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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, please e-mail: [email protected]. Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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: African American Responses to Porgy and Bess 343 Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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.”10 344 The Musical Quarterly Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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 African American Responses to Porgy and Bess 345 Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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 346 The Musical Quarterly Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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 African American Responses to Porgy and Bess 347 Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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 348 The Musical Quarterly Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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 African American Responses to Porgy and Bess 349 Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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 350 The Musical Quarterly Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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, African American Responses to Porgy and Bess 351 Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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 352 The Musical Quarterly 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 Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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: African American Responses to Porgy and Bess 353 Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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 Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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. Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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. 356 The Musical Quarterly Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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 Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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 Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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 Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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: 360 The Musical Quarterly Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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 Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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 362 The Musical Quarterly Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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]. Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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. Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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. Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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 Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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. Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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 Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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). Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on July 5, 2011 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.