Jackie Kay (Trumpet), a former National Poet for Scotland, traces her lifelong enchantment with the blues to a gift she received from her father at age 12. To Kay, an adopted Black girl in a drab, white suburb of Glasgow, the double album, Bessie Smith's Any Woman's Blues, was a revelation of recognition: "I knew then of no black Scottish heroes I could claim for my own. I reached out and claimed Bessie."
First published in 1997, Kay's Bessie Smith is an achingly poignant tribute to the influential singer heralded as the Empress of Blues. Imbuing her portrait of Smith with the same haunting resonances that have made the singer's music so indelible, Kay uses poetry and memoir to escape the confines of conventional biography. One passage, a mournful prose poem in which Kay catalogues the imagined contents of a lost trunk of Smith's belongings, is particularly moving.
By no means does Kay's unconventional approach signal a dearth of scholarship. With a nimble command of primary and secondary sources, she places Smith in a larger tradition of American blueswomen that includes Smith's mentor, Ma Rainey. Kay offers a powerful corrective to popular contemporary narratives about the blues, which routinely belittle the contributions of these "Blues Queens" in favor of a "stereotyped romanticisation of the old bluesmen."
That these questions of authenticity are still unresolved points to the complexity at the heart of Kay's fascination with the blues: "A blues song, like a poem, opens itself to multiple interpretations." --Theo Henderson, bookseller at Ravenna Third Place Books in Seattle, Wash.