Louis Armstrong & Bessie Smith

Egos in Sync

Some were indignant about Louis Armstrong’s records with superstar Bessie Smith - starting with Smith herself. It was almost as if Armstrong were singing a second part on his horn, pushing his way onto her stage.

Smith was a blazing showbusiness light, the Empress of the Blues. In Philadelphia, she was billed as "The Greatest and Highest Salaried Race Star in the World." She refused to appear in shows and revues in which other singers were thinner or lighter-skinned. If things didn’t please her onstage, she’d rip the curtains down. Her strong, unsentimental blues renditions sold hundreds of thousands of records. For backup, she liked the lyric style of Joe Smith (no relation), who stayed discreetly in the background and knew who was boss.

Armstrong could stay with Bessie Smith note for note, phrase for phrase, and still put in his own ideas; he was used to close duo work with Oliver. These recordings also reveal the insight he made between playing and singing, turning his horn into a second voice. While this infuriated Smith, it was a huge musical innovation. Jazz musicians were liberated by this new idea, and it opened up new worlds for jazz solos that come down to us today.

Why was a jazz musician working with a classic blues musician? In those days, there was no difference. Early jazz was fusion; a lot of it grew up out of ragtime (the expression comes from "ragged time," meaning syncopation) and blues. The basis of many jazz pieces is twelve-bar, eight-bar, or sixteen-bar blues-chord progressions. Any jazz band, and any jazz player, was expected to be able to play blues; it was part of the vocabulary.

Like jazz itself, Smith and Armstrong made a huge impact by combining old musical traditions into a fresh mix. Smith treated the blues like art songs, coloring and shading every word and phrase with utter conviction. She was precise without ever being precious – no listener was in doubt about what feelings drove her songs. Armstrong's innovative singing brought an old minstrel tradition – scat – into the new music. (His singing might also have had influences even older – the Hebrew chants and prayers of the Jewish family he had worked for as a child.) Both Smith and Armstrong had a deep sense of pulse, of how to play with a beat so it lost its sharp edge and became sinuous, with curves and stretches. They knew, without ever changing tempo, when to drag, when to push it just a little, so the music felt free.

They also shared an understanding of what recording could do for their music. Musical style and phrasing are passed down by ear; there’s no good way of transcribing them on paper. Before the recording era, Armstrong and Smith might have affected local musicians, but they would not have influenced people far from where they lived.

Many musicians of the time were suspicious of recording: who would pay to hear them play when they had the record? But Smith and Armstrong embraced the new technology. Smith’s phenomenal record sales were a huge part of her fame, and turned her music into a legacy: decades after her death, Smith was influencing rock and roll. Armstrong also sensed that a body of recorded work would carry his sound through space and time. Starting early in his career, he recorded as much as he could.

Powerful charisma was another thing Smith and Armstrong had in common. Armstrong in person had an otherworldly pull that brought musicians climbing through backstage windows to listen. Decades later, they savored the memory as something mystical. Smith would say, before a performance, "I’m going to walk me one tonight." She would focus her singing toward a member of the audience (usually a man), and he would be drawn, in a trance, to where she stood. Those reeled in by her power were unable to remember how it happened.

That charisma extended even to white audiences. Though they were both hampered (and sometimes put in danger) by Jim Crow mentality, Smith and Armstrong broke the race barrier by having white as well as black fans, something that chipped away at the set conventions of the white world. It also brought Smith and Armstrong wider fame.

Bessie Smith showed no interest in sharing the spotlight with Armstrong, though. "I never worked with Bessie Smith outside of the recordings," Armstrong remembered. "I was there to make the records, didn’t get to talking to her too much, don’t think we spoke the same kind of language."

Even though Armstrong and Lil Hardin had been regulars at Bessie Smith’s famous music parties in Chicago, that didn’t mean she was going to pal around with Armstrong in New York. She was wealthy and successful on a scale Armstrong could only imagine. Once, he saw someone approach her to change a thousand-dollar bill. "She just raised up the front of her dress and there was a carpenter’s apron and she just pulled that change out of it. That was her bank." Armstrong made substantial money later in his career, too, but it melted out of his hands as soon as he got it. It’s also likely that his mob-associated agents skimmed his earnings. While he never had Smith's business skills, he was one of the few jazz musicians whose fame eventually spread even further than hers.

In later years, Armstrong took a dim view of some of the recordings he’d made with other singers - but not his recordings with Smith. "Everything I did with her, I like."