Bertha Mae Spivey
Bertha Mae Spivey was born in Lowndes County, Alabama, in 1880. Her mother, who died young of the tuberculosis, had a beautiful voice. Her father played bass drum and was in charge of putting up a tent for a traveling medicine show, performing in blackface. Bertha Mae grew up on the road, often sleeping out in a wagon under the stars, dancing to fiddle and harmonica in the show by the time she was eight, always aware that show people were different. Her first husband, the love of her life, died of yellow fever while serving in the Spanish war in Cuba. Her second, a trumpet player addicted to Chinese opium and racetracks, ran off with a contortionist. By then Bertha Mae was in her early twenties, a featured singer on the southern circuit, billed as “the Belle of Cotton Country” and warbling sentimental favorites. Older men wanted to protect her, and she let a few of them, for a while. One became her manager, who protected her from having too much money by investing all her savings in a poker game that he left, cold, on a mortician’s stretcher.
She played Tampa and Jacksonville and Valdosta and Macon, Atlanta, Charleston, Wilmington, Washington, Lexington, Memphis, Jackson, Birmingham, Montgomery, Shreveport, Baton Rouge and New Orleans and pretty much every town between them. In New Orleans she sang with Jelly Roll Morton and all the others and picked up the new sound they were creating, a style she could put her dead lover and her cheating trumpet player and her card-playing manager and all the rest of it into and pretty soon her billing was “Baroness of the Blues”, coming out with an ermine cape and a crown of feathers, singing sad and low then hot and sexy then sly and funny. First it was traveling in the nicest of the colored passenger cars, then she had a whole show around her- musicians and jugglers and comedians and dancers and even her own dressing room when she got there- up to Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland, the places country people had run to escaping the rope and torch and Jim Crow indignities, looking for a better life. The Paramount company recorded her, with Tampa Red and Georgia Tom (who later got religion and wrote “Precious Lord”) backing her up, and the records sold and led to even better bookings, as well as the nicest of the colored hotels and her own dresser and hair stylist and chauffeur, what the Creoles in New Orleans would call an entourage. There were still older men who wanted to protect her but by now she could protect herself, you had to go through so many people to even get near her and then it was the Baroness they were after and not a forty year old woman lonely in a strange town.
She had a few pretty ones before Slick, who were happy to spend whatever money she gave them and go out and brag and get in trouble, but he was the first one she sensed something sweet and real in, a twenty year old with big eyes for the glitter but no fence around his heart. And he came to hear her sing every night, every night, sat near the front with a big happy smile on his pretty face, really listening as if he’d never heard those songs a thousand times. He’d go off and be naughty now and then, probably something wrong with him if he hadn’t, but he knew who his Sweet Momma was, was there when she was so tired she could cry, knew how to touch her, how to talk to her.
When the stock market crashed so did the record company and so did the circuit, a slow-motion crash for Bertha Mae that saw the hotel rooms get smaller and the audiences thin out and the chauffeur and the dresser and the hair stylist let go, singing with the house musicians now instead of carrying her own band and it was too bad because she was singing better than ever. One night singing in a club that was more of a warehouse in Mobile she saw more customers passed out than conscious, only Slick with his big sweet smile really listening to her, and decided it was time to come off the road.
They were driving to visit her mother’s people, Slick the chauffeur now, when they passed through Harmony and saw the house for sale. They were talking to the owner on the front steps for less than ten minutes but when she turned to go there were two dozen faces staring up from the street, come to see the Baroness in the flesh. The War was just starting then, lively times in the county what with the Army base full up, and when Tyrone Purvis who she knew by reputation- good steady piano man, always on time, burns up the keys- appeared in her parlor with his hat in his lap asking would she like to appear at his new roadhouse it sounded like fun. And it was, the Army boys hungry for any entertainment and clapping and laughing and some of them even knew who she was, or had been. It was the nice part of performing without the grind of the road. She had Slick negotiate her fee, of course, give him some sense of being the one in control, and he always paid for his drinks at the Honeydripper like a gentleman. Strange to feel sad at the War ending.
It’s been hard lately, nobody much in the club, singing for herself more than anything else, and then all the ailments. So hard to sleep. And something new, a prickling on her skin, a fear in the pit of her stomach. She hasn’t been frightened of anything in so long.
