorsey brothers, Tommy and Jimmy, on trombone and clarinet respectively.
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