In the OUT LINES series, a biography of blues singer Bessie Smith which examines her artistic success and personal tragedies, provides information about her lesbian affairs and unhappy marriage and considers how these factors influenced her music.

As a young black girl growing up in Glasgow, Jackie Kay found in Bessie Smith someone with whom she could identify and idolize. Her fascinating and extraordinary Outline mixes fact and fiction, poetry and prose as she relates the tempestuous life of the greatest blues singer who ever lived. She takes us from Bessie's early years of poverty in Chattanooga, and her time spent with Ma and Pa Rainey in the Moses Stokes Travelling Show, through her rapid rise to fame and fortune, her disasterous marriage to Jack Gee, her many lesbian affairs, her raucous and wild lifestyle on the road in her famous yellow Pullman railroad car, to her slide from popularity during the depression years and her eventual tragic death in a car crash in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1937.