‘She was the queen of the blues’

TEDDY JAMIESON

WHEN she was 12 years old, growing up in a small, semidetached Wimpey house in Glasgow, Scots Makar Jackie Kay was given the album Bessie Smith: Any Woman’s Blues by her blues-loving dad. A double album, in fact, with Smith’s face on both sides.

“It was like a two-sided coin,” Kay recalls. “The happy face and the sorrowful one. I just found the album cover fascinating.”

It was to spark a lifetime-long obsession with Smith and the music she made. “Hearing her voice and hearing those songs, I just got drawn into the world of those blues.”

Kay grew to adore the music as much as her dad. She still does. “I love the raunchy wildness of the blues. I love the fact that they don’t shy away from anything, from revenge to redemption.”

And Bessie Smith was her gateway

was able to be completely herself.

She never changed her working-class self either. She never changed her speech patterns, or her behaviour, and that I find really fascinating.

She was working-class royalty, really. The blues queens were the closest you could get to a black royal family. But they did it in their own style with their own dresses, their own way of presenting themselves … Their own trains. They had so much autonomy.

The train also was a boon for her love life.

How cool. Who wouldn’t want their own love life on a moving train?

I think that’s what first attracted me to the idea of reading about her life. There was this book my friend gave me at 14 about this woman having sex with women and men and I remember finding that really fascinating.

It’s difficult to square the image of this selfmade, self-possessed, successful woman who could face down the Klan with the woman who became so controlled and abused by her second husband Jack Gee.