1. Fannie Barrier Williams, "The Woman's Part in a Man's Business," Voice of the Negro 1 (1904): 544.

The terms "African-American," "black American," "Colored," and "Negro" are used interchangeably in this chapter.

2. The most comprehensive general references for the history of black musicians are Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans , 3d ed. (New York: Norton, 1997), and eadem, Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982). See also Hildred Roach, Black American Music: Past and Present , 2d ed. (Malabar, Fla.: R. E. Krieger, 1992), and Tilford Brooks, America's Black Musical Heritage (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1984). Of bibliographical interest are Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., and Marsha J. Reisser, Black Music Biography (White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus International, 1987), and idem, Black Music in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Reference and Research Materials (White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus International, 1983).

Studies focusing on black women include M. A. Majors, Noted Negro Women (Chicago: Donohue & Henneberry, 1893); Lawson A. Scruggs, Women of Distinction: Remarkable in Works and Invincible in Character (Raleigh, N.C.: L. A. Scruggs, 1893); Mildred Denby Green, Black Women Composers: A Genesis (Boston: Twayne, 1983); Notable Black American Women , ed. Jessie Carney Smith (Detroit: Gale Research, 1991); and Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia , 2 vols., ed. Darlene Clark Hine (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson, 1993). See also Notable American Women, 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary , 3 vols., ed. Edward T. James and Janet Wilson James (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1971); and No - soft

table American Women: The Modern Period , ed. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1980).

3. On the contributions of black women performers in classical music, see Josephine Wright, "Black Women and Classical Music," Women's Studies Quarterly 12 (1984): 18-21; also eadem, "Black Women in Classical Music in Boston during the Late Nineteenth Century: Profiles of Leadership," in New Perspectives on Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern , ed. Josephine Wright, with Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. (Warren, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press, 1992), 373-408. Wright mentions eight women composers and three impresarios of the nineteenth century.

4. Washington, D.C., New York, New Orleans, Baltimore, and Philadelphia led the list of 43 cities having 10,000 or more black residents in 1910. See Edgar Toppin, A Biographical History of Blacks in America from 1528 , 2d edition (New York: McKay, 1971), 152.

5. This period in African-American history is discussed in John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom , 5th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1980), 280-84. On the Great Migration, see also Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in the United States , vol. I: From Slavery to Second Class Citizenship, 1619-1945 (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970); Cary D. Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance (Houston: Rice University Press, 1988), 6-29.

6. Two examples of gender discrimination cited by Paula Giddings are the furor raised when Ida Wells Barnett was elected financial secretary of the Afro-American Council and the exclusion of women from the prestigious American Negro Academy. Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of the Black Woman on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 110-11, 116. Linda M. Perkins notes instances in which black women held positions of authority but received discriminatory treatment ultimately resulting in their leaving the positions. For example, Mary Jane Patterson was removed as principal of the M Street High School in Washington, D.C., so that a black man could be placed in the position. Perkins, "The Impact of the Cult of 'True Womanhood' on the Education of the Black Woman," Journal of Social Issues 39, no. 3 (1983): 25.

7. Mary Church Terrell, "Being a Colored Woman in the United States," Mary Church Terrell papers collection 102, box 3, folder 53, 1, Manuscript Division, MSRC. Cited by Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race, 1895-1915 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 2, 237 n. 3.

8. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States . rev. and abr. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 102-3.

9. Giddings shows that, although sexual inequality was not the norm, black women activists were generally accorded a high degree of acceptance ( When and Where , 59).

10. The number of African-Americans in Washington, D.C., reached 28.5 percent during the first three decades of the twentieth century. By 1950, 35 percent of Washington's residents were African-American.

11. For a full discussion of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century classical music traditions in Washington, D.C., see Doris Evans McGinty, "The Black Presence in the Music of Washington, D.C.," in More Than Dancing: Essays on Afro-American Music and Musicians , ed. Irene V. Jackson (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 81-106.

12. Elsie B. Smith, "Mary Lorraine Europe, Musician: October 13, 1885-October 20, 1947" (unpublished paper), 2-3. Vertical File, MSRC.

13. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, prominent in England both as conductor and composer, was greatly admired by African-Americans, who must have viewed his success as an impossible dream, and he demonstrated his kinship with black Americans through his settings of the poems of Paul L. Dunbar, his arrangements of spirituals for piano, and his visits to black communities in the United States. See further William Tortolano, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: Anglo-Black Composer, 1875-1912 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1977), and Geoffrey Self, Hiawatha Man: The Life and Works of Samuel Coleridge- Taylor (Brookfield, Vt.: Scolar Press, 1995).

14. For a reference to an unusual female brass band of 1903, see Doris Evans McGinty, "Black Women in the Music of Washington, D.C., 1900-20," in New Perspectives on Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern , ed. Josephine Wright, with Samuel Floyd, Jr. (Warren, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press, 1992), 428.

15. Corda means "string" in Italian. The use of mandolins with traditional stringed instruments was not unusual, the trend having emerged in the United States around the turn of the century, especially in colleges and universities. The Corda Club performed in Philadelphia as well as Washington, D.C.

16. McGinty, "Black Women," 412-17.

17. Anna Cooper, Voice of the South (Xenia, Ohio: Aldine Printing House, 1892), 28.

18. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 180; see also Florette Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 1900-1920, The Road from Myth to Man (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press / Doubleday, 1976), 34. According to John Hope Franklin, more than 28,560 Negro teachers were in the public schools in 1900, and of these teachers most, by far, were women, a trend in keeping with the general feminization of the teaching profession in America. Franklin, From Slavery , 272.

19. Larry Winters, born Lawrence Whisonant, first sang professionally with the Eva Jessye Choir and eventually became a principal baritone with the Hamburg (Germany) opera. See Southern, Biographical Dictionary , 411.

20. Camille Nickerson was a teacher in her father's School of Music in New Orleans before she joined the Howard University music faculty in 1926.

21. Lillian Dunn-Perry, music teacher and former president of the B-Sharp Club, expended great effort on enlarging the scholarship awards of the club. The club makes an annual scholarship award of $1,000 from a Perpetual Scholarship Fund in the name of her late husband, Robert N. Perry, Jr., also a former president of the B-Sharp Club.

22. D. Antoinette Handy's Black Women in American Bands and Orchestras (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981) is the basic reference on black women instrumentalists.

23. Isabelle T. Spiller studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, Columbia Teachers College, and the New School for Social Research.

24. Handy, Black Women , 129; Southern, Biographical Dictionary , 356.

25. Doris E. McGinty, "Conversation with Revella Hughes: From the Classics to Broadway to Swing." Black Perspective in Music 16, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 100.

26. Ibid., 101.

27. Southern, Biographical Dictionary , 218; Chicago Defender , 30 October 1937.

28. For more information on Europe and Webster, see Doris Evans McGinty, "Gifted Minds and Pure Hearts: Mary L. Europe and Estelle Pinckney Webster," Journal of Negro Education 51, no. 3 (Summer 1982): 266-78.

29. Thomas W. Talley, "Appreciation of Mrs. Ella Sheppard Moore by a Fellow Student," Fisk University News , November 1914. Cited by Jessie Carney Smith, "Ella Sheppard Moore," in Notable Black American Women , 1005-10. See also Mary E. Spence, "The Jubilee of Jubilees," Southern Workman 51 (1922): 77.

30. Jean E. Cazort and Constance T. Hobson Born to Play: The Life and Career of Hazel Harrison (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 118.

31. Helen Hagan (1891-1964), the first black pianist to present a solo recital in New York's Aeolian Hall (1921), was another distinguished pianist who later taught on college faculties. She taught at Tennessee State Agricultural and Mechanical College, became dean of the School of Music at Bishop College in Marshall, Texas, and finally, sometime after 1935, established the Helen Hagan Music Studio in New York. See Southern, Biographical Dictionary , 158.

32. Maud Cuney-Hare, Negro Musicians and Their Music (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1936; reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1974), xi.

33. Tuskegee Institute had more than one well known vocal artist on its faculty. From 1932 to 1934 the faculty included Abbie Mitchell (1884-1960), a soprano who toured Europe as a recitalist, was a lead actress with the Lafayette Players, and also achieved fame as a performer in musical comedy on Broadway and in Europe. For more on her career, see Annetta Jefferson in Black Women in America , ed. Hine, 2: 802, 803; and Dictionary of American Negro Biography , ed. Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston (New York: Norton, 1982), 441-43. Cleota Josephine Collins, concert soprano, was a member of the Tuskegee faculty in the 1930s; she also taught at Bluefield State College in West Virginia and later headed the voice department at Virginia State College. See later in this essay on A. Hackley scholarships. See also Southern, Biographical Dictionary , 79.

34. A few institutions for music instruction established by black women during the early twentieth century were the following: 1903 —Washington Conservatory of Music and School of Expression, Washington, D.C., (Harriet Gibbs Marshall); 1912 —Howard University School of Music, Washington, D.C. (Lulu Vere Childers); 1912 —Vocal Normal Institute, Chicago (Emma Azalia Smith Hackley); 1919 —Cosmopolitan School of Music and Fine Arts, Indianapolis (Lillian Morris LeMon); 1920 —Chicago University of Music, Chicago (Pauline Jones Lee); 1926 —Junior Preparatory Department of Music at Howard University, Washington, D.C. (Camille Nickerson); 1927 —Cardwell School of Music, Pittsburgh (Mary Cardwell Dawson).

35. The school was originally named the Washington Conservatory of Music and was renamed in 1911 when a department of elocution was added. For further discussion, see Doris Evans McGinty, "The Washington Conservatory of Music and School of Expression," Black Perspective in Music 7, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 59-75.

36. Harriet Marshall helped to establish yet another school. During her stay in Haiti, where her husband served with the U.S. legation, she co-founded the Jean Joseph Industrial School in 1926 with Rosina J. Joseph. Washington Conservatory of Music Collection, box 112-2, MSRC.

37. Washington Conservatory of Music Bulletin, 1931, 3. Washington Conservatory Collection, box 112-3, MSRC.

38. Boxes 112-4 to 112-8, Washington Conservatory of Music Collection, MSRC, contain correspondence dealing with the operation of the Conservatory.

39. After Marshall's death in 1941, her cousin Josephine V. Muse directed the activities of the Washington Conservatory until its closing in 1960.

40. Hackley to Marshall, 15 September 1903, Washington Conservatory of Music Collection, box 112-5, MSRC.

41. Mifflin W. Gibbs to Harriet Gibbs (Marshall), 4 April 1899, Washington Conservatory Collection, box 112-1, MSRC.

42. Florence Price wrote, "I have long regarded you as a pioneer whose efforts will not have been spent in vain." Price to Marshall, 26 October 1939. See also other correspondence from Price and letters from Shirley Graham Du Bois. Washington Conservatory Collection, box 112-5, MSRC.

43. H. C. King to Marshall, 15 April 1907 and 12 January 1914, Washington Conservatory of Music Collection, box 112-5, MSRC.

44. Rayford W. Logan, Howard University: The First Hundred Years, 1867-1967 (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 216.

45. Emma Azalia Hackley, The Foreign Scholarship (n.p.: E. A. Hackley, 1908), 3.

46. Ibid., 5.

47. M. Marguerite Davenport, Azalia: The Life of Azalia Hackley (Boston: Chapman & Grimes, 1947), 130. Hackley was not reticent in making her views concerning her art and the African-American voice known; she spoke on the subject and wrote articles for publication in newspapers. See, for example, New York Age , December 1914, January 1915, and March 1915 for a series entitled "Hints to Young Colored Artists." The most reliable biographical information is found in Ernestine Perkins Lewis Holly, "The Emma Azalia Hackley Memorial Collection of Negro Music, Dance, and Drama: A Catalogue of Selected African-American Materials" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1978).

48. In her unpublished autobiography (Evans-Tibbs Collection, Washington, D.C.), Lillian Evanti describes being invited to audition for the Metropolitan Opera Company by the general manager, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, after he had heard her sing in Italy, and of experiencing great hope and eventual disappointment when the board refused to defy the racial policy of the organization. Caterina Jarboro made a debut with the Chicago Civic Opera (directed by Alfredo Salmaggi) in 1932 and subsequently sang in opera at the Hippodrome Theater in New York, but she was forced to return to Europe to continue her operatic career.

49. Anna Madah Hyers (1855-1920s [?]) sang in "Thirty Minutes around the Operas," the operatic finale of John Isham's Octoroons (see also n. 50), and Inez Clough (ca. 1860s/1870s-1933), along with Sidney Woodward, J. Rosamond Johnson, and William E. Elkins, sang in a forty-minute finale of choruses and solos from grand operas in Isham's Oriental America . M. Sissieretta Jones (1869-1933), known as the "Black Patti," was the star of the "Operatic Kaleidoscope" that ended part 2 of her vaudeville show, Black Patti's Troubadours.

50. Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield (ca. 1824-76), the first internationally known black singer, directed an opera troupe that performed in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia in the 1860s. Her career as "The Black Swan" is discussed in James M. Trotter, Music and Some Highly Musical People (1878; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1969), and Arthur LaBrew, The Black Swan (Detroit: The Author, 1969). See also Kathleen Thompson in Black Women in America , ed. Hine, 1: 499-501. The sisters Anna Madah and Emma Louise Hyers (both of the late nineteenth century) organized the first black American concert company in the 1870s and used operatic literature as the core repertory. For a discussion of their early concert careers, see Eileen Southern, "An Early Black Concert Company: The Hyers Sisters Combination," in A Celebration of American Music , ed. Richard Crawford, R. Allen Lott, and Carol J. Oja (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 17-35. Another noteworthy company was the Colored American Opera Company (sometimes referred to as the Colored American Opera Troupe), formed in Washington, D.C., in 1873. See McGinty, "Black Presence," 91-93. Theodore Drury established the Theodore Drury Colored Opera Company in 1899 and produced operas in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s.

51. Evanti's most celebrated appearance in La traviata took place on 28 August 1943 as one of the Watergate Summer Concerts, so-called because the performances were presented on a barge moored on the Potomac River near the Lincoln Memorial. The concerts were favorites with Washington audiences, who had the opportunity to hear the National Symphony Orchestra in its "Sunset" series and special performances such as that of the NNOC. Other productions of La traviata by the NNOC in 1944 took place in Pittsburgh (25 January), New York (29 February), and Washington, D.C. (31 July). The NNOC repertoire of operas included Verdi's Aida , Gounod's Faust , and Clarence Cameron White's Ouanga . The NNOC also performed R. Nathaniel Dett's oratorio The Ordering of Moses . I am indebted to Wayne Shirley, Library of Congress Performing Arts Division, for information concerning the NNOC's 1944 season.

52. See n. 50 above.

53. See n. 32 above. Two other works published on the subject during the period covered in this essay are Maud Wanzer Layne, The Negro's Contribution to Music (Philadelphia: Theodore Presser, 1942), and Alain L. Locke, The Negro and His Music (1936; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969).

54. Black women writers on music for the larger newspapers included Virginia Williams of the Baltimore-Washington Afro-American ; the syndicated columnist Gladys Graham (1913-1976) of the Associated Negro Press (her column was called "Graham Crackers"); and Maude Roberts George (early twentieth century), writer for the Chicago Defender in the 1920s.

55. Analysis of Holt's columns in the Amsterdam News is found in Rawn W. Spearman, "Music Criticism by Nora Douglas Holt in the New York Amsterdam News : Saturday Edition (1944-1952)," in "Essays Submitted to the Summer Seminar for College Teachers" (typescript [sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities], Howard University, 1984). MSRC.

56. A handwritten statement of these particulars appears over Nora Holt's signature on the cover of Music and Poetry 1, no 1. I have seen only vol. 1, nos. 1-10, in the Beinecke Library at Yale University (James W. Johnson Memorial Collection: Carl Van Vechten papers).

57. Music and Poetry 1, no. 1 (1921), pages unnumbered.

58. Musical Messenger 1 (1889): 2. According to Josephine Wright, the publication ran for three to four years. Wright, "Black Women in Classical Music," 20.

59. Music and Poetry 1, no. 1 (1921), pages unnumbered.

60. Lillian LeMon (1932 to 1934), Maude Roberts George (1934 to 1935), Camille Nickerson (1935 to 1937), and Mary Cardwell Dawson (1939 to 1941).

61. The first extensive collection of African-American spirituals was Slave Songs of the United States , compiled by William Allen, Charles Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison (1867). Collections generated from the Fisk Jubilee Singers experience include Theodore F. Seward, Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn . (New York and Chicago: Biglow & Main, [1872]) and Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Jubilee Singers, Enlarged , comp. Theodore F. Seward and George L. White (New York and Chicago: Biglow & Main [1884]).

62. See Wright, "Black Women in Classical Music in Boston," 395.

63. See Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance , ed. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990); Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); and Bruce Kellner, The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary for the Era (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984).

64. The large library that Marshall collected was given to Howard University when the Washington Conservatory closed and is now held in the Sheet Music Collection of the Manuscript Division, MSRC.

65. Nickerson, herself of Creole origin, published separate pieces in choral and solo arrangements; Maud Cuney-Hare published a collection of Six Creole Folk Songs (New York: Carl Fischer, 1921).

66. Doris E. McGinty, "Conversation with Camille Nickerson: The Louisiana Lady," Black Perspective in Music 7, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 81-94. Nickerson was on the faculty of the School of Music at Howard University when she began her tours with the Creole Songs.

67. Musical America , 29 March 1919, 16; Southern, Biographical Dictionary , 157.