As biographer Jackie Kay notes, so many tall tales about Bessie Smith have sprung up over the decades that it's all but impossible to tell which of them are true. Did she physically batter a man she thought was stealing from her, only to later learn the culprit was her own no-good husband? Did she bail Ma Rainey out of jail after the Chicago police busted a same-sex orgy? Did she knock down a white society matron who tried to lock lips at a fancy party? Did she single-handedly scare off a group of Klansmen who showed up at one of her tent shows?

In the end, did Bessie Smith die because a white hospital turned her away after her touring car hit a parked truck on an unlit road? The accident happened, and Smith did die in a Black hospital; we don't know whether she might have fared better if a closer option was available, but we do definitively know that "nobody bought her a headstone for thirty-three years." That omission was finally remedied in 1970; Janis Joplin, an early donor to the fund, skipped the unveiling ceremony so (it's believed) her celebrity wouldn't distract from the occasion.

Kay's probing and sympathetic biography, a beautifully-composed volume originally published in 1997, has now been reissued with a new introduction in which the author notes, "Bessie Smith is the perfect antidote to these times. She tells no lies. Her voice is still authentic. Her stories seem ever more urgent. She's still troubled. Her eyebrows still furrowed. Loving her blues, the exact timbre of her voice, no longer even feels like taste or choice. It goes deeper than that."

The author is a legend in her own right. A Black woman born in Scotland and raised there by white adoptive parents, Kay came upon Bessie Smith as a revelation. While she couldn't relate to Smith's specific milieu (when she heard Smith's song about 19 feckless men, she thought, "Mr. Aird, Mr. Tweedie, Mr. Dunsmore, Mr. Macintosh, Mr. Murray, Mr. Kerr, Mr. Cochrane. Which one was no doggone good?"), Kay adopted Smith as a personal hero, a truth-teller of charisma and complexity.

Bessie Smith, born in 1894 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, demonstrated from childhood that she had a remarkable voice — which she used to help sustain the family by singing on street corners when her parents both died before she turned 10. While still a teenager she joined the Moses Stokes Traveling Show, where she was mentored by her troupemate Ma Rainey. Like Rainey, Smith found national fame thanks in part to her popular recordings; making records was still so novel when Smith first entered a studio in 1923 that she'd bring a recording horn on tour to demonstrate to live audiences how it was done. (It was done acoustically, which meant the source audio had to be loud: Smith and Rainey didn't have the luxury of crooning like the jazz singers they influenced.)

Kay, who was poet laureate of Scotland from 2016-21, draws an affectionate and probing portrait of her subject, occasionally breaking into Smith's voice in lyrical interludes that suggest the singer-songwriter's no-nonsense sensibility. In one poignant passage, for example, she imagines Smith describing the contents of a rich trunk of historical documentation that was tragically lost to history after Smith's ex-husband — characteristically looking for more money — refused to cooperate with an early would-be biographer.

One of the many ways this slim but substantial volume excels is in its exploration of the particular brand of celebrity enjoyed by the early blues greats. Kay reminds readers that while historical memory of the blues has crystallized around a lonely man standing at a country crossroads with a guitar, the women whose work defined the genre were grand entertainers whose singing was only the crown jewel in a range of talents that included — in Smith's case — dancing, comedy, and male impersonation. ("I bet she made a handsome man," writes Kay.) Smith dressed glamorously both onstage and off, and she was the life of a wide, lifelong range of parties. Her crowdpleasing favorite "Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer" celebrates New York "rent parties."

The last lines of this Harlem party song sum Bessie up — "Slay me 'cause I'm in my sin, / Slay me 'cause I'm full of gin." The gutsy way she sings that "yeah" is like nobody else. She drags that yeah out of herself. She knew how to let herself go; didn't give a damn what anyone thought of her.

Smith enjoyed the constant sexual attentions of both women and men; at its peak her touring troupe included a dozen women, and she incited jealousy by bragging she could have "one every night" if she so desired. Her most intimate relationship with a woman, though, may never have involved sex at all. Ruby Walker, the niece of Smith's husband Jack, was the singer's constant companion for nearly a decade. "Ruby was Bessie's right-hand woman," writes Kay. "She was the one who planned, who covered for her, who lied to Jack for her." Kay imagines what a single kiss between the two of them might have felt like. "It was like kissing myself," thinks Smith in Kay's words.

As Kay observes, many of Smith's relationship-oriented lyrics (she both wrote her own songs and performed those written by others, such as "Gimme a Pigfoot") could be interpreted as regarding either men or women. There are a fair number, though, that call out men specifically. While the songs' sources doubtless range from very concrete instances to flights of the artist's imagination, Kay writes that just about all of Smith's fed-up lyrics about men could reference her first husband, Jack Gee.

Kay acknowledges that she fails to understand what kept Smith in thrall for years to a man so abusive that the blueswoman would sometimes throw herself down stairs just to injure herself before Jack could do it. Their relationship was forged in gunfire: on their very first date, Gee was shot and nearly killed; Smith nursed him through weeks of recuperation, and the two wed just as Smith released her hit debut single, "Downhearted Blues." Their profoundly dysfunctional relationship would last for several years, their marriage only ending when Gee took up with a new protégé whose career he'd launched with Smith's money. It was in the wake of their breakup that Smith recorded her haunting "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out."

Smith did find a happier second marriage, and though her life was cut tragically short by the car accident at age 43, she lived long enough to see classic blues fade in popularity; as with her contemporary Rainey, her star slowly faded even as her legend grew. Importantly, Kay points out that Smith had as much influence in jazz as she did in the blues; artists including Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday (not to mention Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra) built on Smith's sound.

The brilliance of Kay's book is that it embraces Smith in all her complexity. We start where Kay did, with competing images of the artist in agony and ecstasy; then we turn to the music, and learn more about the life. Along the way, Kay is frank about what we can know, what we never know, and what's none of our damn business. While few readers will achieve the depth of Kay's fascination, they'll at least all learn not merely to think of Bessie Smith when they're down and out: this singer brought joy to millions, as well as voicing their pain.

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