Bessie Smith

Fun Facts

It has often been reported that Bessie Smith was taken to a whites-only hospital in Clarksdale, Mississippi but was refused services and died shortly later due to the delay in getting treatment for her traumatic injuries. The jazz writer and producer John Hammond gave this account in an article in the November 1937 issue of DownBeat magazine which has been completely discredited. What most people don’t realize is that there was actually 2 car crashes involved that night. The first (and fatal) crash was caused by Bessie’s lover who was driving at the time Richard Morgan who misjudged the speed of a slow-moving truck ahead of him. Skid marks at the scene suggested that Morgan tried to avoid the truck by driving around its left side, but he hit the rear of the truck side-on at high speed. The tailgate of the truck sheared off the wooden roof of Smith’s old Packard vehicle. Smith, who was in the passenger seat, probably with her right arm or elbow out the window, took the full brunt of the impact nearly severing her right arm off at the shoulder. While Bessie laid on the side of the road, waiting for the ambulance and receiving first aid, a second car traveling at a high rate of speed plowed into Bessie’s disabled vehicle. Bessie was ultimately transported to  the G. T. Thomas Afro-American Hospital (now the Riverside Hotel) in Clarksdale, where her right arm was amputated. She died that morning without regaining consciousness.

First husband Jack Gee thwarted all efforts to purchase a stone for his estranged wife, twice pocketing money raised for that purpose. Smith’s grave remained unmarked until a tombstone was erected on August 7, 1970, paid for by the singer Janis Joplin and Juanita Green, who as a child had done housework for Smith.