The Empress Of The Blues- Queen Latifah’s “Bessie” (2015)-An HBO Film Review 

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

  

Bessie, starring Queen Latifah (who else in this century could do the role as well), HBO, 2015   

One sunny afternoon in the mid-1960s, come on I don’t remember if it was sunny or not but the day would be sunny for another reason, I was trolling the Paperback Booksmith in Harvard Square (that institution, the bookstore, of blessed memory long gone as have most of the brick and mortal bookstores in the age of e-commerce) when I heard this old-time bluesy woman’s voice coming over the store’s speaker system, an amenity that most such places had then to set a certain mood. (You could always tell as far as bookstores went who they were catering to –the Paperback Booksmith tended toward blues and classic jazz a la Billie Holiday, the Harvard Bookstore to classical, The Globe to folk music, hell, they were located above a coffeehouse then what else would they play, and Frank’s (mostly second-hand books) to jazz).

I was so intrigued by the voice that I asked one of the clerks whose voice was beaming over the speakers. She, without lifting an eyebrow or her head from whatever she was concentrating on said, “Come on you don’t know Bessie Smith when you hear that voice, where have you been?” Of course in those days unlike the canned random selection stuff today in most stores she had, as she explained to me once she had finished her task, the staff, her, played whatever records, vinyl records, okay, they wanted on the record player. Her thing was Bessie Smith so Bessie it was playing for all the blues-soaked world to hear.

That voice haunted me the rest of the day (as did that snippy way that clerk had cut me to the quick although the next time I went to that bookstore I wound up getting her telephone number and had a few dates with her on the basis of my new enthusiasm for Bessie and my “desire” to learn all about her music but that is a story for another day.  I was serious though when I said I was “trolling” the bookstore and had been ever since a friend of mine had told me that such places were good “pick-up” spots for intellectual young women who might give you a verbal workout and who knows what else. A guy had a fighting chance in that locale, in a bookstore, those intellectual young women figuring that if you were in a bookstore you could at least read and maybe form complete sentences and you probably were not some Neanderthal ready to pounce-they tended to work the bar scene).                       

This is Bessie’s story though so forget all that other stuff. Well it is almost all Bessie’s story once you learn how I became a devotee back in the mid-1960s and thus would have reason to pick up an HBO DVD in 2016 about her working career back in the 1920s and 1930s when she went “from hunger” to big-time stardom and back-probably one of the early crossover singers-crossover here meaning a black woman who white audiences, at least hip white audiences, could relate to long before guys like rock and roller Chuck Berry did in the 1950s when he told Beethoven to roll over a new sheriff was in town. After that voice haunted me, couldn’t get the song out of my head all day, Empty Bed Blues was the song if I didn’t mention it before I did what came naturally I went back to my growing up home in Riverdale, a town about forty miles west of Cambridge to check with my friend, Pete Markin, the now long gone late Peter Paul Markin to see what he knew about her.

See I was/am a child of rock and roll and while back then I was influenced by some blues stuff if it passed through the rock filter like that Chuck Berry who just mentioned I was not knowledgeable about the genre then. Markin was the “max daddy” as he called himself of everything in the blues night. He had become an aficionado, had dragged the rest of us somewhat kicking and screaming to at least a surface appreciation of the art form by accident. He had been trying to get Rockin’ Eddie’s Rock and Roll Hour on the locale radio station, WJDA, one Sunday night (I won’t say one dark Sunday since I don’t remember Peter saying what kind of night it was and I would not remember this far removed what kind of night it was anyhow) when he got some static on his transistor radio and then clear as a bell Be-Bop’s Benny Blues Hour out of WABC in Chicago came ripping through the night. The song that was being played when he tuned in was Howlin’ Wolf’s (via Willie Dixon) Little Red Rooster and that was all it took. (Markin had actually heard that song covered by the Rolling Stones on rock station WMEX after the ban against had been lifted in Boston but that gravelly voice of the Wolf coming out of some Delta mist had put Mick to shame.) After that night you almost couldn’t talk to Markin about sassy old rock without him coming at you with the blues genesis theory of the birth of rock and roll. He had picked up on Bessie and many of the other female blues singers like Ma Rainey, Mame Smith, the salacious Lucille Bogan, Memphis Minnie and a bunch of other women named Smith (maybe they were hiding from something or someone with that common name-or maybe Smith DNA naturally gravitated toward the blues. The women actually were more popular back in those days than the men.             

So Markin had, as was his wont, filled me in on more than I would ever need to know about Bessie, about the Empress of the Blues as he called her without a hint of mockery in his voice. (I had personally over the years drifted to the bluesy jazzy voice of Billie Holliday who I would have dubbed the Empress if we were going for royal titles in a democratic age). Told about her tough cotton field beginnings and her tragic Mister James Crow-induced death at a fairly early age. Turned me on to a few of her classics like Down-Hearted Blues, Gin House Blues  and Hustlin’ Dan. A few days later (the same day I went back to Paperback Booksmith to “pick-up” that snippy clerk) I went to Sandy’s Record Shop located between Harvard and Central Square to see what he had in stock (last I knew he was still there-at least he was a couple of years ago). Lucky me I was able to get a second-hand set of four double sides albums (with liner notes intact) put out by Columbia Records. I still have all those scratched to perdition records. Ah, very heaven.             

So when I was browsing the Amazon site for some DVDs recently it was not a stretch, I didn’t have to scratch my head to figure out who she was and to see what Queen Latifah had done with a biopic of Bessie. I am here to say that Queen Latifah is Bessie. Not necessarily in her mannerisms, in her style or even in her voice but the whole performance left me speechless. You could almost see the “ghost” of Bessie coming barrel-assing at you at one hundred and ten. If you don’t believe me check the video on YouTube of Bessie singing Saint Louis Blues.