Bessie Tucker (c. 1906 – January 6, 1933) was an American classic female blues, country blues, and Texas blues singer and songwriter. She is known to have recorded 24 tracks, seven of which were alternate takes. Her songs include "Penitentiary" and "Fryin' Pan Skillet Blues".
Bessie Tucker was probably born in East Texas about 1906. Her exact birthplace and date have not been adequately determined or documented. Greenville in Hunt County, Texas, and Rusk in Cherokee County, Texas, have both been suggested as probable birthplaces. The researchers Bob Eagle and Eric LeBlanc state, on the basis of her death certificate, that she was born in Rusk, Cherokee County, Texas, the daughter of Georgia (née Connor) and John Chris Tucker. The 1910 federal census recorded the family living in Hill County, where her father worked as a cook in a restaurant. Bessie was listed as age four and had two brothers.
Little is known about the life of Bessie Tucker beyond the few facts related to the music industry. Though she was slight in stature, her recordings reveal a powerfully dark voice. Tucker’s vocal style is best described as a folk variant on the field holler vocal music sung by African American slaves working in the fields and later by African American prisoners sentenced to forced labour. The field holler style is related to the call and response work songs prevalent among cotton and cornfield workers and on sugar and rice plantations. These vocalizations, from which early blues music was derived, served as an emotional outlet and expressed anguish and pent-up feelings. They also served a social purpose as well as represented a source of motivation in repetitive work.
In August 1928, she recorded a number of songs, most of which she wrote, for the Victor label in Memphis, Tennessee. She was accompanied on piano by the Dallas-born K. D. Johnson. This recording session yielded her best-known song, "Penitentiary". The subject of the song was reputedly not unknown to Tucker. A second session in Dallas followed in October 1929, at which she was again accompanied by Johnson and by the guitarist Jesse Thomas. Tucker’s blues are mesmerising – grainy, tough-minded songs of deceit, desertion and violence. In Penitentiary Blues she contemplates killing an uncaring man, while in Got Cut All To Pieces she threatens the woman who has stolen her lover. Fryin’ Pan Skillet Blues begins more cheerfully, with a cry of ‘Bring me some black-eyed peas!’, but she is in the kitchen to entice a man to sample her cooking. And Fort Worth And Denver Blues is a Texas train blues underscored by a piano part full of lonesomeness and impermanence.
After these recordings Tucker disappeared from performing, apparently for good; no data exists on the later events of her life except that the 1930 census recorded Tucker as living in her father’s household in Dallas, and her occupation was listed as “sales lady” for the Victrola industry. Only one photograph of Tucker has been identified. According to her death certificate, she died of pulmonary tuberculosis at Woodlawn Hospital in Dallas on January 6, 1933. The document stated place of burial as Woodland Cemetery but did not specify whether the graveyard was located in Dallas County. Some researchers have surmised that her burial site is in Woodland Cemetery in Red River County, Texas.
(Edited from Texas State Historical Association, Loudersound.com & Wikipedia)