The Death of Bessie Smith

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The Death of Bessie Smith is a 1959 one-act play by American playwright Edward Albee, written in 1959 and premiered in West Berlin the following year. The play is based around a series of conversations between staff of a 'Whites-only' hospital in Mississippi on the day the famous blues singer, Bessie Smith is brought in (and denied admittance) following a car crash.

The incident that gives the play its title and around which the action centers is based upon a myth that was largely accepted as fact until convincing evidence to the contrary appeared in the original 1972 edition of Bessie, a biography of the singer ^[1]

As widely believed, Bessie Smith did die following a car crash, but she was never refused admittance to a white hospital, which is the premise of Albee's play. She was taken directly to the Afro-American Hospital in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where she died some seven hours later. The myth of racial discrimination had its origin in an article by jazz writer/producer John Hammond, that appeared in the November 1937 issue of Down Beat magazine.

The character of Bessie Smith is only referred to in Albee's play and does not appear on stage. In early performances Albee did not even wish music or pictures of her to be used.

Plays by Edward Albee

The Zoo Story | The Death of Bessie Smith | The Sandbox | Fam and Yam | The American Dream | Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? | The Ballad of the Sad Cafe | Tiny Alice | Malcolm | A Delicate Balance | Everything in the Garden | Box | Sandbox | All Over | Seascape | Listening | Counting the Ways | The Lady From Dubuque | Lolita | The Man Who Had Three Arms | Finding the Sun | Marriage Play | Three Tall Women | The Lorca Play | Fragments | The Play About the Baby | The Goat, or, Who is Sylvia? | Occupant | Peter & Jerry