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Overview
Allan Keiler chronicles the life of the legendary singer and activist from the childhood manifestation of her musical genius to her worldwide celebrity. As he shows, community and familial support could not shield her from the economic hardship and bigotry she encountered in her early performing days. Early successes in London and Berlin set the stage for her American breakthrough while the triumphant 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert established her immediately as an icon in the struggle against discrimination. Keiler reveals a woman more comfortable as artist than activist. But if Anderson's intense privacy and devotion to her work distanced her from a direct role in the civil rights movement, she remained a powerful symbol of possibility.
Drawing on rare archives and meetings with Anderson before her death, Marian Anderson is a magnificent study of a groundbreaking American artist.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252070679 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 01/23/2002 |
| Series: | Music in American Life |
| Edition description: | REPRINT |
| Pages: | 464 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.20(d) |
| Lexile: | 1360L (what's this?) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One: Childhood in South Philadelphia (1897-1915) "Come and hear the baby contralto, ten years old."
Catching sight of a small handbill lying on the ground, the young girl noticed something curiously familiar about it. When she picked it up, she saw her picture in the corner and then, beneath the picture, her name, Marian Anderson. Only then did she notice the words of invitation. Her excitement was so great that, returning home from the grocer's, she discovered she had bought potatoes and not bread, as her mother had asked. On her way back to the grocer's, she held fast to the handbill which had so unexpectedly made her aware of her fame. In later years, thinking about her childhood in South Philadelphia, she recalled that handbill far more vividly than her actual singing.
Benjamin Anderson, Marian Anderson's grandfather, was the first of the Andersons to settle in South Philadelphia. He was born in 1848, in King William County, Virginia, part of the Middle Peninsula in the Tidewater. Like many freed blacks in the fertile lands of eastern Virginia, he earned his living farming. Benjamin was a small man. For someone who worked outdoors in the fields all day, he did not seem in the least robust. Quiet, rarely raising his voice at all, he was kindly and sensitive. In 1869 he married Mary Holmes. She too had grown up in the Tidewater of eastern Virginia, in King and Queen County. To many they must have seemed an unlikely couple. Mary, or Isabella, as everyone knew her, was tall, easily a head taller than Benjamin, and temperamentally as outspoken and fiercely determined, even imperious, as Benjamin was soft-spoken and tolerant. As faras Isabella was concerned, her self-reliance came from her Native American heritage, which she exhibited prominently in her high cheekbones and her large, almond-shaped eyes with their thick, perfectly arched eyebrows. In twelve years of marriage, Isabella gave birth to eight children, five of whom -- four sons and a daughter -- survived infancy.
Virginia suffered more physical destruction than any state during the Civil War, causing a vast exodus of blacks to the large industrial cities of the North after the war. Near the end of the century Benjamin Anderson and his family joined the exodus north, not only to escape the clutches of Jim Crow but to seek more opportunites for work and better schools. They settled in South Philadelphia, in a large house on Fitzwater Street, among the blacks, Jews, Italians and Irish who made up one of the oldest ethnically and racially diverse neighborhoods in the country. Like most streets in South Philadelphia, Fitzwater was lined with row houses, many of them with the green shutters and white marble stoops typical of the neighborhood. Benjamin found work as a laborer. Isabella took in boarders, some of them children whose parents were not able to keep their families together. On occasion, she also acted as midwife for neighborhood doctors.
John Berkley Anderson, the oldest of Benjamin and Isabella's children, was only nineteen when, in 1895, he met Annie Delilah Rucker. Annie Delilah's parents, Robert and Ellen Rucker, had grown up in Boonsboro, in Bedford County, Virginia, just west of Lynchburg. Both parents believed in the value of education and encouraged their four children to aim high. Robert himself was resourceful, with good business instincts and a clear eye toward the economic advantages offered by the growing city of Lynchburg after Reconstruction. With John T. Wilkinson, another merchant, Robert opened a livery stable on Sixth Street, in downtown Lynchburg, where they sold feed, boarded stock, and transported passengers to and from the train station. Annie's brother, William Henry, like her sister Elnora, remained in Lynchburg. Alice, another sister, left Lynchburg for Philadelphia, where she married Grant Ward. It was an illness of Alice's that first brought Annie, who was then twenty-one, to Philadelphia, and it was Grant Ward who brought Annie and John Berkley together.
John and Annie must have had a whirlwind romance, to judge from Marian's version of their first meeting, which she wrote down many years later in a notebook filled with concert engagements and everyday domestic reminders: "On a summer vacation visit to her older sister, my Mother, a Virginian by birth, came to Philadelphia from Lynchburg where she was a school teacher....It was Mother's brother-in-law who introduced her to his friend, the unusual young man who neither drank, smoked nor chewed, was an active Christian, a steady worker and maintained his own room in the home of his parents. And so it is little wonder that she should become Mrs. John Berkley Anderson." They married that same year and moved into the house of one of John's friends, on Webster Street, where they rented a room on the second floor.
John and Annie, like John's parents, formed a study in contrast. Annie was short and rather plumpish. John, well over six feet tall, towered above her. As Marian often recalled in later years, John liked to tease Annie about how much shorter she was: "I remember once when she was helping Father put on his tie and she was reaching up on tiptoe. He laughed heartily and told her to get a newspaper to stand on to make herself a little taller." Annie was modest and retiring. John was a man of considerable charm, outgoing, even flirtatious. Like all the Andersons, he had Isabella's features, the same high cheekbones and piercing eyes. Like his mother and most of the Andersons, John Berkley was Baptist and attended Union Baptist Church, where he was a special officer, helping to seat people and to keep the children out of the balcony. For him religion was in large measure a social and neighborly activity. Annie was a Methodist, worshipping at the old Bainbridge Street Methodist Church, later the Tindley Temple. With an unquestioning belief in the church and its teachings, Annie was guided by a dutiful yet compassionate spirituality.
John and Annie both worked hard during their first year of marriage, hoping to earn enough to raise a family. John worked in downtown Philadelphia at the Reading Terminal, where he sold ice and coal. Eventually he had a small liquor business as well, which Marian always chose to forget. Annie had attended the Virginia Seminary and College in Lynchburg for a short time, which had allowed her to teach in the Virginia schools even without the full credentials of a teacher's college. In Philadelphia, however, no black teacher could teach without full credentials, and even with them could teach only in schools attended primarily by black students. Few blacks were able to attend high school in those years, so only the elementary schools in predominantly black neighborhoods held any promise for black teachers. Eventually Annie might have been able to teach in one of these, but even this would have required further accreditation and considerable good fortune. She settled instead, until her first child was born, for looking after small children.
Marian was born on February 27, 1897, the first of three daughters. When she was about two years old, the family, having outgrown the small room on Webster Street, went to live with Benjamin and Isabella. Marian's two sisters were born there, Alyse in 1900, Ethel May in 1902. Years later, Marian would recall Alyse's arrival as the first event of consequence in her grandparents' house: "My earliest recollection is that of the third-story room my parents occupied in that house. Somehow I was in that room -- I had crawled under the bed when the doctor had arrived and perhaps had fallen asleep there. I heard a cry. It was the first cry of my new sister, Alyse. I peeked out. There was the doctor and there was his black bag. Long after I should have known better, I believed that Alyse had been fetched in that black bag."
After Ethel was born, John Berkley and Annie rented a small house of their own, on Colorado Street, near the corner of Seventeenth Street, only a few blocks from John's parents. Marian always carried vivid memories of the house on Colorado Street: "The house did not have a real bathroom, but Mother was undaunted. We were lathered and rinsed at least once a day, and on Saturday a huge wooden tub was set in the center of the kitchen floor. After sufficiently warm water was poured in, we were lifted inside. Mother would kneel and give us a good scrubbing with ivory soap. Then we were put to bed." But more than anything, it was the powerful bond between mother and daughter that Marian remembered most vividly: "Mother spent a lot of time in the kitchen. Because I was the eldest I was soon allowed to remain with her when my sisters were tucked into bed. Sometimes I would try to help with little things, although I don't know how much use I really was to Mother." For the most part Marian was content to be near her mother, often sitting alone, quietly self-absorbed. Later, Marian liked to recall an incident when her mother found her sitting in a little chair in the living room, laughing. When her mother asked her why she was laughing, Marian explained that she had been watching the flower-decorated border around the room, the walls becoming alive with people laughing and waving.
As an adult Marian claimed to have a clear memory of her father, but her portrait of him is anything but distinct: "We do not have any photograph of him, but I have a picture in my mind of a man, dark, handsome, tall, and neither too stout nor too thin. I cannot say how tall, but he was well over six feet and stood very erect." Mostly she remembered her father's pride in his daughters, and his delight in showing them off: "Easter was another big day. Father made it a point to provide us with new bonnets, and he would go to a shop, and select them himself. When we were very young he would bring each of us one of the sailor hats then in fashion, with a gay ribbon trailing down the back. Later on he chose different bonnets for each of us, and he always insisted that they be trimmed with flowers."
Even before the family moved to Colorado Street, Marian's musical talent was apparent to everyone. Her mother remembered that, "even before the age of two years, [Marian] would sit at her toy piano, and play and sing original ditties, sometimes in a loud voice, then, in subdued tones, sincere and always highly delighted. Thus she would entertain herself for more than an hour at a time." When she was three, her mother told a friend years later: "She had a toy which was made of metal strips mounted on two small blocks of wood. When the metal strips were hit with the little hammer, they produced music. This was her great pleasure from the first thing in the morning to the last thing before bed. In time the little eight note toy could no longer do all the things she wanted it to do, so by a great stretch of the imagination, a stair step became her instrument. The bottom step was her piano stool while the step above was her piano. She would sit there and play and sing by the hour."
When she was six -- the family had already moved to Colorado Street -- Marian enjoyed a brief period of excitement with a violin. As she later recalled: "Somebody took me to a concert and this was a Negro orchestra and the violinist came forward and played a solo, and I thought, that's for me. The big thing then for making money was scrubbing steps, so I scrubbed steps and would get five cents or ten cents, or whatever. I did steps for four or five different people. Finally I saw a violin in a pawn shop and my aunt went with me and I think it cost all of three dollars or a little more." There was no money for lessons, so she had to make do with the frustrating help of a family friend who gave her some rudimentary instruction. Her interest may very well have outlasted the violin, for gradually, string by string, it gave out.
A few years later Marian's father bought the family a piano from his brother Walter. Although there was no money for lessons, she and her sisters learned to play the scales and some melodies in the key of C. They liked to sit on their father's knee as he sat at the piano, trying to teach him what they had learned on their own: "He would almost always manage to strike two keys at a time in order to let us feel that we were so much better at piano-playing than he was. He could easily have struck one key, you know, but generally, when we were guiding his finger, it went on two keys at a time. We were so thrilled that we were able to teach him." One day Marian discovered in a powerful way that she could excel at playing the piano if she wanted to: "I was walking along the street one day, carrying a basket of laundry that I was delivering for my mother, when I heard the sound of the piano. I set down my basket, went up the steps, and looked into the window. I knew it was wrong to peep, but I could not resist the temptation. I saw a woman seated at a piano, playing ever so beautifully. Her skin was dark, like mine. I realized that if she could, I could."
At home Marian threw herself into every musical opportunity that presented itself. At school there were few such opportunities. In 1906, after four years of primary school, she entered the Stanton Grammar School. Like the neighborhood, the Stanton school was mixed, with white and black students, but, reflecting the school board's policy not to place black teachers in all-white or mixed schools, it had only white teachers. Not until the twenties did the school have good musicians among the faculty and offer regular music classes as part of the curriculum. When she went to Stanton, there was music at morning assemblies where the children sang hymns or heard recordings -- often Scottish ballads or records of David Bispham, a Philadelphia-born baritone who had a distinguished career in opera. Otherwise, the children would have only occasional opportunities to sing in the classroom. If a room in which there happened to be singing was close by, Marian was there with the students singing. "I was as completely in that other room," she recalled years later, "as one could be while one's body was elsewhere. When the day came for our class to go there for singing, I was the happiest child in the school. I knew every song -- at least I thought I did. I remember that when my favorite song was passed out to the children I just put back my head and sang as loudly as I could." Marian's mother too remembered how much music dominated her attention in school: "While she was studious in school, no lessons came easy to her. Taking a part in devotionals in school, the teacher soon noticed Marian's voice, and when a class play was given, Marian was always assigned a singing part. She not only learned her part, but invariab ly learned all of the other parts, and taught the song to her two younger sisters at home."
In South Philadelphia's black community, musical talent was fostered and encouraged in church. Gifted black musicians who could not teach in the schools or were ignored by the white musical establishment of the city found jobs in black churches as choir directors. By the turn of the century, Philadelphia had the largest black population of any city in the North, more than half living in South Philadelphia, so many of the black churches had large enough congregations to be able to hire well-trained musicians and to support a large program of musical activities. Union Baptist Church, founded in 1832 during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, is one of the oldest and most important black churches in South Philadelphia. The original church building was on Minster Street between Sixth and Seventh, in one of the densest and liveliest black neighborhoods. In less than a decade there was a membership of 200; by the end of the Civil War, the congregation had doubled, and only Shiloh Baptist Church was larger. In 1888, the cornerstone for a new church building was laid on Twelfth Street below Bainbridge. There, in the church where Isabella and all of her children worshipped, Marian's musical talent developed.
Even before Marian was six she would go with her grandmother and the other Andersons to Union Baptist every Sunday, first to Sunday school and, when she was older, to the main service. When she was six she joined the junior choir, which was then directed by Alexander Robinson, an experienced choir director and assistant director of the Arion Glee Club, one of the largest and most important black choral groups in Philadelphia. Robinson was the first professional musician to recognize her extraordinary voice, with its well-developed lower range that extended upward nearly three octaves, unusual in a young child. He also recognized how consumed she was with the desire to learn and to perform. In later years, she always gave Robinson credit for his generosity and his musical knowledge. He was a person, she later said, "who, out of sheer love for the church and out of a spirit of service, gave his time freely to help others. It gave him pleasure to work with those young voices, and since he loved music and understood enough to communicate his feeling to us, he was able to do something with us. It was not long before the group was singing so well that it was invited to appear before the older children's Sunday school, which convened in the afternoon."
As part of the choir, Marian was entrusted with duets and eventually solos. With a friend who lived across the street, she performed the hymn "Dear to the Heart of the Shepherd," first for her Sunday school class, then for the main service. Later on, she sang the alto part in a quartet of young girls, and with her Aunt Mary -- John Berkley's sister -- who sang with the senior choir, she would get to sing duets, one of their numbers being "Sing Me to Sleep, the Shadows Fall." Before long she had opportunities to sing in neighborhood churches. On one such occasion, her Aunt Mary, wanting to do something for the building fund of a new storefront church, made sure that she would take part in a concert she helped arrange. Handbills were printed up with her picture, promising the unusual pleasure of hearing a ten-year-old singer who was a real contralto.
It was Aunt Mary more than anyone in the family who encouraged Marian's love of singing, taking her to concerts in the local churches and encouraging her to take part. From the time she was six or seven, Aunt Mary would take her to church functions, YMCA or YWCA events, or social gatherings arranged by women's groups devoted to the cause of a black charity, where Marian would perform one or two songs and earn twenty-five or fifty cents. "Are you her mother?" Mary would invariably be asked. "No, I'm her aunt!" she would respond, and off they would go to another church. The twenty-five or fifty cents soon became several dollars, sometimes as much as five dollars. As Marian liked to recall, with a certain amount of pride, one dollar would go to each of her sisters, one dollar to herself, and two dollars to her mother.
Eventually Marian's abilities brought her to the attention of professional musicians in Philadelphia's black community. One of these was Emma Azalia Hackley, an accomplished singer and a teacher of tireless energy and strong musical convictions, who had come to Philadelphia at the start of the century. At the request of the Reverend Phillips of the Church of the Crucifixion, which had become since its modest beginning half a century earlier one of the great cultural and spiritual forces among black Episcopalians in South Philadelphia, Hackley undertook to develop the best choir in the city. In 1904, in addition to her work at the Church of the Crucifixion, she founded the People's Chorus, composed of a hundred voices recruited from the various church choirs of the city. Marian's triumphs at Union Baptist were so celebrated that Hackley accepted her among the younger members of the People's Chorus. Before long, she gave her a solo to sing -- "to inspire the other members to higher things," she liked to say. At the time, she was only ten or eleven. Hackley had her stand on a chair as she sang. "I want her to feel elevated," Hackley told the man arranging the stage properties, "and, too, I want no one in the back of the hall to have the slightest difficulty in seeing her."
In 1909, a few weeks before Christmas, John Berkley was accidentally struck on the head while at work at the Reading Terminal. He lay ill for weeks before he died, of heart failure, a month later. He was thirty-four years old. As she did with most painful experiences, Marian later spoke about the loss of her father obliquely, her memories of his illness, and of her attendant fear and sense of deprivation, intertwined with that Christmas season. "A woman who lived in our neighborhood," she recalled many years later, "met me on the street a few days before Christmas and asked me what I wanted to find under the tree. She was married, and had no children, and was very well off. Perhaps I hoped she could help with our Christmas, although I had not thought much about the fact that Father's illness would affect our celebration of the holiday. In any event, I told her what I wanted from Santa Claus and she replied, 'Well, you're not going to get it. I'm ashamed of you, a girl as old as you who doesn't know there is no Santa Claus.' I was old enough to know, of course, but I had been told at home that there was a Santa Claus and that was it for me. My eyes filled with tears. I could not speak about it to Mother. We did get some gifts at Christmas time, but they were things that Mother knew we needed, and the woman's thoughtlessness clung to me and spoiled that Christmas."
Mrs. Anderson thought she could keep her children together best by going back to Virginia, where most of her family still lived, but Isabella, who wanted a say in raising her son's children, was willing to take them all in and would have none of it. It was Ethel, Marian's younger sister, who later recalled the move back to Fitzwater Street: "The day John Berkley was buried, in the middle of the night, Aunt Mary and some of the men in the family took down the beds and took them around the corner to Fitzwater Street." The house at 1617 Fitzwater was a small, shallow three-story row house that now had to accommodate not only Mrs. Anderson and the three girls, but Isabella and Benjamin, two of their children, Mary and Walter, and two other grandchildren, Queenie and Grace. Robert William, one of Isabella and Benjamin's sons, who had died while still young, had left his wife with four children, two of whom -- Queenie and Grace -- Isabella was helping to raise. As always, there were also boarders.
Mrs. Anderson kept her children together, but the years under Isabella's watchful eye were difficult for her and the children both economically and emotionally. Mrs. Anderson found a job at Newman and Mayer, a tobacco factory on Second Street. Later, she took in laundry and, after some years, worked for Wanamaker's scrubbing floors. Marian, who was thirteen, and Alyse, ten, were old enough to help. In addition to scrubbing steps, they often traveled to different homes in Philadelphia, sometimes taking the trolley car, to deliver laundry their mother had done. On one such occasion, Mrs. Anderson, in need of money, had hurried through a batch of laundry so that it could be delivered before the weekend. Marian delivered the laundry alone, taking it to a small apartment in a private house. As she later described the experience:
No one answered. I called out again and again; then I went into the next room and caught a glimpse of the young woman whose laundry I was delivering. She was sitting as quietly as a mouse, a book in her hands. I suspect she knew who was calling, and I can only guess that she did not answer because she did not have the money to pay. I could not bring myself to let her know that I knew she was there. I left the laundry and went home without the money. Mother did not scold me; somehow she managed that weekend.
Marian said in later years: "We learned how to share a home with others, how to understand their ways and respect their rights and privileges." Certainly sharing could not have been easy in a household so large and with such complicated and conflicting loyalties. Queenie and Grace, unlike Marian and her sisters, could see their mother only infrequently and unpredictably, and this in turn created a bond between the two girls and Isabella that Marian and her sisters did not always share. Mrs. Anderson needed all the patience and tactfulness she was fortunate to have in order to do her share in a household in which she was more isolated by background and relationship than Isabella's only daughter, Mary, who was committed to remaining in her mother's house and taking care of her.
After her father's death, Marian's attachment to her grandfather, Benjamin, grew significantly, his gentle presence helping to soften the sense of loss. Later she remembered with no small measure of satisfaction the times when Benjamin, usually so quiet and meek, would say to his wife when she had finally gone too far: "Isabella, that's enough!" She also seems to have been drawn, perhaps more than the other Andersons, to her grandfather's unusual religion and his determination to practice it among a household of zealous Baptists. As she later recalled: "In his religion he observed Saturday as his Sabbath, spent the whole day at the Temple, and referred to himself as a Black Jew. The words 'Passover' and 'unleavened bread' I heard first from his lips." Benjamin attended a small storefront church on Rosewood Street, behind Fitzwater, between Fifteenth and Broad. The congregation, which often called themselves Hebrews or Israelites, kept the Sabbath on Saturday and observed the Passover and other important Jewish holidays. The women of the congregation wore long white gowns that covered their heads, the men wore the traditional skullcaps. During the service, members of the congregation practiced the ritual of foot washing, in which they actually washed each others' feet, a ritual that led to the derogatory term of "foot washers" often attached to the church's followers.
William Saunders Crowdy, the founder of the church, came to Philadelphia at the turn of the century. At first he preached on a box on Broad and Rodman Streets, taking away members from other black congregations, as his followers liked to tell it, until a delegation of black ministers went to the mayor and asked that he be run out of town. He nonetheless persisted, inspiring his followers with his extraordinary confidence and charisma, and the hope that they would one day find means to escape their state of oppression. The Old Testament story of the Exodus; the Jewish conception of the Kingdom of God; and a strong sense of family and community, drawing on the figure of Abraham, the original patriarch -- these were themes Bishop Crowdy incorporated into his religious doctrine, and they appealed to Benjamin and other blacks seeking a sense of pride and self-esteem.
Benjamin Anderson died only a year after Marian's father. His death not only cut off a warm and supportive relationship that had existed for Mrs. Anderson and her daughters, but also changed the complexion of relationships for Marian and her sisters in a crucial way, for now they were to spend their adolescent years in a household of strong-minded and purposeful women, each one in her own way making her life productive without the presence of husband or father.
After Benjamin's death, the family moved often, always in the same neighborhood, like many black families, having to contend with the balancing act of finding a house small enough that they could afford to rent it, yet large enough to provide decent comfort and enough room for boarders, who contributed an important share of the rent and expenses. From Fitzwater Street, the family moved to Christian Street, where Aunt Mary found them a bigger house to rent, one with more bedrooms and a beautiful bay window. Most of the families on Christian Street, white and black, were wealthy enough to own their own homes, and many of the black residents had achieved a level of success and prominence in the city. John C. Asberry, a well-known judge and civic leader, lived on the other side of Christian, two doors from the black YMCA, and William Dorsey, who had a successful catering business, lived nearby. The house was comfortable but the neighbors, observing young children under Isabella's care coming and going every day, not to mention a brood of teenage girls and their friends, made them feel uncomfortably unwelcome. As Ethel put it years later, "We didn't have any business there. When there were people on a block who didn't belong, they are ignored. We didn't have enough sense to be insulted." But eventually they did, and moved again, first to a house on Eighteenth Street, and again to the Twentieth block of Carpenter.
The most difficult time for Mrs. Anderson after the death of her husband came in the summer of 1912, when Marian graduated from the Stanton School. In the fall, Marian would be ready to attend high school, but the expenses required -- for clothes, books, and social gatherings -- were considerable, and would put an intolerable strain on the family's income. Moreover, her return to school would deprive the family of income that she was now old enough to earn, not only from domestic work but from singing. Isabella's authority must have contributed to the final decision. If Queenie and Grace were working, then why should not Marian, who was fifteen and only two years younger than Grace, shoulder a full share of work? With what must have been aching disappointment, Mrs. Anderson acceded to the decision that, at least for the present, she could not attend high school. When she was older, Marian avoided any mention of the interruption to her education and the circumstances necessitating it, going so far, in fact, as literally to expunge those years from memory. At the time, however, she no doubt saw advantages. For her, school was not only drudgery but a distraction from music. Moreover, she had by then a powerful sense of responsibility toward her mother and younger sisters, which she could now exercise in a more mature way.
Marian's teenage years, even without high school, brought many opportunities for social events. She joined the Baptists' Young People's Union, whose activities included not only music but religious discussions, and competitions such as speech making. Her attraction to the stage, an inevitable extension of her love of singing, was satisfied by membership in the Camp Fire Girls, a group that gave her opportunities for acting as well as singing. "There was a big affair," she recalled in later years, "with specialty acts, comedy skits, and singing and dancing numbers for which special music was written. There must have been about forty of us taking part. My assignment was to go on alone and sing a song at certain intervals in the entertainment, and these appearances served as introductions to what was to follow. Although my acting was confined to a few gestures here and there, I was immeasurably happy about the whole venture."
In the senior choir at Union Baptist -- she had joined the more advanced group a few years earlier, when she was thirteen -- Marian had frequent opportunities for solos, and occasions to learn difficult and more varied music. Although naturally a contralto, with the rich, dark timbre of a lower voice, she had the range to sing soprano parts with ease. The director of the senior choir, Mr. Williams, had already discovered that she could sing any part in the choir, and was more than willing to do so when a soloist or choir member failed to appear. Marian always longed to replace Mrs. Buford, the contralto soloist in Union Baptist, but it was the absence of the soprano soloist that gave her an unexpected challenge she was to recall years later: "One of the choir's show pieces was 'Inflammatus,' which had a series of high C's for the soprano soloist. Mr. Williams, the choir leader, liked to spring pieces on us without advance warning. One Sunday morning he motioned to me to take the seat of the absent first soprano. He handed out 'Inflammatus,' and we began to sing. The high C's did not daunt me at all. I was happy to have a chance to sing them, and they came out with no effort. They may not have been perfect, but they certainly were uninhibited."
Both of Marian's sisters sang in the choir at Union Baptist, and both had beautiful voices. Alyse was a soprano and Ethel had the same kind of deep, richly textured voice as Marian. Yet neither had her passion for music, nor her seriousness of purpose. More often than not they preferred to combine music with companionship, forming a trio with another young singer, Leila Fisher. The trio would sing at local churches and other events sponsored by the black community, their sense of adventure challenged on occasion as much as their musical abilities. Ethel loved to tell about one such occasion: "Reverend Jordan from the Foreign Mission Board had us sing and we gave the concert and he said he was going to pay us but Jordan slipped out and didn't give us anything. He was staying at the YMCA on Christian Street. The three of us marched to the Y and asked him where the money was. We had got him on the phone. He said he would get us some money but now he was going to bed."
Marian's appearances brought her more and more into contact with other performers as well as local leaders interested in fostering talent within the black community. The resulting friendships helped to give her confidence in her abilities, and deepened her desire to have a professional career as a singer, a desire that had formed itself in her mind with little effort or much conscious awareness. Many in the black community, aware of her talent and believing that her chances for a career rested on education, were dismayed that her family could not afford to send her to high school or to provide singing lessons. One of them was the Reverend Wesley Parks, the dynamic pastor of Union Baptist, who had a special love for music. After the service one Sunday morning, the Reverend Parks took up a special collection for Marian; he wanted, as she later remembered, "to do something for our Marian." The collection, amounting to $17.02, was turned over to Mrs. Anderson, to be used for whatever Marian needed most. The Buster Brown shoes she wanted, and the white silk dress she had seen at Wanamaker's, were too expensive, so they settled on making a satin evening dress that she could wear for one of her appearances, with "a five-and-ten-cent store 'gold' braid decorated with miniature blooms and leaves."
Prepared to do their part, the People's Chorus organized a concert for the evening of March 26, 1914, a month past Marian's seventeenth birthday. The concert was designed to demonstrate the great diversity of talent of Philadelphia's black musicians. Music by Harry T. Burleigh, Hall Johnson, and Coleridge Taylor was performed; the performers included singers as well as instrumentalists. Marian joined the chorus in Rosamond Johnson's "Since You Went Away." Her part was noticed by the reviewer of the Philadelphia Tribune, who remarked on "the singularly rare contralto voice of Miss Marion E. Anderson."
The sad contradiction of the seventeen-year-old contralto of immense promise who for several years had done without formal education continued to trouble the directors of the People's Chorus. In a few years, joining with other members of the black community, they would raise the money needed to further Marian's education.
Copyright © 2000 by Allan Keiler
Table of Contents
1. Childhood in South Philadelphia (1897-1915)2. The Struggle for Education (1915-1921)
3. Touring with Billy King (1921-1928)
4. London (1928)
5. The Judson Years (1929-1930)
6. Berlin and Scandinavia (1930-1931)
7. "Marian Fever" (1932-1934)
8. Fame in Europe (1934-1935)
9. A Hurok Artist (1935-1939)
10. The Concert at the Lincoln Memorial (Easter Sunday, 1939)
11. Marriage and Career (1939-1943)
12. Postwar Years (1943-1952)
13. On the World Stage (1952-1958)
14. Retirement (1959-1993)
Appendix I Repertory
Appendix II Discography
References
Bibliography
Notes
Index
What People are Saying About This
I am delighted to see this wonderfully complete and accurate biography of my old and beloved friend Marian Anderson. We had the warmest of relationships for so many years, and she has always remained in my mind as an icon of dignity, accomplishment and extraordinary modesty, despite her enormous accomplishments. This biography has taught me so many details that I would not have otherwise known and I am grateful for the scholarship and devoted attention that brought all of this to be made available to those millions of people who were her fans and who remember her greatness as if it were today. I reccommend this to every person interested in the quality of life in the twentieth century and what can be achieved by the dedication of a singular talent... Isaac Stern