Bessie Smith

The stone is the story. Smith died in a highway crash outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1937 and was buried at Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. In 1970 Janis Joplin, who credited her own style to Smith's, contributed funds for a gravestone there. The tale that Smith bled to death after a whites-only hospital turned her away has been shown to be unfounded, though she did have to wait for an ambulance for Black patients. The recordings did the lasting work: 156 are known, and Louis Armstrong played trumpet on nine of them.

What the plaque says

Bessie Smith Born in Chattanooga to black parents, her great talent and determination earned her the title "Empress of the Blues." Death came in a tragic automobile accident in Clarksdale, Miss. In her memory, Columbia Records erected a tombstone with the epitaph "The Greatest Blues Singer In The World Will Never Stop Singing."

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bessie Smith Cultural Center — 0.6 mi
  Chattanooga's African American museum and performance hall on the old Ninth Street, named for the Empress of the Blues, who started out singing for change on that same street.
• Tennessee Aquarium — 1.3 mi
  A river-themed aquarium that opened on May 1, 1992, on the Chattanooga bank where John Ross kept a trading post, tracing a raindrop from the Appalachians to the Gulf.
• Walnut Street Bridge — 1.3 mi
  An 1890 truss bridge now open to walkers, and the place where Alfred Blount in 1893 and Ed Johnson in 1906 were lynched, the case that led to the Supreme Court's only criminal trial.
• Ross's Landing — 1.4 mi
  The Tennessee River landing where Chattanooga began and where Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee people were put on boats and ferried out in 1837 and 1838.

More markers nearby

• The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga — 0.3 mi
• Walden Hospital — 0.4 mi
• Martin Hotel — 0.6 mi
• Joe Engel — 0.6 mi