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American Musics
Cultural Uplift and Double-Consciousness:
African American Responses to the 1935
Opera Porgy and Bess
Ray Allen and George P. Cunningham
As previously quoted, “No Negro could possibly be fooled by ‘Porgy and
Bess.”’ Not Duke Ellington, who agrees that “the times are here to debunk
Gershwin’s lampblack Negroisms.” Not Hall Johnson, who insists that
George Gershwin has composed “an opera about Negroes rather than a
Negro opera.” Not Ralph Matthews with his contemptuous “musical
hybrid,” . . . ‘Porgy and Bess,’ it seems, was concocted for the white folks.
Old Massa Garland adores it!1
“Old Massa Garland” was Robert Garland, the white playwright who,
between 1928 and 1937, served as the chief drama critic for the New York
World-Telegram. Garland, one of the more enthusiastic reviewers of Porgy
and Bess, declared in his opening-night review that the opera was a
“modern masterpiece” and “something significant in the American theater.”2 Like many first-night reviewers, Garland revisited Porgy and Bess
for a more sustained discussion of its artistic merits and its importance to
American theater, music, and creative culture. Unlike his white colleagues
in the major daily newspapers, Garland devoted his second take not to his
own thoughts but to reporting African American responses to the work.
Alone among mainstream critics, he acquainted his readers with black
opinions about Porgy and Bess by committing the lion’s share of his article
to direct quotations from an interview with the jazz musician and composer Edward Duke Ellington, an extensive commentary by the playwright
and choral director Hall Johnson, and the opening-night review by Ralph
doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdi018
88:342–369
Advance Access publication September 27, 2006
© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions,
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On 16 January 1936, a week before the closing of the initial Broadway
run of Porgy and Bess, an article entitled “Negroes Are Critical of ‘Porgy
and Bess’: Gershwin Opus Held Over at the Alvin Because of Popularity
with Whites” appeared in the New York World-Telegram. The article
concluded:
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J. Matthews, the critic of Baltimore’s Afro-American. The thrust of Garland’s
piece, summed up in the title and final quip, “concocted for the white
folks,” was that African Americans were far less enthusiastic about the
work than were the white audiences who attended the production.
Garland’s article is a useful place to begin a discussion of African
American responses to Porgy and Bess because it became the starting point for
representing and defining responses to the 1935 production in much of the
subsequent Gershwin literature. Few studies of George Gershwin and Porgy
and Bess have gone beyond Garland’s narrow sample and conclusion that
blacks were almost unanimous in their dislike of the opera. In his 1973 biography Gershwin: His Life and Music, Charles Schwartz paraphrases Garland’s
article and characterizes the responses of Ellington, Johnson, and Matthews to
the opera as a “chorus of black nays.”3 Gershwin biographer Joan Peyser, theater critic Joseph Swain, and Porgy and Bess chronicler Hollis Alpert repeat
Garland’s Ellington-Johnson-Matthews script, and, like Schwartz, wrongly
attribute the damning pronouncement “the times are here to debunk
Gershwin’s lampblack Negroisms” to Ellington, when in fact it was uttered by
Edward Morrow, the white critic who interviewed Ellington for New Theater.4
Writers, biographers, and compilers of Gershwin criticism reference
almost exclusively the opening-night reviews of the elite cadre of white,
New York–based music and drama critics.5 Those who did note African
American responses found strategies to place those black voices outside the
purview of legitimate criticism by relegating them to the realm of social
rather than artistic criticism. Writing more than half a century after
Garland, Swain commented that “the social and political implications of
Porgy and Bess for the black community are very real and quite complex,
and require discussion, but ultimately they are irrelevant to any dramatic
appraisal of the work.”6 Likewise, Alpert concluded that “black protestation
was overblown” because the black populace paid “little attention” to the
opera, and because most criticism came from “a strident few on grounds
more applicable to a larger or a current cause than to the work itself.”7
Musicologists tended to respond to issues of culture and race by arguing
the allegorical and universal nature of art in general and of opera in particular. For example, Wilfrid Mellers’s 1965 pioneering analysis of the opera’s
music and text presents the work as a parable of modern man’s conflict with
nature, a theme that applies “obviously to urban, industrialized man whatever the colour of his skin: the plight of the Negro merely gives one peculiarly
pointed manifestation.”8 Two decades later, writing in American Music,
Lawrence Starr reasoned that Porgy and Bess was “a pure and compelling
human drama, whose implications were restricted to no single race or ethnic
group.”9 To view the opera as a “racial document,” he argued, “is to apply criteria which lie wholly outside that tradition to which this work relates.”10
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The exception to this position is Richard Crawford’s 1972 article, “It
Ain’t Necessarily Soul: Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess as a Symbol,” published
in a relatively obscure journal, the Yearbook for Inter-American Musical
Research.11 The essay was partly a response to Harold Cruse, one of the
most acerbic and influential cultural critics of the Black Arts Movement,
who disparaged the opera in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967) as
an exemplar of American cultural paternalism.12 Crawford, while finding
more merit in the work than did Cruse, approached the opera as a paradoxical “symbol of American cultural collision” that meant “different
things to different men as forcibly as any other American musical work
that has come to mind.”13 For Crawford, Porgy and Bess not only generated critical discourse on what constitutes a native American opera, but
also extended debate over issues of folk authenticity, racial stereotyping,
and cultural exploitation. Crawford’s approach to Porgy and Bess framed
the opera’s meaning and significance in broad cultural terms that were
informed by, but not limited to, musical form. Moreover, he took into
account the serious concerns of black critics, including Johnson’s commentary on the original opera and criticism of the 1959 film version by
playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Ebony editor Era Bell Thompson, and
Cruse. But few musicologists have followed Crawford’s lead, and the field
has remained relatively silent on African American reactions to Porgy and
Bess and to the larger issues of race and culture inherent in the work.14
Crawford’s exploration leads us beyond the opening-night reviews in
the major white dailies and toward the broader discussion of the opera’s
artistic merit and cultural value that took place among African American
critics and commentators. In this article we will look at Crawford’s
“American cultural collision” through the lens of those African American
responses, taking the position that extra-textual issues such as race and
nationality are inextricably bound up in nearly all contemporaneous discussions of Porgy and Bess. Through a close reading of Johnson, Ellington, and
Matthews, in conjunction with a broad survey of the black press’s responses
to the opera, we seek to restore the variation and nuances that were present
in African American reactions to the work. We further argue that African
American reception of the opera is best understood in the context of an ideology of cultural and racial uplift, a profound sense of double-consciousness,
and a desire to enable a more democratic vision of American culture
through the elevation of traditional black art and creative artists.
African American responses to Porgy and Bess took place largely in
the pages of the black weekly newspapers. While most African Americans
may not have seen the 1935 production, they read about it in the black
press, whose extensive coverage made Porgy and Bess an important site for
a national discussion of blacks in the arts. In addition to the New York Age
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and the New York Amsterdam News, our sources are drawn from three
other important weekly African American papers: the Chicago Defender,
the Pittsburgh Courier, and Baltimore’s Afro-American. In 1935, the year
that Porgy and Bess opened on Broadway, the Courier had a circulation of
103,283; the Defender, 110,000; and the Afro-American, 58,978.15 Their
readership was national and primarily black, and, through a series of correspondents and the Associated Negro Press news syndicate, they not only
covered national and international news but also supplied copy to smaller
and more local African American papers such as the Philadelphia Tribune
and the Norfolk Journal and Guide. Through these papers an African
American readership came to understand its place in the nation and the
world and could imagine itself as part of a national racial community
bound together by much more than shared discrimination. Each paper
devoted one to three pages to covering the news of African Americans in
theater, film, nightclubs—the range of popular entertainment available to
its mass readership. They also reported on the way the race was represented
by black performers on Broadway and in the traditional concert hall whose
audiences were predominately white, a coverage that included news of
discrimination and discussions of stereotyping. The society pages augmented the coverage of popular entertainment with news of recitals and
concerts by classically trained black singers and composers, supporting the
cultural ambitions to which its middle- and upper-class readers aspired.
There was a shared belief among the critics who wrote for black
weeklies and among other African Americans who wrote about Porgy and
Bess that the performing arts provided an important site for reading and
writing racial progress. At the simplest level, musical and dramatic productions deemed successful by white critics could serve as symbols of
racial achievement and proof that African Americans could master the
highest forms of European cultural expression. In a more complex way,
the creative domain was a place where the tensions that shaped African
American life and that divided blacks from whites could be imaginatively
reconfigured and possibly transcended. African American critics of the
1920s and 1930s negotiated the variety of roles that blacks played in the
arts through a complex of shifting frames centered on the notion of uplift.
The roots of black thinking about the relationship of art and society were
entangled with the late nineteenth-century bourgeois ideal of racial uplift,
which, according to the historian Kevin K. Gaines, aimed at promoting
social mobility for blacks through assimilation and the adaptation of
middle-class values, including “self-help, racial solidarity, temperance,
thrift, chastity, social purity, patriarchal authority, and the accumulation
of wealth.”16 The goal, according to Gaines, was to replace “the racist
notion of fixed biological racial differences with an evolutionary view of
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cultural assimilation” and to demonstrate that an artificial “color line”
separated blacks and whites in the cultural arena.17 The turn-of-the-century
emergence of conservatory-trained black instrumentalists, singers, and
composers embodied the ideal of racial uplift. Yet the color line held.
Segregation limited opportunities for blacks to join mainstream orchestras
and opera companies, forcing most trained musicians to pursue careers as
soloists, composers, and music teachers. By the 1930s, a separate world of
black classical music had evolved, centered on all-black symphonic
orchestras, opera companies, choral ensembles, and music schools.18
There was, however, a group of African American intellectuals, critics, and composers who dissented from the strict assimilation of the
nineteenth-century ideal of racial uplift. Among the members of this
group another notion of uplift emerged that had roots in Antonín Dvorák’s
1893 call for American composers to use indigenous African American
and Native American folk expressions as the foundation of a national art
music and in W. E. B. Du Bois’s equating the Negro folk spiritual with
European art song in his 1903 work The Souls of Black Folk.19 Dvorák and
Du Bois’s ideas would merge to help define a metaphor of cultural transformation. Among the most articulate spokespersons of this metaphor and
its ramifications for the world of music were Harlem Renaissance critics
and composers Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and William Grant
Still, who advocated cultural uplift through the synthesis of African
American musical materials with European style and form, and the
transformation of those materials into new expressions rather than a de
facto accommodation to European American artistic norms.20
The spirituals became, as Du Bois hoped, the privileged genre of
African American folk expression for cultural transformation and elevation. The careful arrangement of folk spirituals according to principles of
Western harmony, tonality, and form—a practice that dated back to the
formal stage performances of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and other black
college choirs during the post-Reconstruction period—had proved an
effective means for such transformation.21 By the early 1930s, the overall
consensus of culturally minded African Americans and progressive whites
was that the performance of formally arranged folk spirituals on the concert stage was a marker of racial progress and cultural uplift that served as
an antidote to the damaging imagery of popular minstrelsy. Proof was
readily demonstrated by the popularity—among black and white audiences on both sides of the Atlantic—of concert soloists Roland Hayes,
Paul Robeson, and Marian Anderson; black college jubilee choirs; and
choral ensembles led by Hall Johnson and Eva Jessye.22
In the early 1930s, the African American press had the opportunity
to explore the movement of the formally arranged folk spiritual from the
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concert stage to a dramatic setting through two important precursors to
Porgy and Bess: the religious folk plays The Green Pastures (1930) and Run,
Little Chillun! (1933). The Pulitzer Prize–winning folk drama The Green
Pastures was written by white playwright Marc Connelly and based on
Roark Bradford’s collection of local color stories, Ol’ Man Adam an’ His
Chillun (1928). Connelly’s fable dramatized the trials and tribulations of
the Lord Jehovah, the Angel Gabriel, a host of Old Testament characters,
and an angelic choir who together wrestled with the meaning of creation
and faith.23 Featuring an all-black cast with spiritual singers under Hall
Johnson’s direction, the play received extensive coverage in the black
weeklies. Banner headlines such as “‘Green Pastures’ Termed Biggest Hit
of the Season” (Chicago Defender), “Race Play Strikes like Lightning on
Broadway” (Pittsburgh Courier), and “Audience is Moved by ‘Green Pastures’:
All-Race Play Called One of Finest Things of Present Generation”
(Afro-American) led the coverage.24 In a pattern that would be repeated in
the coverage of Porgy and Bess, many reports simply stitched together
favorable excerpts from the major New York drama critics and added only
minimal commentary. In more substantive discussions, the African American
press explored the problems inherent in mixing religion and popular stage
entertainment. Writing for the New York Amsterdam News, S. Tutt Whitney
noted that the play’s star, Richard B. Harrison, expressed initial concerns
that a Broadway depiction of black religion might be offensive to African
American viewers and that he needed to be “convinced that naught of
sacrilege was to be found in ‘The Green Pastures,’ but that it was a fantasy
of entrancing loveliness teaching an eloquent sermon.”25 To assuage his
middle-class readers’ worries that The Green Pastures might overemphasize
the extreme emotional nature of a southern religion that ran counter to
their notions of respectability, Chappy Gardner of the Pittsburgh Courier said
that the play “is an attempt to present certain aspects of a living religion in
the terms of its believers—the religion is that of thousands of Negroes all
over America. No one becomes offended at this poetic, fantastic, mad,
imaginative jest. Everyone should see this play.”26 In an unsigned review
in the Crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois warned that blacks might at first view the
religious folk play as “sacrilege,” but he concluded, “No one may miss this
play. It is the beginning of a new era, not simply a Negro art, but in the art
of America.”27 The critics of the black press became advocates of The Green
Pastures as a synthesis of African American religious music and theater,
observing that the spirituals could maintain the dignity they had attained on
the concert stage when recontextualized in a staged drama about folk religion.
African American critics extended this critique to their reviews of
Hall Johnson’s folk play Run, Little Chillun! Johnson, a conservatorytrained violinist and native of Athens, Georgia, had settled in New York
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City in 1914, where he found work in various jazz and theater orchestras.
In 1925, dissatisfied with such work, he began an all-black choral ensemble dedicated to the performance of concert spirituals, and, eight years
later, when he assumed the musical directorship of The Green Pastures, his
choir had gained a national reputation for its brilliant interpretations of
Negro folk spirituals.28 Johnson’s success as Connelly’s music director
bolstered his career and helped him muster the resources to write and
produce his own religious folk play, Run, Little Chillun!, which opened at
New York’s Lyric Theater in March 1933. Writing for the Chicago
Defender, Gardner stated his preference of Johnson’s work over The Green
Pastures, extolling Run, Little Chillun! as an “authentic history of a great
people in the raw,” created by “an intelligent man who knows his people.”29 Gardner emphasized the verisimilitude of the production and the
music: “So true to life and the characters of the revival scene inject so
much honest-to-goodness reality into their work that many in the audience about me found themselves completely controlled by the spirit of the
play.” Most importantly for Gardner and other critics, this realism was not
simply a consequence of the black cast’s “natural” acting and singing abilities but rather the result of their training and of Johnson’s artistry as a
playwright and composer.30 Gardner said, “I found it hard to keep from
joining in the singing of the older spirituals and hymns sung by my mother
and hers—and now given more artistic fullness and appreciation by Hall
Johnson’s masterful direction.” Johnson’s reviewers emphasized that in
the transformation of folk culture to a more self-conscious artistic rendering, African American religious music had been elevated without departing from its essential cultural and aesthetic core.
The success of Connelly’s and Johnson’s folk plays undoubtedly set
certain standards and expectations for the black critics who would
respond to Porgy and Bess—an American folk opera based on African
American life and lore and sung by conservatory-trained blacks with a
chorus led by a black choral director.31 Through Porgy and Bess, spirituals
had progressed from play to opera, raising black folk music to the highest
rung of the European American cultural ladder.32 However, as an opera
with a composed score for singers and full symphonic accompaniment,
Gershwin’s production foregrounded the composer, the compositional
process, and the resulting score more than the folk sources. Gershwin
himself emphasized his own creative role. In a New York Times article later
reprinted in the African American press, Gershwin defended his notion
of a folk opera and claimed to have written his “own spirituals and
folksongs” following trips to Charleston and Folly Island, South Carolina,
to hear black church singing firsthand.33 Moreover, Gershwin was not
interested only in spirituals; his score was influenced by a variety of
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secular sources, including ragtime, jazz, musical theater, and romantic and
modernist musical modalities. For black reviewers, the presence of the
spiritual in the new context of an opera and the mixing of folk, popular,
and highbrow musical sensibilities presented a new synthesis that both
challenged and extended the possibilities of rendering African American
culture onstage in ways not present before Porgy and Bess.
In their earliest coverage of Porgy and Bess, the black weeklies
reported the progress of the opera as it moved from rehearsals to its
weeklong trial run in Boston. These early reports consisted primarily of
reprinted excerpts from articles that had originally appeared in the mainstream white dailies. Although the white press paid little attention to
what African Americans thought about Porgy and Bess, it is clear that the
response of white critics and audiences played a central role in establishing
the opera as a significant cultural phenomenon for an African American
readership that, by and large, was unlikely to see the work firsthand. For
black reviewers and their readers, the presumptive audience for the opera
was white, and its reception provided them with insight into the way
African American culture was viewed by white arbiters of taste, whose
opinions shaped the contours of American cultural values. By recontextualizing these white voices, the African American press engaged in a
sophisticated deployment of W. E. B. Du Bois’s “double-consciousness”—
“that sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of
measuring one’s soul by the tape of the world that looks on.”34 Gaines’s
amplification of Du Bois’s ideas provides a suggestive map of the terrain of
double-consciousness that underlay much of the African American
response to Porgy and Bess. He describes a process by which educated
blacks “often viewed themselves (and other blacks) through the judgmental gaze of whites, even while struggling to break free of falsified white
images of blackness into self-consciousness.”35 From the casual to the
most thorough reviews of Porgy and Bess, African American critics always
employed a second sight, constantly interweaving two subjects—the
aesthetic and cultural value of the opera itself and the framework in which
the white audiences and critics viewed the work. Black critics further
understood Porgy and Bess in light of their “struggling to break free” of
white misconceptions about culture and race, and thus they explored the
possibility that the opera might serve as a model for self-conscious African
American expression.
Before Porgy and Bess opened on Broadway, the black press reported
on Gershwin’s broader cultural enterprise of creating an American opera
and recounted reviews of the Boston run that generally lauded the artistic
merit of the work. These early reports implicitly recognized the value of
elevating African American folk music to the operatic stage and the
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talents of the individual black singers. A week before the opera’s New
York premiere, the Afro-American reported that the opera had been
“highly acclaimed” in Boston and reprinted a Time magazine article that
praised Gershwin’s score as “the finest effort yet at a real U.S. opera.”36
The New York Amsterdam News’s “Story of Gershwin’s New ‘Porgy and
Bess’” reprinted a Times article that laid out what would become the
standard story of the opera’s origins—Gershwin’s discovery of the DuBose
Heyward novel Porgy; the emergence of the collaboration between
Gershwin and Heyward; and Gershwin’s journeys to South Carolina to
absorb African American folk music.37 An article by the Afro-American’s
Ralph J. Matthews, who would write about Porgy and Bess more often than
any other African American critic, reported that it was “the first authentic American opera to win great acclaim of the critics” and concluded
with a nearly complete reprint of an enthusiastic New York Times review
of the Boston opening.38
When the opera opened in New York on 10 October, several of the
black weeklies reprinted favorable excerpts of opening-night reviews by
New York mainstream drama and music critics.39 William E. Clark of the
New York Age told his readers that “the management of the Guild Theatre
failed to include the critics of the Harlem weekly newspapers in their invitation to the opening of ‘Porgy and Bess.’” But if Clark perceived a slight,
he nevertheless reported favorably on the opera, concluding from reviews
in the daily press that the production seemed “destined to be one of the
hits of Broadway.” Clark closed his column with excerpts from Danton
Walker’s New York Daily News review, which declared, “American opera
has at last arrived. An opera which musically is in the American idiom, lyrically in the American vernacular, and the perfect expression of a folk tale
of the American soil.”40 Floyd Calvin, the special feature’s editor of the
Courier and a syndicated columnist, followed a strategy similar to Clark’s.
His article “New Negro Play On Broadway Is Rated ‘Tops’: Burns Mantle,
Walter Winchell, Richard Lockridge, Lawrence Gilman, Robert Garland
and Pitts Sanborn Admit Acting Is Superb” selected from a large body of
reviews in compiling quotations from New York’s leading drama and music
critics praising Porgy and Bess, its music, and its cast.41 The selectivity of
Clark’s review and Calvin’s digest of the reviews is a reminder that African
Americans neither passively placed themselves under the eye of white critics nor unself-consciously basked in a moment of reflected glory. Rather,
they were active in shaping that “other” vantage point into a call for a new
and more democratic American culture in which transformed and elevated
African American expression would play a critical role.
The reviews of the New York premiere in the major black weeklies
on and after 19 October began, in a distinctive African American voice,
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to answer the call of the earlier black press coverage. In the larger debate
over the work’s merits that unfolded in the major dailies, most African
American reviewers, having finally seen Porgy and Bess for themselves,
sided with the white critics who praised Gershwin’s score. These black
reviewers found in his music a satisfying fusion of African American folk
spirit and traditional operatic conventions that, when sung by conservatory-trained African Americans, represented a significant advance in the
presence of black artists and culture on the American stage. Ted Yates,
whose column on New York club and theatrical life appeared regularly in
the Amsterdam News, wrote a breezy but enthusiastic evaluation, proclaiming Porgy and Bess a “blue ribbon winner” and declaring that the
“brilliant” work of Todd Duncan (Porgy) and Anne Brown (Bess) was
deserving of “all those splendid notices that my brother critics from the
Main Stem have laid before the door of New York’s Alvin Theatre.”42 In a
more thorough review for the Chicago Defender, Alan McMillan brimmed
with enthusiasm for the score and reflected through African American
eyes the promise of fulfillment implied in the black weeklies’ earlier
reprinted reviews. He began by placing his readers in the audience with
him: “Here is one of the finest works that I have had the pleasure to see
and hear in the past ten years. You would no doubt feel as I do if you had
been present at the Alvin last Thursday night and heard a packed audience applaud long and fervently following each of the several musical and
dramatic climaxes.”43 This scene of double-consciousness, of seeing the
opera as white audiences saw it, set the stage for his discussion of “the
spectacle of America’s all-American folk opera.” For McMillan, Gershwin
successfully created a persuasive musical unity, tying together African
American folk music and the European operatic conventions. “His fugue
and counterpoint treatment of this folk music portraying the idioms and
characteristics of the Negro,” McMillan argued, “lifted ‘Porgy and Bess’ to
the dignity of Grand Opera.” Yet McMillan saw Gershwin’s score as a new
artistic fusion shaped by “splendid modern harmonies” that avoided the
older “technique applied by the European masters in their old time
scores.” Although he felt that Porgy and Bess was fifteen minutes too long,
McMillan concluded that Gershwin’s radical break from the past had created “something entirely different” that “completely established a new
school of American contemporary music.”
The African Americans in the cast provided the black press with the
opportunity to tell a very different kind of story about race and culture
than the saga of Catfish Row’s beggars, drug abusers, and loose women.
Carl Rossini Diton, a trained concert pianist and composer, was measured
and thoughtful in a brief article syndicated in October 1935 by the Associated Negro Press.44 He was less interested in fully reviewing Porgy and Bess
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Edward Matthews, baritone, is another of the younger group who deserves
special mention. He has made many friends through his concert work and his
connection with Fisk University Singers. He has been a daily feature over the
radio through Station WHN, and through Major Edward Bowe’s Sunday
morning broadcasts over Station WEAF of the National Broadcasting Co.
Mr. Matthews gained some operatic experience through his singing of the role of
“St. Ignatius” in the much talked of production of “Four Saints in Three Acts.”
For White, the emergence of Matthews and others on the operatic stage
was intertwined with Gershwin’s elevation of African American folk
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than he was in pointing out the ways in which the cast reflected a transformation of the African American presence in the arts. Diton reminded his
readers that Todd Duncan’s Alfio, in the all-black cast of Harlem’s Aeolian
Grand Opera Company production of Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana,
had, in the previous year, “demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt the
operatic possibilities of the Negro in legitimate opera when presented under
favorable circumstances.” The widespread attention paid to Porgy and Bess
provided such “favorable circumstances.” That Porgy and Bess was, for Diton,
a “hybrid,” “part play and part grand opera,” paralleled and amplified his
major theme: there was a “curious yet satisfying mixture of experienced
troopers” composed of familiar faces from the African American musical
theater and a new generation of “vocal post-graduates” fresh from conservatories. Diton, who was from the concert world, read into that “satisfying
mixture” a story of the progress of African Americans in the theater from the
musical and revue to the higher form of opera, and from the small all-black
stages in Harlem to the center stages of American culture. He indirectly
praised Gershwin’s “well sounding score” by suggesting that its strength
revealed and challenged the younger singers’ talents. Diton noted the “vocal
fatigue of every character,” suggesting that Gershwin’s score was “a little in
advance of the Negro’s vocal development to date.” He concluded by recognizing the joined potential of the score and the cast, asking, “what heights
this creation may reach after the younger principals have matured both
vocally and histrionically in the years to come,” and expressing his “sincerest
hope that George Gershwin’s ‘Porgy and Bess’ may never die!”
Lucien White’s New York Age review devoted almost half its attention to recounting the musical curriculum vitae and pedigree of the
“group of younger artists, trained under more modern methods, who are
being given their first opportunity to exhibit their abilities before the foot
lights.”45 His minibiography of Edward Matthews, who sang the part of
Jake, suggests the range and the limits of the concert world for a trained
black musician prior to Porgy and Bess:
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music to the national stage. White alone among the reviewers discusses
Gershwin’s trips to Charleston favorably. He retells the story of Gershwin’s
“long time in Charleston and its environments, among the Negroes, absorbing atmosphere and learning at first hand of the habits and customs of the
people whose lives are portrayed in this opera” as testimony to the racial
authenticity of the music in Porgy and Bess. The result of Gershwin’s southern pilgrimage was “the first authentic American opera with a foundation
on Negro life.” Gershwin’s opera, claimed White, illustrated that “the
American Negro’s racial development can be used as the basis for a distinctive American opera,” which provided “an opportunity for demonstration of
the Negroes’ ability in interpreting and portraying the operatic forms.”
Only Ralph Matthews of the Afro-American, one of the three
reviewers Garland quoted, dissented from the initial chorus of approval
from the black press. Matthews, who expressed a wide range of views
about Porgy and Bess, was labeled a “music critic” by Garland, but at the
Afro-American he wrote on a broad spectrum of cultural and social issues.
Perhaps best known for his reviews of theater and music on the entertainment pages, his other writings struck very different notes; at times he
sounded like a society-page reporter, and in other instances like an editorial writer and “race man.” Although a thread of cultural conservatism
runs through his discussions of Porgy and Bess, Matthews was thoroughly
cosmopolitan and occasionally satirical in his writings.46 He was probably
instrumental in the Afro-American’s devoting more than half of the
“Entertainment and Amusement” section of its 19 October edition to the
opera. Under the wry banner headline “‘Gay White Way Has a Sun Tan,’
Says Matthews” appeared a prominent photo spread of the cast and two
articles by Matthews—his review of Porgy and Bess and a more general discussion of contemporary African Americans on Broadway. The second
page of the entertainment section included Matthews’s regular column,
“Looking at the Stars,” which consisted of brief biographical sketches of
twelve cast members and a reprint of Ruth Sedgwick’s Stage article on
Rouben Mamoulian’s efforts to educate himself about black folk culture
before directing the original 1927 play Porgy. Several pages later, Matthews
offered a separate feature on Anne Brown, in which he recounted her
father’s distress at witnessing his daughter’s character, Bess, perform a
suggestive “hoochie” dance with the opera’s brutal villain, Crown.
In his 19 October review, Matthews puzzled at Porgy and Bess’s
form.47 He attempted to locate the work in the conventions of opera and
drama, as well as in those of other Broadway productions featuring allblack casts, but in each instance Porgy and Bess fell short. It was not “really
opera in the sense that we have been taught to understand the term,”
because it depended too much on “primitiveness” and “playing on the
354 The Musical Quarterly
basic emotions.” As tragedy, the wedding of music to the play “softens the
effect,” producing something “less gripping” than drama. While subsequent
Gershwin scholars have paid attention to Matthews’s discussion of Porgy
and Bess’s shortcomings as an opera, his Afro-American readers were probably more attuned to his locating the work in relation to its immediate predecessors. Porgy and Bess failed to capture the underlying power of African
American religious music, lacking the “jubilee spirit” of Johnson’s Run,
Little Chillun! and the “deep soul-stirring” songs of Connelly’s The Green
Pastures. In comparing Gershwin’s operatic interpretations of African
American religious songs with Johnson’s a cappella arrangements of spirituals, Matthews’s often-quoted criticism of the “conservatory twang” of the
singing takes on a specific meaning. Matthews argued that:
Matthews, who clearly favored the deeper-pitched, four-part, a
cappella concertized spiritual style, felt that the full orchestral accompaniment and operatic rendering of the songs compromised the singing.
Although Matthews concluded that Porgy and Bess was a “hybrid” that was
“good entertainment, beautifully portrayed and sympathetically interpreted,”
he was unwilling to abandon conservative mooring to celebrate Gershwin’s
inventiveness. Matthews was clear that, for him, Porgy and Bess had not
successfully united its various parts into a coherent and persuasive whole.
“Occasionally,” he said, “one catches strains remindful of the old masters,
and by closing the eyes, can be swept with the beauty of the arias; but when
they are heard open-eyed against the shoddiness of Catfish Row, they seem
mis-cast.” Matthews had exceeding difficulty reconciling Gershwin’s
merger of low life and high aspirations; it did not work for him as art.
Whatever dissatisfaction Matthews felt with Porgy and Bess, as part
of the general landscape of African Americans on Broadway, it offered
him reasons to be sanguine. Matthews, in a companion piece to his
review, and later Floyd Calvin looked at Gershwin’s folk opera in the context of other productions featuring African Americans on Broadway.48 For
Calvin, At Home Abroad with Ethel Waters; Mulatto, written by Langston
Hughes; Three Men on a Horse, produced by Alex Yokel and featuring
Richard Huey; and Connie’s Inn Revue, led by Louis Armstrong, formed
with Porgy and Bess a quintet of African American progress on Broadway.
Matthews added to the list Josephine Baker’s return to the United States
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the singing, even down to the choral and ensemble numbers, has a
conservatory twang. The word ‘twang’ describes it admirably. When
colored voices singing Dixie jubilees must pitch their voices an octave
higher to coordinate with the strains of a symphony orchestra, the
result is generally twangy.
African American Responses to Porgy and Bess
355
to perform in the Ziegfeld Follies and Fletcher Henderson’s engagement at
the Roseland Ballroom. Calvin, who had previously despaired that the
comedic revue was the only form that Broadway audiences would accept,
felt that these new works represented “a wider range of artistic representation than any season in recent Broadway history.” And they pleased a
variety of audiences:
Calvin concluded, with an eye toward white perceptions of blacks on
Broadway, that the blackface stereotype was broken and that “white people now pay to see Negroes be themselves, and rate them on the faithful
interpretation of character rather than on the faithful portrayal of preconceived prejudiced notions.”
It is not surprising that Matthews and Calvin, with their intense
interest in the achievements of blacks on Broadway, contributed to the
consensus among African American reviewers regarding the importance
of Porgy and Bess’s conservatory-trained black cast. And, like most of the
opera’s black reviewers (who were almost exclusively male), they paid
greater attention to the women of Porgy and Bess than they did to its men.
Their coverage of Ruby Elzy, Eva Jessye, and Anne Brown represented
flashpoints in the evolving representations of African American womanhood. Calvin introduced Elzy, who played the part of the God-fearing
church woman Serena in the opera, as the “first Mississippi ‘country
woman’ to reach Broadway stardom.” The narrative of her ascent from
humble “country woman” to opera singer mirrored the lives and achievements of the many successful southern women migrants who derived their
strengths and virtues from church, family, and rural community.49 In contrast, Jessye, the opera’s choir director, was portrayed as an independent
and thoroughly modern urban woman who had abandoned the confines of
the church and patriarchy to pursue her interests as a music teacher, journalist, and organizer of a professional traveling choir. Calvin chronicled
her struggles to overcome severe racial and gender bias on her road to
becoming a successful Broadway woman.50 But it was Brown, whose family
background and talent represented the gendered ideal of female accomplishments in the arts, who would become the favorite of the black press.
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The Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue “swells” don formal attire to hear
Warren Coleman, Todd Duncan, Anne Wiggins Brown and Ruby Elzy
interpret the celebrated Gershwin American folk opera; Ethel Waters
amuses the tired business man; Hughes shocks the egotistic and conceited
aristocrats, and thrills the not-so-color-conscious of the younger set; Huey
helps split the sides of the plain people, and Louis Armstrong amazes the
jaded men and women about town.
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When Porgy and Bess opened in New York, the Amsterdam News
ran a brief profile of Brown, assuring its readers that it was her “dramatic
talent alone which enables her to give a convincing portrayal of the
Charleston woman of easy morals.”51 In this initial article, she was portrayed
as an “intensely fascinating, cultured and well poised girl” from a respectable
professional family, whose sacrifice gave Brown and her two sisters the
opportunity for a sound education. The article concluded that although
Brown spoke “with perfect English diction, her singing of the spirituals and
folk songs in dialect is as perfect as that of her German lieder and French
chansons and arias.” Matthew’s piece, titled “Papa Brown Shocked When
Annie Does Hoochie Dance,” characterized her in much the same way.52
Her parents, Dr. and Mrs. Harry S. Brown, were part of black middle-class
Baltimore society, and, for a time, neighbors of Matthews, who “knew only
too well what a circumspect life they lead.” Matthews recounted the
Browns’ reaction to seeing their daughter portray Bess. While both
mother and father were proud of their daughter’s exceptional artistry, her
father sat “silent and glum” during the scene on Kittawah Island when she
sang “What You Want with Bess” to Crown while doing a “risqué dance.”
Dr. Brown’s concerns for his daughter’s moral reputation reflect a larger set
of patriarchal values central to the older uplift paradigm that were threatened by public displays of female sexuality in characters like Bess.53
For Matthews, Gershwin was unable to elevate the character of Bess
above a stereotype. Porgy and Bess reproduced, rather than challenged, the
predispositions of the white audiences and producers. In an editorial titled
“Every Broadway Play to Date has Shown our Women as Prostitutes,”
Matthews extended his criticism of Porgy and Bess to Broadway in general,
arguing that in representing African American women, “good looks and bad
morals go together.”54 He cited a long list of predecessors for the role of
Bess, including the black female heroines in Charles MacArthur and Paul
Sheldon’s Lula Belle (1926), Leon Gordon’s White Cargo (1923), Daniel
Reed’s Scarlet Sister Mary (1930), DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s Porgy
(1927), and King Vidor’s all-black motion picture Hallelujah! (1929). Even
Johnson’s Run, Little Chillun! came in for criticism from Matthews, who
described the play’s heroine, played by Fredi Washington, as “a two-timing,
double crossing husband-stealer.” His editorial was polemically aimed at
white producers who were engaged in “a definite vicious Nordic plot to keep
the world from knowing that a colored woman ever rises above the
primitive,” although later in the article he denied believing in plots.
Two weeks later the Afro-American published a reply to Matthews by
W. Llewellyn Wilson, the black director of the Baltimore Municipal
Symphony Orchestra and Chorus.55 For Wilson, Porgy and Bess told “in a
straightforward way of the love, hatred, superstition, revenge and other
African American Responses to Porgy and Bess
357
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strong emotion” of Catfish Row, and made no attempt to be the “crystallization of the American Negro as a specific type.” The history of the
portrayal of women in opera, rather than the history of the portrayal of
African American women on the Broadway stage, was the proper context
for evaluating the role of Bess. Matching Matthews’s cast of bad girls,
Wilson cited Kundry and the Flower Maidens in Wagner’s Parsifal, Mimi
in La bohème, Carmen in Carmen, and Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly as
examples of women of questionable virtue in opera. If the role of Bess “sullied” the singer, so would any of those operatic roles. While the Matthews/
Wilson debate over Bess’s status as tragic operatic heroine or black Broadway “hoochie” would not be resolved, it undoubtedly left black readers
with lingering concerns over how African American women were being
represented on the operatic stage and how white audiences might react to
displays of overt black female sexuality.
Toward the latter stages of Porgy and Bess’s initial New York run, two
extended appraisals appeared outside the black weeklies, written by the influential African American musicians Hall Johnson and Duke Ellington. Both
were aware that they spoke to a white as well as a black readership, since
their remarks appeared, respectively, in Opportunity, the official magazine of
the National Urban League that enjoyed a biracial audience, and the leftleaning New Theater. As musicians and composers in their own right, their
response to Gershwin’s opera was in part a matter of clearing space for their
own vision of the way African American folk and vernacular music might be
transformed without losing what they thought to be its cultural essence.
Johnson offered a sustained discussion of Porgy and Bess in the
January 1936 issue of Opportunity.56 Writing more than two months into
the opera’s run, he was responding to white and black critics who had
lauded Gershwin’s score for capturing a genuine Negro sensibility. For
Johnson, Porgy and Bess failed to achieve a unity on the musical level.
Opera as “the musical embodiment of a story” required “so subtle a blending
into the form” of its various episodes that “there are no seams nor wrinkles.”
But with Porgy and Bess, the audience was “confronted with a series of
musical episodes which, even if they do not belong together, could be
made to appear as if they do by a better handling of the musical connecting tissue.” Porgy and Bess lacked a “consistent thematic development in
the orchestral interludes which join these episodes.” Gershwin’s recitativo
also failed to link the elements of the story, and their intelligibility was
hampered by “misplaced accents and unnatural inflections.” While
conceding that the production was a “delightful musical show,” Johnson
maintained that it was “disconcerting as an opera.” Like Matthews and a
number of white music critics, he appreciated Gershwin’s production as
entertainment but rejected it as a viable artistic synthesis.
358 The Musical Quarterly
It is not easy, however, to believe that Sportin’ Life (a genuine product
of Catfish Row, for all his smart talk about New York) could be so
entirely liberated from the superstitious awe of Divinity which even
the most depraved southern Negro never quite loses. His immortality is fleshly, not cerebral.
Clearly offended by a vaudeville-styled song that derided faith in the
Bible, Johnson argued that the piece would be better off sung by comedians in a white revue, for, in the context of an opera, “it can only suggest a
pathetic Gilbert and Sullivan vainly trying to go slumming in a very
smudgy coat of burnt-cork.” Johnson did, however, praise Sportin’ Life’s
“There’s a Boat That’s Leavin’ Soon for New York” as a “Negro gem” and
Bess’s “What You Want With Bess” as a “few pages of such vibrant
beauty, so replete with the tragedy of the minor spirituals.”
Johnson held the religious music of southern black slaves in particular reverence. Indeed, the spiritual was his privileged genre, and when
Johnson spoke of folk music he meant religious music rather than secular
blues, jazz, or ragtime. He continued an argument first articulated by
Frederick Douglass, who expressed dismay at the white misreading of spirituals as a sign of the slave’s spontaneous joy.58 That idea was amplified by
Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk when he labeled the slave spirituals “the
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As a “Negro opera,” Porgy and Bess also missed the boat. Johnson
outlined a complex task for Gershwin or any composer who aimed to essay
a “Negro opera.” To “make an artistic unity,” the composer of such an
opera would need to address “the question of opera as a musical form; . . .
the question of Negro music, the behavior of Negroes in general and of
[the characters] Porgy and Bess in particular.” While recognizing Gershwin’s
extraordinary talents, Johnson viewed him as a cultural outsider who had
failed, in his visits to Charleston, to capture the “informing spirit of Negro
music,” and he took issue with Gershwin’s assertion that he had written
genuine folk songs.57 According to Johnson, Porgy and Bess was “not a
Negro opera by Gershwin, but Gershwin’s idea of what a Negro opera
should be.” Such a project must not only succeed on the musical level, but
it must also “be written in an authentic Negro musical language and sung
and acted in a characteristically Negro style.”
In what emerged as a major theme in Johnson’s essay, Gershwin
achieved only a superficial understanding of African American culture,
what Johnson called “a certain Negroid flavor.” Johnson singled out Porgy’s
“I Got Plenty of Nothin’” and Sportin’ Life’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” for
their particularly “un-Negroid” style and substance. He seemed to take particular umbrage at the sentiments expressed in “It Ain’t Necessarily So”:
African American Responses to Porgy and Bess
359
So that our (African-American) folk-culture is like the growth of some
hardy, yet exotic, shrub, whose fragrance never fails to delight discriminating nostrils even when there is no interest in the depths of its roots. But
when the leaves are gathered by strange hands they soon wither, and when
cuttings are transplanted into strange soil, they have but a short and sickly
life. Only those who sowed the seed may know the secret at the root.
Johnson affirmed his vision that “the secret at the root” could reinvigorate
the American theater and opera. That ambition was Du Boisian in suggesting that an African American opera would elevate black folk music
through a self-conscious artistry that presented black social memory, what
Du Bois called “the gift of the spirit” in its most artistically distilled form.60
By looking back to older religious folk music, Johnson recapitulated
and extended the critical paradigm used to judge his previous work in The
Green Pastures and Run, Little Chillun!, a trajectory that elevated spirituals
from the concert to the dramatic to the operatic stage. Duke Ellington, in
contrast, drew on the cauldron of black urban music—blues, ragtime, and
jazz—to extend vernacular music into higher realms. When the white
journalist Edward Morrow interviewed him for the New Theater, he introduced Ellington as not simply a jazz musician, but as a “Negro orchestra
leader and composer” whom critics had compared with Sibelius and whose
“energies might be released to the serious efforts his genius warrants,”
positioning Ellington as a legitimate musician who could speak with
authority on Gershwin’s opera.61 Yet Ellington had not emerged out of the
black classical sphere and its ideologies about race and culture. Like
Gershwin, he lacked conservatory credentials but had an ambitious
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sorrow songs.” For Johnson, like Du Bois, Alain Locke, and James Weldon
Johnson, spirituals were what the historian Paul Allen Anderson calls
“vessels for transmitting black social memory.”59 Johnson spoke of the wall
of racial separation “that forced them [the spirituals] into existence,” and
that at the same time had “closed in tight upon their meaning, and allows
only their beauty to escape through the chinks.” Gershwin, like many whites
before him, might appreciate the aesthetic beauty of black spirituals but
could never grasp the deeper significance they held for blacks, and hence
could never succeed in offering their proper interpretation.
Johnson argued that an “authenticity of style” necessarily preserved
and transmitted the social memory of the spirituals and would “be achieved
only when the public has been made to see and like Negro material presented as its creators understand and feel it.” Gershwin, despite his good
intentions, could only fall short. Johnson described the approach of white
creative artists and audiences to African American culture as follows:
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commitment to traverse the high/low cultural divide by fusing African
American vernacular sounds with the conventions of European musical
style and form. At the time of his interview with Morrow in December
1935, thanks to high-profile engagements at Harlem’s top nightspots and
to national exposure gained through tours, radio broadcasts, films, and
recordings, Ellington led America’s best-known black jazz orchestra.
Moreover, Ellington was known for innovations in harmony, tonality, and
form that pushed his jazz arrangements in the direction of the western
classical tradition. Early pieces like Black and Tan Fantasy (1927), Creole
Rhapsody (1931), and Reminiscing in Tempo (1935) foreshadowed the
extended compositions like Black, Brown, and Beige (1943) and his Sacred
Concerts, which would be performed at Carnegie Hall.62
Discerning Ellington’s true intentions toward Gershwin and his
opera based solely on his New Theater interview is problematic, given the
leading nature of Morrow’s questioning and the stridency of the political
rhetoric with which he framed the discussion. Indeed, the outspoken and
critical nature of the remarks attributed to Ellington—a figure known for
his grace and diplomacy—was so unusual that musicologist Mark Tucker
has questioned the validity of the interview.63 Ostensibly, Morrow wanted
to offer a corrective to the white critics, the “critical Negrophiles” who
“went into journalistic rhapsodies” and who “hailed it as a native
American opera.” He noted that “no one, however, thought to ask Negro
musicians, composers and singers their opinions of the Gershwin masterpiece.” In the end Morrow offered Ellington very little space as he
advanced toward his own conclusions that, despite “the cramping forces”
that exploited them, “Negro artists are becoming socially-conscious and
class-conscious, and more courageous,” which is why “their expression is
filled with protest.” But a close reading shows Ellington time and time
again insisting on his own definition of his musical intentions, subtly
rebuking Morrow for his critical usurpations. One exchange is illustrative.
“I don’t suppose,” Morrow “suggested” to Ellington, “it could be very true
to the spirit, scene or setting of impoverished Charleston Negroes if the
musical expression failed to consider the underlying emotions and social
forces of the Gullah Negroes.” Ellington simply replied, “That might be . . .
but I can say it better in my own way. For instance, how could you possibly
express in decent English the same thing I express when I tell my band,
‘Now you cats swing the verse, then go to town on the gutbucket chorus’!”
In his own way, Ellington managed to say a great deal about Porgy
and Bess without assenting to Morrow’s political position. He found Porgy
and Bess “grand music and a swell play,” but he sensed a disconnect
between the music and story. As a result, he argued, the opera was not
“true to and of the life of the people it depicted.” He further disputed
African American Responses to Porgy and Bess
361
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critics’ claims that Gershwin had written an opera drawn from African
American folk sources, noting that the work “does not use the Negro
musical idiom. It was not the music of Catfish Row or any other kind of
Negroes.” Ellington offered an example: “What happened when the girl
selling strawberries came on the stage? Did he [Gershwin] get the rhythm,
the speech, and the ‘swing’ of the street-vendor? No, sir, he did not; he
went dramatic! Gershwin had the girl stop cold, take her stance, and sing
an aria in the Italian, would-be Negro manner.” Ellington complained,
“The music went one way and the action another,” and cynically concluded, “Still, the audience gasped; ‘Don’t the people get right into their
parts?’ and ‘Aren’t they emotional!’”
Even though Ellington was perhaps the musician most experienced
and comfortable with Gershwin’s range of musical choices, for him, Porgy
and Bess did not successfully integrate those idioms, nor did it offer him a
model for self-conscious African American artistry. Ellington was one of
the few African American respondents to Porgy and Bess who did not
share the ideal of uplifting black folk forms through European high-art
forms such as opera. In response to Morrow’s inquiry about his future
plans to compose an opera or symphony, Ellington answered, “No. . . . I
have to make a living and so I have to have an audience. I do not believe
people honestly like, much less understand, things like Porgy and Bess.
The critics and some of the people who are supposed to know have told
them they should like the stuff. So they say it’s wonderful.”
In his deceptively simple way, Ellington advocated a musical development that responded to the critical acumen of an audience rather than
to a predefined hierarchical ideology of form. In a sense, he was arguing
that the ideology that valued inherited European forms was an imposition
upon black artists and audiences because it did not truly reflect their own
aesthetic tastes and values. He valued his own artistic sense and the audience it brought him more than the approbation of critics: “I prefer to go
right on putting down my ideas, moods and themes and letting the critics
call them what they will.”64 Ellington’s rejection of the European forms of
opera and symphony in favor of extended jazz works in fact proposed a
different model in the dialectic of double-consciousness, one that established an African American voice for black and white audiences, sought
to transcend stereotypes, and located the self-conscious African American
artist in urban music such as jazz. Ellington had his own vision of African
American music as social memory, having previously argued that the
essence of black music was rooted in “our reaction in the plantation days
to the tyranny we endured” and that he looked forward to “an authentic
[musical] record of my race written by a member of it.”65 If secular blues,
ragtime, and early jazz could be harnessed and transformed, the elevating
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would have to be done by cultural insiders like him, not by outsiders like
Gershwin. In suggesting that the cultural production should be under the
control of African American creators as well as performers, Ellington
joined Johnson in advocating a Harlem Renaissance ethos of cultural
nationalism that challenged the assimilationist attitudes central to earlier
racial uplift theory and practice.66
Despite their criticism, it would be a mistake to conclude that
Matthews, Johnson, and Ellington wholeheartedly condemned Porgy and
Bess. Indeed, all three admitted that the opera possessed moments of sublime aesthetic pleasure and thus had tremendous entertainment value.
This paradox of rejecting the whole while admiring the parts—of recognizing the opera’s overall failure to accurately represent black folk culture
while being profoundly moved by the individual performers and songs that
offered glimpses of genuine expression—was central to the last substantial
black press review of the opera’s initial New York run. Writing under the
subtitle “Music Not Truly Negroid, and Opera Smacks of Minstrel Days,”
Roi Ottley of the Amsterdam News reported that on seeing Porgy and Bess
for a second time, he felt “torn between the spell-binding artistry and the
ability of Negroes to survive the stereotype.”67 Ottley’s discussion of
“surviving the stereotype” introduced an idea that had not been central to
earlier black commentary on the 1935 opera but that foreshadowed later
criticism of civil rights–era productions of the work.68 Although Ottley
stated that the music was “not Negro music” and that he “waited to hear
that blue note hit” that “never was sounded,” he admitted being deeply
touched by certain songs. He identified Bubbles’s performances as “a
symphony of rhythm, motion and mood” that “fairly lifted me out of my
seat when he sang ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ and again when he did ‘There’s
a Boat That’s Leavin’ Soon for New York.’” Ottley, like Matthews,
Johnson, and Ellington, expressed concern over the score’s lack of
authenticity, but still recognized the genius of Gershwin’s songs when
interpreted by master black performers such as Bubbles.
Such recognition was reflected in the reception Porgy and Bess
received when it toured in early 1936 to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh,
Chicago, and Washington, D.C. Local black critics expressed neither the
exuberance of the initial African American responses to the opera nor the
close and critical scrutiny of Matthews, Johnson, and Ellington. Rather,
like Ottley, they paid greatest attention to the theatrical elements and
songs of Porgy and Bess and told their readers that it was, quite simply, a
good show.69 The responses of Ottley and the tour reviewers anticipated
the eventual embrace and reinterpretation of the opera’s songs by leading
black jazz musicians and singers such as Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald,
Miles Davis, and Cab Calloway.70
African American Responses to Porgy and Bess
363
Notes
Ray Allen is associate professor of music at Brooklyn College and the Graduate
Center, City University of New York, and Director of American Studies at Brooklyn
College. He is author of Singing in the Spirit: African-American Sacred Quartets in New
York City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991) and coeditor of Island Sounds in the
Global City (University of Illinois Press, 2001). E-mail address: [email protected].
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Returning to Garland, we see that his 1936 New York World-Telegram
article sets us on a trail toward understanding the racial dynamic that
shaped the reception of Porgy and Bess. His choice of Matthews, Johnson,
and Ellington as black commentators was astute, for all three voiced genuine concerns over the validity of Gershwin’s score and his claim to have
written a Negro folk opera. But Garland’s failure to take into account the
outpouring of support for the opera from the black weeklies or to understand the larger cultural debates regarding authenticity, representation,
and uplift that provided an African American intellectual context for the
trio’s criticism prevented him from grasping the deeper implications of
black responses. In retrospect, Garland’s article serves as a double-edged
sword—on the one hand introducing a white readership to African
American perspectives on the opera, on the other setting into motion a
spurious narrative of black renunciation that wound its way into and
through much of the subsequent secondary literature.
Locating the comments of Matthews, Johnson, and Ellington in the
larger coverage of the 1935 production of the opera by the black weeklies
and in the intellectual discourse regarding the role of the creative arts in
the late Harlem Renaissance tells another story, one far more complex
than Garland’s simple racial binary of white acceptance and black rejection.
The ideology of cultural uplift, always filtered through the perspective of
double-consciousness, drove African American critics to assess and reassess
the contributions that Porgy and Bess might make in the ongoing struggle
for the recognition of black culture, the legitimization of black performing
artists, and the emergence of a self-conscious black creative vision.
In its subsequent reincarnations as a Broadway musical (1942–
1944), an international touring production (1952–1956), and a Hollywood film (1959), Porgy and Bess would continue to serve as a cultural
provocateur, a “symbol of American cultural collision” that challenged
black and white critics alike to reexamine their assumptions about cultural hierarchy and the role of race in forging national art and identity.
For black reviewers and critics, Porgy and Bess would remain an important
site of their engagement in a larger cultural conversation about the constitution of American art and the representation of African American culture on the national and international stages.
364 The Musical Quarterly
George P. Cunningham is professor and chairperson of the Africana Studies Department
at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where he teaches African American
and American literature and culture. He writes on the intersection of gender, race, and
culture, and he is the editor of Representing Black Men (Routledge, 1995).
1. Robert Garland, “Negroes Are Critical of ‘Porgy and Bess’: Gershwin Opus Held
Over at the Alvin Because of Popularity with Whites,” New York World-Telegram (16 Jan.
1936). “No Negro could possibly be fooled by ‘Porgy and Bess’” is a statement by Edward
Morrow from his interview with Duke Ellington; see note 4.
2. Robert Garland, “’Porgy and Bess Scores’: Opera is Presented by Theater Guild,”
New York World-Telegram, 11 Oct. 1935.
3. Charles Schwartz, Gershwin: His Life and Music (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill
Company, 1973), 245.
5. Many Gershwin scholars simply ignored black responses to Porgy and Bess. For
example, Gershwin biographies by Merle Armitage (George Gershwin: Man and Legend
[New York: Dull, Sloan, and Pearce, 1958]), David Ewen (George Gershwin—His Journey
to Greatness [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970]), and Edward Jablonski (Gershwin:
A Biography [Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987]) cite no published black criticism in their discussions of the opera. The Gershwin readers edited by Gregory Suriano
(Gershwin in His Time: A Biographical Scrapbook: 1919–1937 [New York: Gramercy Books,
1998]) and by Robert Wyatt and John Andrew Johnson (The George Gershwin Reader
[New York: Oxford University Press, 2004]) devote significant space to the opera—Wyatt
and Johnson even include recent interviews with Todd Duncan (the original Porgy) and
Anne Brown (the original Bess)—but neither study reproduces reviews or commentary by
black critics.
6. Swain, The Broadway Musical, 57.
7. Alpert, The Life and Times of Porgy and Bess, 322.
8. Wilfrid Mellers, Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Development in the History of
American Music (New York: Knopf, 1965), 393.
9. Lawrence Starr, “Towards a Re-evaluation of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess,” American
Music 2 (Summer 1984): 26.
10. Starr, “Towards a Re-evaluation,” 27.
11. Richard Crawford, “It Ain’t Necessarily Soul: Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess as a
Symbol,” Yearbook for Inter-American Musical Research 8 (1972): 17–38.
12. Harold Cruses’s criticism of the opera can be found in his The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967), 100–07.
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4. The actual passage by Morrow reads, “the times are here to debunk such tripe as
Gershwin’s lamp-black Negroisms.” Garland does not actually attribute the statement to
Ellington but claimed Ellington “agreed” with it. Marrow’s original interview is found in
“Duke Ellington on Gershwin’s Porgy,” New Theater (Dec. 1935): 5–6. Later writers who
used Garland as a source misattributed the remark to Ellington. See Schwartz, Gershwin,
245; Joan Peyser, The Memory of It All: The Life of George Gershwin (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1993), 251–52; Hollis Alpert, The Life and Times of Porgy and Bess (New
York: Knopf, 1990), 121–22; and Joseph Swain, The Broadway Musical: A Critical and
Musical Survey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 56.
African American Responses to Porgy and Bess
365
13. Crawford, “It Ain’t Necessarily Soul,” 23–24.
14. For more recent musicology scholarship that touches on the racial dimensions of
Porgy and Bess, see David Horn, “From Catfish Row to Ganby Street: Contesting
Meaning in Porgy and Bess,” Popular Music 13 (1994): 165–74; John Andrew Johnson,
“Gershwin’s ‘American Folk Opera’: The Genesis, Style, and Reputation of Porgy and
Bess” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1996); and Ray Allen, “An American Folk Opera?
Triangulating Folkness, Blackness, and Americaness in Gershwin and Heyward’s Porgy
and Bess,” Journal of American Folklore 117 (Summer 2004): 243–61.
15. Hayward Farrar, The Baltimore Afro-American, 1892–1950 (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1998), 46–47.
16. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the
Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 2, 3.
17. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 2, 3.
19. Antonín Dvorák, “The Real Value of Negro Melodies,” New York Herald, 21 May
1893; W. E. B. Du Bois prefaced each chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903; repr., New
York: Library of America, 1986) with epigraphs pairing the European musical and literary
traditions with spirituals.
20. The critics and composers of the Harlem Renaissance believed that the command of
European musical style and technique needed to be balanced by a retention of an African
American musical sensibility, what Alain Locke called “a mastery of mood and spirit,”
particularly in the realm of rhythm. Thus, they looked to spirituals, and to other forms of
black folk and popular music, to provide the potential building blocks for the creation of
new genres such as the concert spiritual and larger classical forms such as Negro-influenced
symphonies and operas. For a discussion of the views of Locke, James Weldon Johnson,
and William Grant Still regarding the transformation of black folk music to classical
Western forms through the mastery of form/technique and mood/spirit, see John Michael
Spencer, The New Negroes and Their Music (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1997), 19–26.
21. Samuel Floyd Jr.’s Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance: A Collection of Essays
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990) begins the integration of Harlem
Renaissance literary and musical criticism. Paul Allen Anderson offers a useful summation of Du Bois’s and Locke’s attitudes regarding the cultural significance of the folk
spiritual and its potential for artistic elevation in Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem
Renaissance Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). See especially 13–37
for his treatment of Du Bois and the spiritual, and 77–102 and 113–66 for Locke’s ideas
on the transformation of black folk music. See also Spencer’s The New Negroes, 19–37, for
further commentary on Locke’s and James Weldon Johnson’s thinking about spirituals
and black cultural nationalism.
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18. For an overview of the emergence of often short-lived African American orchestras,
opera companies, and choral societies in the early decades of the twentieth century, see
Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1997),
291–96. See also Southern’s discussion of the establishment of black orchestras in New
York, Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia during the 1920s and early 1930s (418–19).
Lawrence Schenbeck argues that classical music was covered extensively in the Chicago
Defender because of its value in facilitating cultural uplift, in “Music, Gender, and ‘Uplift’
in the Chicago Defender, 1927–1937,” Musical Quarterly 81, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 350–51.
366 The Musical Quarterly
22. For background on the concert spirituals, see Southern, The Music of Black
Americans, 227–31 and 420–24. See also Anderson’s discussion of the importance that
Harlem Renaissance critics like Alain Locke and Carl Van Vechten ascribed to concert
spiritual singers Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson in Deep River, 88–103.
23. For further background on the 1930 play and the 1936 film The Green Pastures, see
Thomas Cripps’s “Introduction: A Moment of Lost Innocence,” in Marc Connelly, The
Green Pastures (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 11–39. The 1936 film
version, directed by Connelly with a screenplay by DuBose Heyward, and starring Rex
Ingram with the Hall Johnson Choir, is now available on DVD (Warner Brothers/Turner
Entertainment DVD 67675, 2006).
24. Sharon Kane, “‘Green Pastures’ Termed Biggest Hit of the Season,” Chicago
Defender, 22 Mar. 1930; “Race Play Strikes like Lightning on Broadway,” Pittsburgh Courier,
15 Mar. 1930; “Audience is Moved by ‘Green Pastures’: All-Race Play Called One of Finest Things of Present Generation,” Afro-American, 8 Mar. 1930.
26. Chappy Gardner, “‘Green Pastures’ Thrills Broadway: Show is Season’s Sensation,”
Pittsburgh Courier, 8 Mar. 1930.
27. “Green Pastures,” Crisis (May 1930): 177.
28. Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 420–23.
29. Chappy Gardner, “Hall Johnson Docks Choir Duties; Sails into Drama and ‘Run Little
Chillun’ is the Result of Trip,” Chicago Defender, 18 Mar. 1933. See also Gardner, “Little
Chillun’ Run,” Pittsburgh Courier, 18 Mar. 1933, and TRP, “‘Run Little Chillun!’ Hits,
Louisiana Flops: Hall Johnson Choir Splendid,” New York Amsterdam News, 8 Mar. 1933.
30. For further discussion of naturalness and artistry in staged black performance,
see Anderson’s discussion of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in Deep River, 18–22.
31. Nearly all of Porgy and Bess’s principal black singers had formal training in European
music. Porgy was played by baritone Todd Duncan (1903–1998), a professor of music at
Howard University who made his operatic debut in 1934 in an all-black production of
Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana at New York’s Mecca Temple. Bess was played by
Anne Wiggins Brown (b. 1912), who was the daughter of a prominent black Baltimore
physician and who had attended the Juilliard School of Music. Serena was played by Ruby
Elzy (1908–1943), a native of rural Mississippi who studied at Juilliard and had a minor
role in the film version of The Emperor Jones. Crown was played by Warren Coleman
(1901–1968), a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music. Jake was played by
Edward Matthews (1907–1954), who taught music at Fisk University, performed with the
Fisk Jubilee Singers, and sang in Virgil Thomson’s 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts.
Choral director Eva Jessye (1895–1992) taught music at Morgan College in Baltimore,
led a New York–based black choral group that specialized in concert spirituals, and
directed the chorus for Four Saints in Three Acts. Black readers were introduced to the cast
and made aware of their professional experience by Ralph Matthews in “Looking at the
Stars: The ‘Porgy and Bess’ Personnel,” Afro-American, 19 Oct. 1935.
32. Porgy and Bess was not the first American opera to feature an all-black cast. Virgil
Thomson’s 1934 modernist opera Four Saints in Three Acts, with a surrealist libretto by
Gertrude Stein, was mounted with an all-black cast led by choral director Eva Jessye.
Although the opera had nothing to do with black folk culture, it attracted attention
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25. S. Tutt Whitney in the New York Amsterdam News, 5 Mar. 1930.
African American Responses to Porgy and Bess
367
among black and mainstream critics who were interested in the possibilities of African
Americans singing opera. For an analysis of the racial dimensions of Thomson’s opera, see
Lisa Barg, “Black Voices/White Sounds: Race and Representation in Virgil Thomson’s
Four Saints in Three Acts,” American Music 18 (Summer 2000): 121–61.
33. George Gershwin, “Rhapsody in Catfish Row: Mr. Gershwin Tells the Origin and
Scheme for His Music in That New Folk Opera Called ‘Porgy and Bess,’” New York Times,
20 Oct. 1935. Much of this article was reprinted as “Gershwin Explains Why his ‘Porgy
and Bess’ is Called ‘Folk Opera,’” Afro-American, 2 Nov. 1935.
34. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 364.
35. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 9.
36. “Broadway to Have Another Glimpse at Catfish Row,” Afro-American, 5 Oct. 1935,
reprinted in full from “Porgy into Opera,” Time Magazine, 30 Sep. 1935.
38. Ralph J. Matthews, “Stage Love-making Injures Anne Brown, Porgy Star,”
Afro-American, 12 Oct. 1935. Matthews quotes from “Gershwin’s Opera Makes
Boston Hit,” New York Times, 1 Oct. 1935.
39. The initial reading of mainstream press reviews by the black critics was far different
from the story told by Gershwin scholars who interpreted the opening-night reviews as
ultimately damaging because of the less-than-enthusiastic reception of the work by influential music critics including Lawrence Gilman (New York Herald-Tribune), Olin Downes
(New York Times), W. J. Henderson (New York Sun), Samuel Chotzinoff (New York Post),
and Virgil Thomson (Modern Music). While these music critics expressed serious reservations about whether Gershwin’s score was a bona fide opera, the New York drama critics
were more united in their praise of the work. See discussions of the opera’s reception in
the mainstream press in Alpert, The Life and Times of Porgy and Bess, 113–18, Jablonski,
Gershwin, 288–91, Schwartz, Gershwin, 265–66, and Peyser, The Memory of It All, 248–49.
40. William E. Clark, “In the Name of Art,” New York Age, 19 Oct. 1935. Danton
Walker’s review originally appeared in the New York Post, 13 Oct. 1935.
41. Floyd Calvin, “New Negro Play on Broadway is Rated As ‘Tops’: Burns Mantle,
Walter Winchell, Richard Lockridge, Lawrence Gilman, Robert Garland and Pitts
Sanborn Admit Acting Is Superb,” Pittsburgh Courier, 19 Oct. 1935.
42. Ted Yates, “Porgy and Bess Scores Triumph at the Alvin: New Opera by Gershwin is
Warmly Received,” New York Amsterdam News, 19 Oct. 1935.
43. Alan McMillan, “[‘Porgy’?] Scores on Broadway: Race Music is Dignified by Sequel
to Late ‘Porgy,’” Chicago Defender, 19 Oct. 1935.
44. Carl Rossini Diton’s review was syndicated by the Associated Negro Press and
appeared in the New York Amsterdam News, 19 Oct. 1935, and the Philadelphia Tribune,
17 Oct. 1935.
45. Lucien White, “Porgy and Bess,” New York Age, 26 Oct. 1935.
46. In the Afro-American, Matthews often satirized the middle-class conventions that
were upheld fervently by the paper’s owner and editor, Carl Murphy. See Farrar, The
Baltimore Afro-American, 90.
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37. “Story of Gershwin’s New ‘Porgy and Bess,’” New York Amsterdam News, 12 Oct. 1935,
reprint of “On the Genesis of a Folk Opera,” New York Times, 6 Oct. 1935.
368 The Musical Quarterly
47. Ralph Matthews, “‘Porgy and Bess’ Given Ovation on Broadway: White Way
Welcomes Back Old Favorite in New Clothes,” Afro-American, 19 Oct. 1935. Subsequent
quotes by Matthews are from this source.
48. Ralph Matthews, “Many Get Chance on Broadway as Season Opens,” Afro-American,
19 Oct. 1935. Floyd Calvin, “Race Actors Capture Broadway: And New York’s ‘Street of
Shows’ Is Still The Tops,” Chicago Defender, 7 Dec. 1935; the article also appeared as
“Race in Five Broadway Shows, With No ‘Black Face’ in Casts,” Philadelphia Tribune,
5 Dec. 1935.
49. Floyd Calvin, “Ruby Elzy Establishes Precedents in Role of ‘Serena’ in Opera Porgy
and Bess,” New York Age, 9 Nov. 1935.
51. “Talented Girl in New Opera of Old Favorite,” New York Amsterdam News, 12 Oct.
1935.
52. Ralph Matthews, “Papa Brown Shocked When Annie Does Hoochie Dance,”
Afro-American, 19 Oct. 1935.
53. See Gaines’s discussion on how black males, in order to achieve middle-class
status, had to demonstrate “male protection and protected femininity” in Uplifting the
Race, 12.
54. Ralph Matthews, “Every Broadway Play to Date has Shown our Women as Prostitutes,”
Afro-American, 26 Oct. 1935.
55. W. Llewellyn Wilson, “Most Feminine Characters Were Pretty Bad Lot, Baltimore
Director Points Out,” Afro-American, 9 Nov. 1935. The Afro-American identifies Wilson
as the director of the Baltimore Municipal Symphony and Chorus, and Eileen Southern
as director of the Baltimore City Orchestra and Chorus. See Southern, The Music of Black
Americans, 290.
56. Hall Johnson, “Porgy and Bess’—a Folk Opera,” Opportunity (Jan. 1936): 24–28.
All subsequent quotes by Johnson are from this source.
57. Gershwin, “Rhapsody in Catfish Row.”
58. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845; repr.,
New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 58.
59. Anderson, Deep River, 6.
60. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 545.
61. Edward Morrow, “Duke Ellington on Gershwin’s Porgy,” New Theater (Dec. 1935):
5–6. Subsequent quotes by Ellington are from this source unless otherwise noted.
62. See Lewis Erenberg’s discussion of Ellington’s attempts to establish jazz as legitimate
composed music in Swinging the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Birth of American Culture
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 94–119.
63. Mark Tucker argues that “this outspokenness was so unusual for Ellington as to raise
questions about the interview’s authenticity.” But, he concludes, “While the frank tone is
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50. Floyd Calvin, “Eva Jessye Proves the Meek Sometimes Do Inherit the Earth: Noted
Choir Director Went to Gay White Way in a Bandana to Win Foothold,” Afro-American,
12 Dec. 1935. See also Ralph Matthews’s coverage of Jessye in “Looking at the Stars,”
Afro-American, 19 Oct. 1935.
African American Responses to Porgy and Bess
369
surprising, the manner of delivery would seem to be Ellington’s own.” See Tucker, The
Duke Ellington Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 114.
64. Perhaps Ellington’s reticence toward composing longer works such as operas or symphonies and his defensive posture toward critics were a result of John Hammond’s attack
on Ellington’s extended piece, Reminiscing in Tempo, in a review that had appeared a
month earlier in the jazz magazine Down Beat. Hammond called Reminiscing in Tempo
“formless and shallow” and chided Ellington for losing touch with his grassroots black
audience and ignoring their political struggle. See John Hammond, “The Tragedy of
Duke Ellington,” Down Beat (Nov. 1935): 1, 6, reprinted in Tucker, The Duke Ellington
Reader, 118–20. Ellington would later announce his intentions to write an opera, Boola,
which was never produced and, according to Mark Tucker, probably never finished. See
Tucker, The Duke Ellington Reader, 116.
66. Gaines argues that the contradictions of the older racial uplift ideology became
more apparent following World War I and the first great migration to the North. See
Uplifting the Race, 234, and the final chapter of the book.
67. Roi Ottley, “[ . . . ] Stereotype in ‘Porgy and Bess’: Music Not Truly Negroid, and
Opera Smacks of Minstrel Days, Reviewer Complains After His Second View of Work,”
New York Amsterdam News, 11 Jan. 1936.
68. See for example Richard Crawford’s discussion of black playwright Lorraine
Hansberry’s and Ebony editor Era Bell Thompson’s concerns over racial stereotyping in
the 1959 film version of the opera in “It Ain’t Necessarily Soul,” 30–32.
69. See Rob Roy, “‘Porgy and Bess’ More than Opera,” Chicago Defender, 29 Feb. 1936,
and “‘Porgy and Bess’ Opens for Stay at the Forrest,” Philadelphia Tribune, 30 Jan. 1936.
70. See Porgy and Bess: Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald (Verve 2507, 1957) and Miles
Davis—Porgy and Bess (Columbia/Legacy CK 65141, 1958).
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65. As quoted in Duke Ellington, “The Duke Steps Out,” Rhythm (Mar. 1931): 20–22,
and reprinted in Tucker, The Duke Ellington Reader, 46–50. See also Anderson’s discussion of Ellington’s attitudes toward race and music and the reception of his extended
pieces in Deep River, 257–70.