Bessie Smith: A study of her influence on selected works of Langston Hughes, Edward Albee, Sherley Anne Williams, and James Baldwin

The life, the art, and the death of Bessie Smith has served as an influence on many important writers of the twentieth century. Her music, for Langston Hughes the poet, has bridged the gap between the "lowbrow" stereotypes of blues and its acceptance as a culturally valuable product of African-American society. For Edward Albee in The Death of Bessie Smith, she has become an example of the waste of life and the perversion of possibility in a flawed society. Her independent insistence on living her life on her own terms and her unabashed pride in her race has served as a model, especially for Sherley Anne Williams, whose poems from Some One Sweet Angel Chile praise Bessie Smith as a priestess and as a source for emulation and inspiration. For James Baldwin in his novel Another Country, her music has become the secular spiritual, a comfort in a lonely and confused world.