HEY LOCO FANS – Blues singer Lucille Bogan was born April 1, 1897. She was among the first blues singers to be recorded.
She also recorded under the pseudonym Bessie Jackson. Music critic Ernest Borneman noted that Bogan was one of “the big three of the blues”, along with Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.
She was born Lucile Anderson, probably in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1914, she married Nazareth Lee Bogan and gave birth to a son. Much later she divorced Bogan and married a man 22 years younger than her.
She first recorded vaudeville songs in New York in 1923 and later that year recorded “Pawn Shop Blues” in Atlanta, Georgia. This marked the first time a black blues singer had been recorded outside New York or Chicago. In 1927 she recorded her first big success, “Sweet Petunia”.
By 1930 her songs tended to concern drinking and sex, such as “Sloppy Drunk Blues” and “Tricks Ain’t Walkin’ No More”. She also recorded the original version of “Black Angel Blues”, which was covered by B. B. King and many others. With her experience in some of the rowdier juke joints of the 1920s, many of Bogan’s songs, most of which she wrote herself, have thinly veiled humorous sexual references.
In 1933, she returned to New York, and, apparently to conceal her identity, began recording as Bessie Jackson. She recorded over 100 songs between 1933 and 1935, including some of her biggest commercial successes, “Seaboard Blues”, “Troubled Mind”, and “Superstitious Blues”. Her other songs include “Stew Meat Blues”, “Coffee Grindin’ Blues”, “My Georgia Grind”, “Honeycomb Man”, “Mr. Screw Worm in Trouble”, and “Bo Hog Blues”.
Her final recordings include two takes of “Shave ‘Em Dry”, recorded in New York on Tuesday, March 5, 1935. The unexpurgated alternate take is notorious for its explicit sexual references, a unique record of the lyrics sung in after-hours adult clubs.
She appears not to have recorded after 1935. She moved to Los Angeles shortly before her death in 1948.
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