Forever the ‘Empress Of The Blues’, Bessie Smith was and always will remain one of the pioneering superstars of black American music. Throughout the 1920s, Bessie had few peers as a blues woman, and fewer still who could match the sales that her long string of 78s racked up. With one or sometimes two new releases a month, it would have been hard for anyone to catch her. The quality of those releases made it almost impossible. Bessie began recording in the ‘acoustic’ era but was one of the first artists to record using the new electrical process that was introduced in 1925. This new Jasmine CD release brings you as many of Bessie’s first year of electrical recordings as a) have survived and b) we could fit into one collection. Although it doesn’t include all her classics it offers a generous sampling of them among its 24 tracks, some with just Bessie and piano accompaniment, others featuring a fine small band of musicians of a calibre that you would expect such a blues megastar to be able to work with. Inevitably there have been a number of digital compilations of Bessie’s work in the 40 years since CDs came onto the market, this is the first to specifically focus on one year in the recording life of this sublime performer and to watch the evolution, from a fairly early stage, of one of the greatest blues legends of all.