'The Last of the Anglo-Saxon Poets'

“Hooray for Christmas, as Bessie Smith calls rather cautiously on one of her tracks, and if all your friends like jazz it will present no problem.” 

It’s December 14, 1963, and Philip Larkin is reviewing an assortment of jazz releases for the Daily Telegraph in time for the holiday. The song in question is “At the Christmas Ball” from 1925. Smith is one of Larkin’s favorites, along with Armstrong and Bechet. The review begins with a memorable simile:

 

“Early Ellington records are like vintage cars They are not as he or anyone else would make nowadays, but historically they are still important and aesthetically they are still delightful.”

 

One might say the same of most of our favorite artists, especially poets. In 1987, Murray Kempton wrote a column for New York Newsday titled “Bessie Smith: Poet.” Kempton had seen Smith perform shortly before her death in 1937.  He writes:

 

“We have no way to know the source of most of her lyrics; she must have picked up a good many in the carnivals and others were written for her by hands more practiced. But a lot of these words have to be her very own and they bring us the sense of being in the company of the last of the Anglo-Saxon poets.”

 

[Larkin’s review is collected in his All What Jazz (1985). You’ll kind Kempton’s column in Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events (1994). The photo I took of a recently opened boutique here in Houston.]