Earlier entries of this series can be found here: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3065&p=45337&hilit=archive#p45337
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“Trouble, trouble, I’ve had it all my days”
64. Bessie Smith – Downhearted Blues
The facts:
Year: 1923.
Genre: Blues.
Country: United States.
Released as a single.
Acclaimed Music ranking: #1635.
Song ranking on Acclaimed Music in the artist’s discography: 2nd.
Ranks higher than Do It Again by Steely Dan, but lower than Racing in the Street by Bruce Springsteen.
Place in the Acclaimed Music Song Poll 2015: unranked.
The people:
Written by Alberta Hunter & Lovie Austin.
Vocals by Bessie Smith.
Piano by Clarence Williams.
The opinion:
“Hell, you got the St. Louis blues, the Chicago blues, the Gin House blues, the "my man done left me" blues. They all the same song, ain't they?”, asks Ma Rainey (played by Mo’Nique) rhetorically to Bessie Smith (performed by Queen Latifah) in the HBO film Bessie. “With the same three chords. And you done heard 'em about a dozen hundred times from a dozen hundred people. So what make folks wanna hear from you? So you got to put something else in it. The blues is not about people knowing you. It's about you knowing people.”
In a way these words relate to a lot of music genres, but there is no doubt that Ma Rainey, a veteran of blues music, knew what she was talking about when she advised the young Bessie Smith who was still at the start of her career. Now, the movie I cite these lines from isn’t all that great, a mediocre biopic that barely gets under the skin of its subject. But this quote stuck with me, some half year after seeing the movie. It captures a lot of what can make the blues special.
As you may notice, Ma Rainey there mentions some famous blues songs and one non-existent song (though many blues tracks might as well have been called “my man done left me blues”), but Downhearted Blues isn’t mentioned. This is because it was a new song by the time Smith recorded it, but it fits right into that list. It has three chords, lyrics that are frequently repeated twice in a row and of course the subject is as happy as the title promises.
It’s unlikely that Ma Rainey said these exact same words to Smith, but it is well-known that Rainey coached Smith when she started out and gave her advice about how to create a self-image. It would take a few years of hard work as a dancer and a background singer before Smith would get recognized, but when she released her first single in 1923, Downhearted Blues with Gulf Coast Blues as a b-side, she became the biggest female African-American star of the decade.
Bessie Smith recorded many blues standards in her career, including the aforementioned St. Louis Blues (of which some think she did the definitive version) and Gin House Blues, but perhaps she was lucky to start off with Downhearted Blues as it was rather fresh for the audiences. The song had been recorded only once before, by Alberta Hunter who co-wrote it with Lovie Austin. Hunter’s version is more jazzy and up-tempo and was a minor hit in 1922, but Smith would make it a standard.
She sounded like she lived the hard times the song described, and by all accounts she did. Even after more than 90 years since recording this it still sounds surprisingly raw. The sound quality of songs from this era are always something I have some difficulty with. For a long time now, we are used to more clear sounds: recordings can capture the sound of a voice in more detail. At times, this 1923 take can make Smith’s voice sound less subtle, more as one continuous sound. But listen closely and you hear that there is more going on here. The nuance of Smith’s voice revealed itself to me after various plays.
Just pay attention to the first verse. It opens with rather famous lines: “Gee, but it is hard to love someone/ When that someone don’t love you”. Smith almost cries out these words as if taken over some immediate love pains. Then follows “I’m so disgusted, heartbroken too”. “Disgusted” is sung with real disgust, while she slowly become more sad than loud. It ends with “I’ve got those downhearted blues” and by then the voice has lost its magnificent volume and sounds truly blue. It’s only a few seconds really, but Smith gets to show her full range in it.
The rest of the song is simple, as a blues song tends to be. In fact, there is only Clarence Williams accompanying her on piano and he doesn’t intrude. Later recordings by Smith would frequently incorporate trumpets, with no one less than Louis Armstrong being her favourite, but I think Downhearted Blues benefited from its stark and basic musical set-up. It made sure all the hard-earned drama had to be evoked by the vocals.
The record was released in the right period of time. For most of music history, the blues may have been influential, but with little mainstream appeal. The nineteen-twenties were the exception. For about ten years the genre was good for many hits, although by the thirties it had become mostly a specialty genre again. Bessie Smith fell into obscurity too, but for a while she was a real star and Downhearted Blues illustrates well why.
It also shows why she is still regarded as a stand-out vocalist, when so many performers of her time period – even the good ones – are mostly relegated to footnotes and are only known by connoisseurs. It says something that HBO still feels she is important enough to merit a biopic in 2015. There were more tributes. The Band made a song about her, which appears on The Basement Tapes. Above all, Janis Joplin was a fan. In 1970, when she found out that the grave of Smith remained unmarked Joplin bought her a gravestone. This was in turn the basis for a song by Dory Previn, named Stone for Bessie Smith. Not a particularly good song if you ask me, but still.
Why didn’t Smith have a tombstone, you may ask? Her husband, from whom she was long estranged, actually received a large sum in donations to give Smith a good grave, but he decided to keep the money for himself. Downhearted Blues contains the lines “It seems that trouble’s going to follow me to my grave”. I doubt Smith could guess how true that would turn out to be. A shame, but for an artist as Bessie Smith her songs are the landmarks we remember them by. She knew people and I suspect we will keep visiting Downhearted Blues for quite some times to come.
8/10
Other versions:
This is a blues standards so there have been made quite a few records of it since 1923. As I said before, Alberta Hunter’s original is more jazzy (and a real treat I highly recommend) and perhaps because of that it has recordings in both jazz and blues style. It should be noted though, that blues and jazz where far more similar in the twenties than they would be later in times, so many standards from the era appear in both genres.
As the Ma Rainey quote above suggests the song requires a unique personality. If you compare all these covers you notice how well blues performers understood that. The rock covers I usually speak about here tend to be quite faithful, but all the covers of Downhearted Blues seem to have their own personality (and sometimes their own lyrics). The song remains recognizable mostly, but few artists seem to want to evoke Bessie Smith. They have their own pain to heal.
With the variety on display it is a matter of personal taste which cover you prefer. I think the richness of Smith herself as well as the playfulness of Alberta Hunter are unmatched, though Barbara Hendricks and Juanita Hall deliver quite moving versions of their own and the mournful mood of Alice Stuart is rather lovely too. The more upbeat takes, especially the Latin-flavoured one by Rita Del Piano, miss the mark if you ask me. An exception is the only rock version I came across, by Hybrid Groove; that one’s quite catchy.
The playlist:
Because I mentioned Ma Rainey extensively in this text I added her biggest song, See See Rider Blues, to the playlist as well.
I won’t be able to write one of these next week. If anyone wants to take over for one time, be my guest. If not, I will be back in two weeks.
