Sergio Mims: New York Times: Overlooked No More: Sissieretta Jones, a Soprano Who Shattered Racial Barriers

Sissieretta Jones in a photograph by Addison N. Scurlock, about 1911. She was perhaps the most famous of an early generation of African-American singers.

Credit H. Lawrence Freeman Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University

Jones performed in gowns that were adorned with a large collection of medals given to her by admirers around the world.

Library of Congress

Sergio A. Mims writes:

The New York Times had an article today about the pioneering late 19th century soprano Sissieretta Jones.

The New York Times

August 15, 2018

Michael Cooper

Sissieretta Jones forged an unconventional path to singing opera, becoming the first African-American woman to headline a concert on the main stage of Carnegie Hall, in 1893.

She sang at the White House, toured the nation and the world, and, in a performances at Madison Square Garden, was conducted by the composer Antonin Dvorak.

But there were color lines she never managed to break, like the one that kept the nation’s major opera companies segregated, denying her the chance to perform in fully staged operas.

“They tell me my color is against me,” she once lamented to a reporter from The Detroit Tribune.

When another interviewer suggested that she transform herself with makeup and wigs, she dismissed the idea.

“Try to hide my race and deny my own people?” she responded in the interview, which was published by The San Francisco Call in 1896. “Oh, I would never do that.” She added: “I am proud of belonging to them and would not hide what I am even for an evening.”

Jones was perhaps the most famous of an early generation of African-American singers who shattered racial barriers in classical music, more than a half-century before Marian Anderson became the first black artist to sing a leading role at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

“Thirty years out of slavery for African-Americans in this country, here she was on the stage of Carnegie Hall,” Jessye Norman, a great African-American diva of the late 20th century, said in an interview.

Nicknamed “the Black Patti” for publicity purposes — a comparison to the white diva Adelina Patti — she became the star of a touring company called the Black Patti Troubadours. All the performers were black, but the managers were white.

Performances would open with skits that had roots in minstrel shows, including songs in dialect called “coon songs.” But they would close in another key entirely: with Jones as the star of an “Operatic Kaleidoscope.” An early show that began with a skit called “At Jolly Coon-ey Island” ended with Jones singing arias by Verdi and Offenbach — in costume, backed by a chorus.

“She took no other part in the show, but was the great drawing card,” James Weldon Johnson, the author, civil rights activist and songwriter wrote in his 1930 book, “Black Manhattan.” He added that she “had most of the qualities essential in a great singer: the natural voice, the physical figure, the grand air, and the engaging personality.”

The Troubadours began touring in 1896, and she held the stage with them and a successor company for nearly two decades.

Matilda Sissieretta Joyner was born in Portsmouth, Va., in either 1868 or 1869 (records disagree); her father was a carpenter and pastor who was born into slavery, and her mother sang in the choir at the nearby Ebenezer Baptist Church. The family moved to Providence, R.I., where a young Sissieretta sang in church and began her vocal training. Her marriage to David Jones ended in divorce; their daughter, Mabel, died at the age of 2.

After studying singing in Providence and Boston, she began appearing in concerts in New York, New England and Philadelphia, and in 1888 went on her first tour, of the Caribbean and South America. On a tour of England, she performed for the Prince of Wales. She sang at the White House in 1892 for President Benjamin Harrison, her first of several appearances there.

But Jones attributed her success to an engagement months later at Madison Square Garden billed as a “Grand Negro Jubilee.” After several instrumentals played by the band, some songs by the Jubilee Chorus and a fight scene, Jones took to the stage of the Garden.

“Wearing long white gloves, a pearl gray gown, and a chestful of medals, Sissieretta smiled broadly as she walked confidently up the steps to the platform in the center of the huge amphitheater,” her biographer, Maureen D. Lee, wrote in “Sissieretta Jones: ‘The Greatest Singer of Her Race,’ 1868-1933” (2012). “If she was nervous, she did not let her audience see any evidence of it.”

Jones was a hit. In its review of her performances there, The New York Dramatic Mirror wrote that she had “one of the most pleasing soprano voices ever heard in this city,” and added that she had a “purity of tone, an accuracy of phrasing, and a richness and a power.”

Jones later said: “I woke up famous after singing at the Garden and didn’t know it.”

She followed in the footsteps of earlier African-American concert singers who upended racial stereotypes, including Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, who began her singing career before the Civil War, Flora Batson and Marie Selika Williams, the first black singer to perform at the White House, in 1878.

Jones became one of the most successful, though, amassing a large collection of medals from international admirers that she often wore at concerts, and becoming one of the best-paid African-American performers of her day, according to modern scholars.

But she frequently had to endure racism, and all manner of indignities.