Jackie Kay - Bessie Smith

There are some stones that open in the night like flowers.

Down in the red graveyard where Bessie haunts her lovers.

There are stones that shake and weep in the heart of night.

Down in the red graveyard where Bessie haunts her lovers.

Why do I remember the blues?

I am five or six or seven in the back garden;

the window is wide open;

her voice is slow motion through the heavy summer air.

Jelly roll. Kitchen man. Sausage roll. Frying pan.

Inside the house where I used to be myself,

her voice claims the rooms. In the best room even,

something has changed the shape of my silence.

Why do I remember her voice and not my own mothers?

Why do I remember the blues?

My mothers voice. What was it like?

A flat stone for skitting. An old rock.

Long long grass. Asphalt. Wind. Hail.

Cotton. Linen. Salt. Treacle.

I think it was a peach.

I heard it down to the ribbed stone.

I am coming down the stairs in my parents house.

I am five or six or seven. There is fat thick wallpaper

I always caress, bumping flower into flower.

She is singing. (Did they play anyone else ever?)

My fathers feet tap a shiny beat on the floor.

Christ, my father says, thats some voice shes got.

I pick up the record cover. And now. This is slow motion.

My hand swoops, glides, swoops again.

I pick up the cover and my fingers are all over her face.

Her black face. Her magnificent black face.

Thats some voice. His shoes dancing on the floor.

There are some stones that open in the night like flowers.

Down in the red graveyard where Bessie haunts her lovers.

There are stones that shake and weep in the heart of night.

Down in the red graveyard where Bessie haunts her lovers.

There are some people whose voices ring out across the centuries, who, even after they have gone, possess a strange ability to still be effortlessly here. Bessies voice has that quality. Unsettled most of her life, she still unsettles. Try to imagine asking her about anything that is going on today, from the floods, to the climate crisis, to the coronavirus, to the Black Lives Matter movement, to the Me Too movement, to the refugee crisis, and you would find an answer in her rich and resonant blues narratives. We could match any of todays troubles and anxieties to her music. The blues are not past. Bessies blues are current.

Her narratives are even eerily prescient she sang about floods, about sexual abuse, about financial crashes, about sudden changes in circumstances, changes in love. There isnt anything that life could currently throw at her that would surprise her. Her blues sought the truth the truth in all its multiplicity; the hard truth, the strangest truth, the supernatural truth. The whole truth has a different ring to it in the world of Bessies blues. In these surreal times, where distinguishing the truth is a challenge, Bessies voice has a pure and true ring. She is telling it like it is. Theres nothing fake about her. And because she was not afraid to bear witness to her times, to rising racism and the Ku Klux Klan, to inequalities and class differences, to hypocrisy and the dangers of celebrity, she also manages to bear witness to our times. Pioneers dont just lead the way in their own time; they continue to refract and reflect our time. Pioneers can perform the magic trick of being contemporary in any time.

For my twelfth birthday, my dad bought me my first double album. It was Bessie Smiths Any Womans Blues. I was drawn to the two-sided picture of her on the cover, the smiling Bessie and the sorrowful one. It wasnt long before I made her part of my extended imaginary black family, before I felt not just as if she belonged to me, but as if I belonged to her. She felt like kith and kin. She felt like kindred. There was something in her that seemed to recognise something in me. Well, thats what we think with people whose writing or music or art we love it is not so much that we see something in their work, but that we are deluded enough to imagine they might understand us, comprehend the complex workings of our minds. They feel like soul mates. We feel known, intimately known.

Now, more than twenty years since I first wrote about Bessie, that feeling is so ingrained in me that it feels a little awkward to state it. It feels like stating the obvious. Im older now than she ever got to be, twenty years older, and yet trying to imagine her at fifty-seven or at seventy-seven is not all that difficult. Not difficult because the people you choose to accompany you dont die, they hold up one of lifes oddly glinting mirrors. Youre not the young girl that loved Bessie Smith any more and danced to the blues in your living room. You are a fifty-seven-year-old woman whose odd reflection in the waiting mirror perhaps Bessie would catch? Youre not the same any more. Youve changed physically, emotionally; youve learnt and unlearnt different things. But you still love Bessie. She is one of those folks you go to for comfort and understanding when the going gets rough, the rough gets going.

Bessie Smith is the perfect antidote to these times. She tells no lies. Her voice is still authentic. Her stories seem ever more urgent. Shes still troubled. Her eyebrows still furrowed. Loving her blues, the exact timbre of her voice, no longer even feels like taste or choice. It goes deeper than that. I dont know what gave me the idea back in 1996 when I first wrote Bessie to write about my life and write about her life together. How odd to try and do both at the same time. I wasnt interested in writing a standard kind of biography. I think I was interested in how much our interests and passions form part of our own identity how we beg and borrow and become ourselves, how much of a big mixture we are. I was interested in the point of intersection.

I was working on my novel Trumpet at the time when Nick Drake asked me if I would put on hold what I was writing and choose a gay icon to write about instead. It was strange. I was having trouble with Trumpet in trying to find the right tone to tell the story and, strangely, returning to the blues and immersing myself in Bessie and in her contemporaries clarified the voice of Trumpet. I started to see the style of the book as a piece of music. The whole chapter called Music in Trumpet was directly inspired by thinking about how the blues journeyed into jazz. I was trying to find a metaphor for that fluidity in our own gendered identities. I was thinking about how we imagine states of identity to be static when they are in fact fluid. I had arrived at the conclusion that my hero, Joss Moody, would be called he after he made the decision to present himself to the world as a man, and that to refer to him as she would be a kind of an affront. Writing about Bessie and her blues, about her very fluid identity, how she was as at home in pearls and plumes as in a mans suit, allowed me to create Joss Moody. The two books seem twinned. Writing about Bessie unleashed something and Trumpet kind of sprang to life.

Twenty-odd years on it is amazing how much has changed in a relatively short period of time. The shift in attitudes to gay and trans people has probably been the biggest social change of our lifetime. It is not to say that prejudice does not still exist but still it would have been impossible to imagine all the terms that have so quickly become part of our new vocabulary; we have walked into a changing language about ourselves, which is still shifting, still open to question, still partly greeted with derision in places, but which none the less has reshaped the gendered landscape that we lived in just twenty years ago. I want every bit of it, Bessie sang.