T'aint Nobody’s Bizness If I Do
By Gabrielle Wilkinson
ENTERTAINMENT
Edited by Charlotte W
6/14/20262 min read
©Getty Images
Removing the bob pins from your hair after a night spent learning the Charleston, you place a new record on the gramophone: Downhearted Blues by Bessie Smith. A commanding piano introduction fills the room before Bessie’s voice unfurls a haunting tale of a mistreated woman’s heartbreak — a record that sold more than 700,000 copies within six months of its release.
Bessie Smith was the defining blues voice of the Roaring Twenties. Affectionately known as the Empress of the Blues, she became the highest-paid Black performing artist in America, commanding theatres, tent shows and vaudeville stages. Armed with a formidable contralto, she captivated audiences with raw emotional power and a preacher-like stage presence.
Born in Tennessee, Smith was orphaned young and, alongside her siblings, survived by singing and dancing on street corners. She began touring with Ma Rainey before forging a solo career, signing with Columbia Records in 1923. Over her career she recorded around 160 songs, collaborating with musicians such as Louis Armstrong on St. Louis Blues.
In the 1929 short film St. Louis Blues, Smith plays a woman betrayed by her lover; when she confronts him, he knocks her to the ground and leaves her pleading. The song became one of the decade’s most enduring blues standards and was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Smith herself, however, criticised the recording, believing Armstrong’s cornet overshadowed her voice. The film also reflects the racialised imagery of its time; from colourist casting to caricatured depictions of Black leisure, the motion picture captures the segregationist reality of the Jim Crow South, where discriminatory laws divided schools, churches and hospitals.
“There ain’t nothing I can do, or nothing I can say
That folks don’t criticise me, but I’m going to do just as I want to anyway.”
Released in 1924, T'ain't Nobody's Biz-ness If I Do became an early anthem of female autonomy. Decades before You Don't Own Me and Respect, Smith asserted a woman’s right to self-determination. Her legacy shaped later vocalists, including Billie Holiday, who cited the Empress of the Blues as a formative influence and later re-recorded the song in tribute.
“She showed me the air and taught me how to fill it,” wrote Janis Joplin.
Once dismissed as rough-voiced and rejected by Black Swan Records, Bessie Smith ultimately taught generations of blues singers to claim their sound and their freedom because, as she sang, it ain’t nobody’s business if you do.
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