Bessie Smith: Deep Cuts
Apple Music
Bessie Smith's best-known tracks earned her the honorific Empress of the Blues. But obscure, quirky cuts like the dark, disturbing “Spider Man Blues” (cut decades before the famed superhero of the same name existed) and the campily spooky, ghost-ridden “Haunted House Blues” showed Smith had endless fresh twists on the blues' classic he-done-me-wrong theme.