Blues Empress in Black Chattanooga: Bessie Smith and the Emerging Urban South is a book written by Michelle R. Scott on the roots of Bessie Smith, and the growing urban area of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Rather than detailing Smith’s upbringing, musical success, and her untimely death, Scott writes mostly about the evolvement of the transient urban town and the path that led to Bessie’s career. The book starts in the antebellum era in pre-Civil War East Tennessee and goes through the mid-1920’s when Smith signed a contract with Columbia records to become their Blues Empress. Throughout the book, you learn about culture, migration to urban areas, industrialization, and the development of black communities in Chattanooga. One of the most significant themes within the book is not about Smith’s family upbringing, but rather the city in which she was born and where began her musical journey. Scott takes you on a journey with a mini-history lesson on the environment in which African-Americans lived during Bessie’s early life, and the half-century before, in the budding urban town of Chattanooga. You get a glimpse of the treatment of slaves and freedmen, and their life during the war at Camp Contraband. After the war, …show more content…
Scott draws her information from many different sources to detail the migration into the city, and the evolvement of emancipated slaves to working class blacks during the industrialization of Chattanooga. The sources for Smith’s early years are few and far between. Scott makes many assumptions about Smith’s youth and development into a performer. Though she does make assumptions, she doesn’t stretch these assumptions into far-fetched myths about Smith’s childhood. Of the sources she does have, Scott does a great job of interpreting the information, and notes when she is making a statement that doesn’t have a factual source behind