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Welcome neighbors to the Bitter Southerner podcast from Georgia Public Broadcasting

and the magazine I edit The Bitter Southerner.

I'm your host Chuck Reese and this is the second episode of our second season. And our lesson

today begins with the blues. Specifically the music of Betsy Smith who was born in 1894 in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

He's a deep sea diver with a strode

fed kangaroo.

He's a deep sea diver with a stroke that came around. He can test the bottom and his windows are so long. Now that song called Empty Bed Blues was recorded in 1928.

So you know if you thought nobody saying about sex on the radio until Prince, well, now you've learned something.

But that song by Bessie Smith should remind us of something much more important than the carnal pleasures of life.

It reminds us of a truth that we should honor, which is this.

In the Jim Crow days of the American South, music was one of a very few activities that

allowed our African American brothers and sisters the chance to feel freedom.

Bessie's genre, the blues, was her people's music.

And the music that came the following morning in the church,

gospel, was theirs too.

Oh the way she's raving she must have gone and tried it too. and the drink houses and juke joints that were reserved for them they could let loose on a Saturday night, drink a little,

maybe even wind up doing a little of that good thing. And on Sunday mornings and the church is

reserved for them, they could sing songs of praise to a god powerful

enough to dissolve all the shackles of their life in America.

...