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Bye, bye-bye, baby, bye-bye.
I may be seeing you around
When I change my living standard and I move uptown.
Bye-bye, baby, bye-bye.
So long, my honey, so long.
Too bad you had to drift away
'Cause I could use some company
Right here on this road, on this road I'm on today.
("Bye, Bye Baby," Powell St. John)
Introduction
Bessie Smith-the woman who under Ma Rainey's tutelage later defined the musical genre of blues in the early part of the twentieth century-"lay in an unmarked grave" (Kay 132) from 1937 until August 1970, when Juanita Greene, President of the North Philadelphia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) (whose mother had cleaned house for Smith) and Janis Joplin purchased a marble gravestone to commemorate her life and to commiserate her death (Albertson Bessie 233; Echols 237; Kay 133). Joplin died less than two months later on October 4,1970, ironically on the same date that Smith had been buried 33 years earlier. This memorial event symbolically marked only one of the many connections between the women's lives. Bessie Smith and Janis Joplin have both been described-by their biographers, their fans, and their critics-as heavy-drinking, hard-living, loose-loving, flamboyant, lewd, lascivious, even down-right-raunchy women. For many people, their unforgettable music, their short lives, and their tragic deaths were defined by excess. Linda Gottfried, close friend and confidante to Janis Joplin, believed Joplin to have been Bessie Smith, "Empress of the Blues," reincarnated (Joplin 126). Eerily echoing Gottfried's belief, a 1969 issue of Neu'suvek, featuring Joplin on the cover, proclaimed the "Rebirth of the Blues." (Posthumously, Joplin was also featured in a 1974 Time article curiously called "The New Bisexuals" (Garber 19).) In a biography of her sister's life, Laura Joplin also notes the influences, musical and personal, of blues and jazz legends Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Billie Holiday, and Willie Mae Thornton on Joplin. Laura Joplin writes, "She used her innate drama and power to project her personality into her music. She wore bright satiny clothes and feathers in her hair. She was foulmouthed and bisexual" (126); it is not until the next sentence, "her brief period of public acclaim came between 1923 and 1928" (126), that the pronoun referent, "she," is...