Since 1944 the Riverside Hotel has provided lodging for traveling musicians, and some, including Sonny Boy Williamson II, Ike Turner, and Robert Nighthawk, lived there. Before that, the building served African Americans of the Delta as the G.T. Thomas Hospital. Blues singer Bessie Smith died there in 1937 from injuries sustained in a car accident while traveling to Clarksdale for a performance. On the morning of September 26, 1937, Smith, known as "the empress of the blues," died at the G.T. Thomas Afro American Hospital after an automobile accident on Highway 61 just outside Clarksdale. Known for her powerful voice and raw emotional delivery, she was the biggest star of the blues in the 1920s and was making a comeback. Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the early 1890s, she lost both parents by age nine, and she and her older sister were left caring for nine younger children. Smith and her brother Andrew performed on the streets to earn money, and in 1912 she began her professional career as a dancer with the Moses Stokes touring company, which also included Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, later called the "mother of the blues." Rainey mentored Smith, who soon became an established performer on the African-American vaudeville circuit. In 1923 Smith made her first recording for Columbia, "Downhearted Blues / Gulf Coast Blues," the first in a string of hits that included "St. Louis Blues," and she soon became the highest paid African-American performer of the 1920s. At the time of her fatal accident, she was traveling in her Packard from Memphis to Clarksdale to spend the night before appearing the next day with the traveling show Broadway Rastus in Darling, about 20 miles northeast. Although it was widely rumored that her death resulted from being refused admission to Clarksdale's white hospital, the facts suggest otherwise, and local ambulance drivers at that time would not have considered taking an African-American patient to a white hospital. Like hospitals, housing accommodations were segregated before the 1970s, and some hotels catered to touring musicians. When the building opened as the Riverside Hotel in 1944, regular guests in the 1940s and 1950s included local blues artists Sonny Boy Williamson II, Robert Nighthawk, Raymond Hill, Ike Turner, Joe Willie Wilkins, James "Peck" Curtis, Johnny O’Neal, and Robert "Dudlow" Taylor. Another notable guest was John F. Kennedy, Jr., who stayed there in 1991.