Sissieretta Jones

"The Greatest Singer of Her Race," 1868-1933

Maureen D. Lee

• Éditeur: University of South Carolina Press
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781611172812
• Sujet: Media & Performing Arts
• Sous-sujet: Music Biographies

Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones, whose nickname the "Black Patti" likened her to the well-known Spanish-born opera star Adelina Patti, was a distinguished African American soprano during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Performing in such venues as Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden, Jones also sang before four U.S. presidents. In this compelling book-length biography of Jones, Maureen Donnelly Lee chronicles the successes and challenges of this musical pioneer. Lee details how Jones was able to overcome substantial obstacles of racial bias to build a twenty-eight-year career performing in hundreds of opera houses and theaters throughout North America and Europe.

Serving as a role model for other African American women who came after her, Jones became a successful performer despite the many challenges she faced. She confronted head on the social difficulties African American performers endured during the rise of Jim Crow segregation. Throughout her career Jones was a concert singer performing ballads and operatic pieces, and she eventually went on to star in her own musical comedy company, the Black Patti Troubadours. Critics praised Jones as America's leading African American prima donna, with some even dubbing her voice one in a million.

Lee's research, utilizing many Black newspapers, such as the New York Age and the Indianapolis Freeman, concert reviews, and court documents brings overdue recognition to an important historical songstress. Sissieretta Jones: "The Greatest Singer of Her Race, " 1868-1933 provides a comprehensive, moving portrait of Jones and a vivid overview of the exciting world in which she performed.

1

Rhode Island

Sissieretta was born Matilda Sissieretta Joyner on 5 January 1868,¹ three years after the close of the Civil War and seven months before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, which gave black Americans the rights and privileges of citizenship and provided them equal protection of law. Her birthplace was a house with two apartments on Bart Street in Portsmouth, Virginia, between Chestnut and Effingham Streets.² Her father, Jeremiah “Jerry” Malachi Joyner, had been born into slavery in 1833 in North Carolina. At the time of Sissieretta's birth, he was a carpenter as well as pastor and choir leader of the African Methodist Church in Portsmouth.³ He could read and write. Sissieretta's mother, Henrietta, was an illiterate washerwoman, also from North Carolina. She was born about 1845, making her twelve years younger than her husband.⁴ They married in October 1862.⁵ Henrietta was an exceptional soprano and talented musician who sang in the choir at the nearby Ebenezer Baptist Church, the first black Baptist church in Portsmouth. Sissieretta, whose family called her by her first name, Matilda, or her nickname, “Sissy,” was the oldest of three children born to Jeremiah and Henrietta. From an early age, Sissieretta enjoyed singing, often climbing on chairs or tables in the house to sing before her mother chased her out.⁶ Sissieretta's sister, Isabella, born in August 1869, died a year later of “teething,” according to Portsmouth death records. Her brother, Jerry Jr., was born in March 1871, but he died 10 October 1876 at the age of four and a half from an “abcess [sic] in [the] bowels.”⁷ After Jerry's death, likely in late 1876, the family moved to Rhode Island in search of a better life.⁸ Even though Virginia had been readmitted to the Union in January 1870, the state still suffered the aftermath of the war and Reconstruction. Most black residents of the South were poor, were subjected to inadequate schooling, lived in substandard housing, and had limited economic opportunities and health care.⁹ Jeremiah had been offered a ministerial position at an African American church in Providence and probably seized on this opportunity to improve living conditions for his family.

In 1876, the year the Joyners moved to Providence, the United States celebrated its one hundredth anniversary as a free country with a Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Ten million people visited the thirty thousand exhibits during the six-month run of the exposition, where Alexander Graham Bell personally demonstrated his telephone. The exposition, with themes of unity, strength, and prosperity, featured machinery, agriculture, horticulture, arts and crafts, and cultural displays all centered around middle-class life—white middle-class life. African Americans had no exhibit of their own, and there were no African American women featured in the exposition's Women's Building. The only time blacks were included was when they appeared in stereotypical roles singing plantation songs and playing banjos in concessions named “The South” and the “Southern Restaurant.”¹⁰

Although the Civil War had freed African Americans from slavery, it had not guaranteed that whites would accept them readily into American society. By 1876 the Reconstruction period in the South was coming to an end. Federal troops were withdrawn the following year, leaving southern white leaders free to impose their control once again. Segregation returned, lynchings increased, and intimidation and terrorism by white supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan became more prevalent. In the North black citizens maintained their legal rights, but most whites made sure African Americans “knew their place” and kept to themselves.

When the Joyner family arrived in Providence, they found a thriving, vibrant capital city whose population and wealth had doubled in the decade of 1860–70. The profitable sugar and slave trade of the 1760s and early 1770s had been replaced by industrial wealth, with big gains coming from textile and manufacturing industries. For fifty years following the Civil War, Rhode Island was an attractive place to live. “For the state, it was the beginning of a fabulous era of wealth and middle-class comfort.”¹¹ Providence, a city of residential neighborhoods and businesses, had an urban transit system with horsecars on rails linking various parts of the city. Racial segregation of the public schools had been abolished in 1866 throughout Rhode Island, making it possible for seven-year-old Sissieretta to attend Meeting Street Primary School and later Thayer Street Grammar School.¹²

The number of African Americans living in Providence was small compared with the white population. Many black citizens living in the city could trace their roots back to the South. Jeremiah and Henrietta probably felt comfortable settling into life in Providence's black community on the East Side near the Benefit Street area. Jeremiah's ability to read and write gave him an advantage as he tried to adjust in this northern city. The family's first documented address was 20 Congdon Street, across the street from the Congdon Street Baptist Church, one of the city's black churches.¹³ By 1870 Providence's African American population had at least five different churches of their own to attend, all of which originated from the African Union Meeting House. In addition to those five, the black community began six other churches.¹⁴ Jeremiah had moved his family to Rhode Island to preach in one of these churches, but it is not known which one.

Surely the African American church community embraced the Joyners and helped them establish themselves in Providence. Churches were an integral part of African American life. In addition to worship services, these institutions provided a social network that helped people find jobs, introduced strangers, spread news of the community, and provided charity to those in need. The church also was a gathering place where people came together for church suppers, lectures, and musical performances.

Unfortunately for Sissieretta, the Joyner family did not stay together long once they settled in Providence. Sometime in 1878 Jeremiah and Henrietta stopped living together. By 1880, when the federal census was conducted, Henrietta listed herself as the head of household with no mention of Jeremiah. Henrietta, then age thirty-five, and twelve-year-old Sissieretta were living at 7 Jackson Court, still on the East Side of downtown Providence. Henrietta supported herself and Sissieretta by taking in washing and ironing in her home. Census takers reported Henrietta's status as a widow, a term occasionally used for women who were divorced or separated as well as for widows.¹⁵ Years later, in 1889, Jeremiah divorced Henrietta, claiming she was “guilty of the crime of adultery and other gross misbehavior and misconduct in violation of and repugnant to the marriage covenant.” Her reply to these accusations was not included in the existing court records.¹⁶

Henrietta no doubt struggled to provide food and shelter for herself and her young daughter. Jeremiah stayed in Providence at least until 1893. He lived most of those years at 8 Gould's Lane and worked as a carpet cleaner.¹⁷ It is unknown whether he tried to see Sissieretta or helped pay for his daughter's care. Despite the hardships at home, Sissieretta kept singing. “When I was a little girl, just a wee slip of a tad, I used to go about singing. I guess I must have been a bit of a nuisance then for my mouth was open all the time,” she recalled.¹⁸ Little “Sissy” or “Tilly,” as her classmates called her, delighted the other students on “singing teacher day” with her beautiful voice. A schoolmate said her distinctive voice carried over the rest of the class.¹⁹

Not only did Sissieretta sing at school, but she also sang at church, especially at programs and festivals held at the Pond Street Baptist Church. One can imagine the small black child dressed in a stiff, uncomfortable white dress that rustled as she walked on the stage, taking her place before a church hall filled with expectant faces all trained on her. “Oh, I was scared so I could hardly catch my breath,” Sissieretta said, recalling one of her first stage appearances. “When the applause came I almost fell off the stage. But timidity was soon replaced by confidence, and I kept on singing in charitable enterprises.”²⁰ By 1883, when Sissieretta was fifteen, she began formal musical training at the Providence Academy of Music, “under the tutelage of Baroness Lacombe, an eminent Italian preceptor, and Mr. Monros, also eminent in the world of music.”²¹ It is a wonder how she or her mother would have paid for this music instruction.

At age fifteen Sissieretta had things on her mind other than music. That year she met David Richard Jones, a handsome mulatto from Baltimore who was working as a hotel bellman at the fashionable, eight-story Narragansett Hotel on the southwest corner of Dorrance and Weybosset Streets in Providence. The two were married 4 September 1883 by Baptist clergyman John C. Stockbridge. Although marriage records said Sissieretta was eighteen and David was twenty-four, she was actually fifteen and he was about twenty-one.²² The young couple lived with Henrietta. The following spring, on 8 April 1884, seven months after their wedding, David and Sissieretta's daughter, Mabel, was born.²³ Her middle name, Adelina, may have been chosen in honor of the famous soprano Adelina Patti, who was very popular when the child was born.

By the time Mabel arrived, David was supporting his family working as a waiter at the Narragansett Hotel while Sissieretta and her mother cared for the infant. David, who often went by his middle name, Richard, was ambitious, working his way up from bellman to waiter at the hotel and being elected vice president of the Narragansett Hallmen, a group of African American men working at the city's luxurious, 225-room hotel.²⁴ During the 1880s many blacks living in Providence had a rich community and social life, as well as being comfortable financially. “In no other city in the Union will you find a colored community better off than in Providence, when it comes to money,” said the New York Age's Providence correspondent in 1888.²⁵ The New York Freeman often carried columns about various African American organizations and clubs in Providence that took steamboat cruises together on Narragansett Bay, hosted balls and grand receptions, or sponsored recitals and cultural programs at halls and churches. David Jones's organization, the Narragansett Hallmen, had the distinction of giving one of the finest balls ever held by Providence's African American community. The only other organization to give a grander reception was the Apollo Club, but the black press criticized this group for inviting some white guests who were staying at the Narragansett.²⁶ As good as conditions were for many African Americans in Providence, the “color line” existed there. For example many skilled mechanics who were black could not get jobs in Providence because of their skin color. Another example: white clerks would not rent skates to “colored people” at the Providence Roller Skating Rink.²⁷

Sissieretta continued studying vocal techniques and began singing at more church concerts and performing with other musical groups such as the Excelsior Brass Band. Her name began to show up in the Rhode Island column of the black New York Freeman newspaper more often after appearing in various concerts. The “coming soprano” was usually referred to as Mrs. Richard Jones or Mrs. M. S. Jones.

On 21 May 1885 Sissieretta joined a well-known black singer in Providence, Flora Batson, at a concert and reception hosted by the Fourth Battalion Drum Corps. Sissieretta shared the concert stage with Batson before a “packed” audience at Providence's Armory Hall.²⁸ This was a very important contact for the young singer to make because Batson was well established in the black community as a concert singer and later helped open doors for Sissieretta. Batson (1864–1906) was born in Washington, D.C., but moved to Providence at an early age to live with her widowed mother, Mary A. Batson. Flora Batson did not have formal training, but she had a powerful voice with a soprano-baritone range. She gained experience singing in church choirs in Providence. By the time Sissieretta met her, Batson had performed for three years, 1883 through 1885, at the People's Church in Boston and had sung in many other concerts, including a European tour and a temperance revival in New York City.²⁹ Batson got a big career break in 1885, when she was hired to perform in a Bergen Star Concert on 15 October 1885 at the Providence Music Hall. Bergen Star Concerts were led by John G. Bergen, a white concert manager who promoted black singers and arranged concerts to entertain black audiences. He had planned for the nationally famous African American soprano Mme. Nellie Brown Mitchell to sing at the October concert, but for some unexplained reason, Mme. Mitchell canceled her appearance. Bergen hired Batson to replace her.³⁰ From that point forward, Batson became the lead singer in the Bergen Star Concerts. Two years later, on 13 December 1887, Batson and Bergen married. With Bergen as her husband and manager, Batson's career advanced quickly, and soon “she was booked all over the country and the world.”³¹

Nellie Brown Mitchell (1845–1942), one of the first classically trained African American female singers, attended Boston's New England Conservatory, where she earned a music certificate and later received a music degree at the New England School of Vocal Arts in Boston. She sang professionally with the Bergen Star Concerts until early fall of 1885, when she went out on her own and did an extended tour of the South, one of the first black concert singers to perform in that part of the country.³² Batson and Mitchell were two of a small group of black female concert singers during this period who performed on stage before black and white audiences and who defied the stereotypes portrayed in minstrel shows of shiftless, joke-cracking, banjo-plucking, plantation-singing African Americans. White audiences were curious about, even fascinated by, these early black prima donnas. The first of the prima donnas was Elizabeth Taylor-Greenfield, born a slave in Natchez, Mississippi, sometime in the mid-1820s. She taught herself to sing and performed mostly in the Northeast. White people who heard her were amazed by her dazzling, although untrained, soprano voice, but at the same time they were amused by a black woman singing serious music rather than minstrel or plantation songs. She had to withstand many degrading comments because white audiences were uncomfortable with this new role for a black woman. Some claim she could have matched any of the white divas of her day had she been given proper training. She traveled to Great Britain in 1853, where she received some musical tutoring and also gave a command performance for Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace on 10 May 1853. After returning to the United States in 1854, she continued to sing some concerts and opened a music studio for private teaching.³³ She died in 1876, the year seven-year-old Sissieretta and her family moved to Providence and the year another black concert artist, Marie Selika (1849–1937), made her professional debut. Selika had a two-octave range from C to C. Like Taylor-Greenfield she was born in Natchez. Her real name was Marie Smith, but she took the pseudonym Marie Selika from the main female character, Selika, in the opera L'Africaine. Selika reportedly was the first black female concert singer to perform at the White House, appearing before President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878. She too toured Europe, and in 1893, with her career declining, she returned from Europe and the West Indies to settle in Ohio, where she opened a music studio and continued to sing concerts. In 1916 she retired from the stage and began teaching music in New York City's Harle...