Bessie Smith -- Baby Won’t You Please Come Home 1923

Bessie Smith -- Baby Won’t You Please Come Home 1923 Bessie Smith (1892 or 1894 --1937) was the most popular and successful female American blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s, and a strong influence on subsequent generations, including Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, Dinah Washington, Nina Simone and Janis Joplin. This is one of her first recordings in 1923 with pianist Clarence Williams. In no other way than living the kind of violent, hard-drinking street life she sang about, could Bessie Smith have inspired in her audiences the powerful empathy that ultimately won her the title, “Empress of the Blues.“ Throughout her career, Bessie was respected for being a strong, independent African-American woman with tremendous talent and determination. She expressed great pride in her culture, and gladly participated in its earthy pleasures, regularly indulging her taste for alcohol and sex to extremes. How ever much others tried to run roughshod over her, Bessie refused to submit to t