Bessie Smith was the Empress of the Blues -- the highest-paid Black entertainer of the 1920s. A big woman with a bigger voice and an appetite for life that matched it. Downhearted Blues sold 780,000 copies in six months. In 1923. That's not success. That's dominion.

She traveled in her own custom railroad car, drank her male contemporaries under the table, and outsang them too. She recorded with Louis Armstrong. She turned the country blues of the tent shows into an art form that filled theaters. Nobody sang the truth louder, harder, or with less apology.

She died in 1937 after a car accident in Mississippi, bleeding out on the side of the road while a white ambulance refused to take her. The myth about being turned away from a whites-only hospital is disputed. The truth is she died unnecessarily young, and the blues lost its first queen. The voice remains. You can still hear it a century later.

Bessie Smith was the first great blues recording artist -- before Robert Johnson, before anyone. Downhearted Blues moved 780,000 copies. She recorded with Louis Armstrong. She showed a generation of singers what it looked like to take the stage and command it. Dead at 43 on a Mississippi highway. The Empress of the Blues. The voice still sounds like the truth.