The ghost of Bessie Smith

The ghost of Bessie Smith
by David Benjamin

“… Oh, how that boy can open clam/ No one else is can touch my ham/ I can’t do without my kitchen man…”
— Bessie Smith, “Kitchen Man”

MADISON, Wis. — Picture Bessie Smith, belting out one of her bluesy anthems from the ill-lit corner of a boisterous, drafty roadhouse somewhere in the bayou country of west Mississippi. She’s surrounded by musicians — a drummer and a guitar man, a stand-up piano with a dervish pounding the keys, a couple of sweaty men with horns, a girl too young to be in a joint like this rattling the tambourine — who all seem to be competing with her to be heard. She’s wearing a sequined dress that sparkles and a head scarf that screams. She’s flashing that big ivory grin and leaning back, shaking the moon with every gut-busting note and smutty innuendo. By now, she’s had enough whiskey to be loose, fluid and winkingly lewd as she improvises new lyrics to her own songs.

“You’re a good old wagon, daddy, but you done broke down…”

Bessie’s voice is like a train-whistle cutting into the wee-hours blackness all around, defeating the players but losing its way now and then, here and there, amidst the riotous party in this clapboard tumbledown. Along the bar, drinkers are shouting their orders — barrelhouse kings with feet unstable, sagging, reeling, pounding on the table — and the barkeeps bellowing back. In one corner, three, four, five biglegged women in print dresses and rolled-up stockings trying to sing along but don’t know the words and besides, they’re too high to harmonize. Across the room, two dangerous men arguing thunderously over a high-brown honey who’s given them both the slip as she saunters out the door with a third man who already has his eyes down her dress and a hand on her ass.

The scrape and shuffle of dancing feet on the slivered floor, flesh on flesh, breaking glass and desperate laughter, grunts of lust and stage-whisper refusals (or the giddy squeal of carnal assent), all the while the night invades through gaps and weathered knotholes — owl screams, cricket chirps, the whine of a million skeeters and a choir of baritone bullfrogs — boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM. The only white face in the place is pinched and avid, an itinerant musicologist working a primitive recorder, struggling to capture live on a celluloid cylinder the rude genius of Bessie’s blues. But even this reverential device, its steel stylus hissing softly, sifts into the din that swells all around, mindlessly rising up to drown Bessie’s peerless, joyous performance.

Bessie, of course, minds none of the pandemonium she has wrought. This is her briar patch. Near the stage, a handful of devotees presses close, their ears attuned only to the goddess, their lips following her lyrics, their eyes alight whenever she makes up something mildly obscene from out of the blue. Bessie belts on, her song the pure thread that explains it all, makes it all possible, lends coherence to this stormy evocation of Sodom before the lightning struck.

Somehow, this unlikely scene came to mind as I tried to somehow organize all the media mishegoss stirred up by Vladimir Putin’s meddling in last fall’s U.S. election fiasco. The Electoral College Blues?

I know, Bessie, Vlad and Donald Trump seem the strangest conceivable bedfellows — until you give the thought a chance. More and more, political scandals in America resemble a Reginald Marsh canvas overfull with drunks and floozies, drinking, dancing, shouting, singing, fighting and fornicating inside a broken-down blind pig in the heart of a bog. One side accuses, the other side denies passionately, then turns the tables, crying “You did it! Not we!” A shred of evidence, like a snatch of sliphorn jazz, emerges, blows up so suddenly huge that it collapses upon itself and convinces no one, eventually shaming the hapless sleuth who dug it up. A thousand reporters, commentators, analysts and propagandists chime in, create a hubbub that smothers the few provable facts, befuddles a million minds and spooks the horses into the quicksand.

Investigations — each with a vested interest and a foregone conclusion, each discredited before they’ve begun, each populated by cherrypickers who trumpet half-baked findings that foster their cause, while wailing denial and disgust at opposing panelists promoting their own portfolio of dubious revelations — stumble along fitfully. The ever-rising roar threatens, at last, without resolution, to simply deafen everyone in the joint — beating an empty barrel with the handle of a broom, hard as they are able, boom, boom, BOOM.

There’s a clear thread here somewhere, like Bessie’s voice and her immortal poetry…

When it thunders and lightnin’ and the wind begins to blow
There’s thousands of people ain’t got no place to go…

The thread is the actual evidence. It’s the truth. It’s the testimony of someone who was there, who saw it all, who played a part — the bottleneck guitar, the clarinet, the little gal with the tambourine — who knows the music and sang the words. The thread is John Dean in the Watergate scandal, or Joe Welch at the Army-McCarthy hearings.

The thread is proof, on paper, on film, on that waxy cylinder scratching every note, every syllable and flourish, making it permanent and irrefutable. It’s Nixon’s Oval Office tapes or Denny Hastert’s hush money.

The thread, underlying all the hollering, emotion and disputation, is the truth. It’s as clear and vital as Bessie’s voice. It’s the only reason that all the other noise ever rose up in the first place.

But we don’t have that imaginary record of Bessie singing her from her soul in a fictional backwater dive. We know she did that stuff in joints like that. But there’s no film and there was no musicologist on the premises. It was all drowned out long ago and time has swallowed every trace. Even the songs that we’ve preserved are mere ghosts of the Bessie Smith who gave voice, strength, music, joy and momentary liberation to a people whose swamp was all around and farther from the hope of dry land than any black eye could see.

The truth beneath this latest uproar — this glut of Trumpian uproars — is somewhere, like Bessie’s spirit. It can’t be silenced, it will never die.

But most of us have never heard even Bessie’s ghost. Most of us never will.