As a black girl growing up with adopted white communist parents in Glasgow, poet Jackie Kay adopted as a role model and deep emotional life-partner the blues singer Bessie Smith from Chattanooga, outlining the Deep South in the atlas with a yearning Scottish Forefinger. This outline of Bessie, her raucous on-the-road relationships, proffesionalism and death and how it all influenced Jackie’s character and work, weaves Bessie’s songs explicitely with Jackie’s poems, and Bessie’s lesbian life implicitely with Jackie’s. A passionate, personal, imaginative insight in to Bessie’s art.

Ruth Padel Daily Mail 16.11.97

This beautiful book offers the most vivid evocation of Bessie Smith I have ever read. Straightforward narrative is enriched by one or two of Kay’s excellent poems, poems by others, the words of many blues, quotes from witnesses and experts, and imaginative reconstructions and explorations. Kay’s wise and perceptive book, though quite short, is epic in scope and a fitting tribute to this exceptional artist.

Ian Carr BBC Music Magazine Feb 98

Bessie was the world’s first pop star and people were wild about her, because as Kay tells us, like all popular heroes, " She filled people with awe and longing", with, "a sense of themselves". Jackie Kay’s book is less a biography that a tribute.She blends biography with social history, dramatic monologue, and her own personal reminiscences to create an interpretive and a touching account of this great blueswoman.

Debbie Kilbride. DIVA Jan 98

Jackie Kay has listened to that soaring and growling voice with a rapt attention probably denied to those of us who are not black, not lesbian and not poets, and is able to transmit it wonderfully. Bessie was in many ways impossible - alcoholic, selfish, capable of arbitrary violence - but she was also a genius, and Ms Kay has paid her true and heartfelt homage.

The Daily Telegraph 25.10.97. George Melly

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