Bessie Smith
On September 26, 1937, Smith was seriously injured in a car accident while traveling between Memphis, Tennessee, and Clarksdale, Mississippi. Her boyfriend Richard Morgan was driving. People think he might have fallen asleep at the wheel or that he could not tell what speed a slow-moving truck was driving in front of him. Tire marks at the scene showed that Morgan tried to hit the truck by driving around its left side but he hit the back of the truck side-on very fast. Smith, who was in the passenger seat, was hit worst in the crash. Morgan did not have any major injuries. One of the first people to see her after the crash was a doctor. He said that she had a bad injury to her arm which made her lose a lot of blood. She also had bad injuries to the side of her body, and was in shock.