Creativity Quote by Kate Smith

“I have never known stage-fright at any time” lands like a quiet flex, but it’s also a statement about labor. Coming from Kate Smith, a singer whose voice became a kind of national utility during the radio era, the line doesn’t read as boastful so much as practiced. It’s the sound of someone who treats performance less as exposure and more as assignment: show up, deliver, anchor the room.

The intent is control. Stage fright is the romantic myth of the tortured artist; Smith rejects that script. Her persona was steadiness, not volatility - a voice meant to reassure households through the Depression, war years, and the mass rituals of broadcast culture. In that context, admitting fear would undercut the job. Radio demanded intimacy without visible vulnerability; you had to sound unshakable while imagining millions of listeners you couldn’t see. “Never known” is doing extra work there: it’s not just “I manage it,” but “it doesn’t enter the equation.”

The subtext is also about legitimacy in an industry that didn’t hand women authority for free. For a big-voiced, non-glamour-coded singer in a fame economy obsessed with image, composure becomes power. If you can’t be the ingenue, you become the institution. Smith’s claim reads as self-mythmaking, yes, but also as a survival strategy: the audience gets certainty, and the performer keeps the upper hand by refusing the language of fragility.