Bessie Smith Cultural Center

Bessie Smith was born in Chattanooga and grew up in Blue Goose Hollow at the foot of Cameron Hill. Both parents were dead by the time she was nine, and that year she began singing and dancing for change on Ninth Street, today's M.L. King Boulevard. She joined the Rabbit Foot Minstrels in 1912, learned from Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, and in 1923 recorded "Down Hearted Blues" for Columbia, which sold 800,000 copies and led the label to start its Race Series. Billed as the Empress of the Blues, she made 156 known recordings.

The Chattanooga African American Museum was founded in 1983 by ten local leaders in what had been the city's Black enterprise zone, the Ninth Street District. In 1996 a renovated building at 200 East M.L. King Boulevard became home to the museum and to Bessie Smith Hall, a performance hall. The two organizations became one in 2009 under the present name, and people here call it "The Bessie."

Exhibits follow Black life in Chattanooga from Native people and slavery to the present and include the story of Ed Johnson. Smith's own end has a myth worth correcting. She was killed in a highway accident outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1937, and the old account that a whites-only hospital turned her away has been found unfounded, although she did have to wait for an ambulance for Black patients. She is buried in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania, under a stone Janis Joplin helped pay for.