Prominent NAACP leader William Pickens declared in 1926 that “radio dissipates color”: “The joke is that a lot of white folk do not know that they are listening to a coloured artist when they ‘tune in’ … Colored artists are singing and playing to audiences which they could not reach in person.” Pickens had heard of a new device that would eventually transmit vision as well as sound, but he feared the consequences: “let us keep listening thru the impenetrable screen of the intervening air, which eliminates everything but the music.”Footnote 1 A decade later, African American educator Lucy Harth Smith was also optimistic about the new sound technologies. She recalled the moment early in black tenor Roland Hayes's career when he had had to sing on stage from behind a curtain: “The phonograph and radio are curtains used today … Negro artists and their art are unconsciously being received, and appreciated, in hitherto unopened homes.”Footnote 2 Radio did not dissipate colour as rapidly as Pickens and Smith predicted, but the idea that it might have done has a history. Most historical studies of race deploy visual metaphors – colour line, race-blindness. But race is also, as Radano and Bohlman argue, “constituted within and projected into the social through sound.”Footnote 3 What are we to call the ideal of a public sphere in which all kinds of music could be performed by all kinds of people and heard by audiences on merit? Deaf to colour? Race-silent? Whatever we name it, the hope that animated Pickens and Smith – about the segregation-eroding potential of the new sightless sound technologies – remained important. The ardent desire for a sound world freed from visual discrimination is something any American history of race needs to understand.
The hope that new sound technologies could bring white audiences to listen without prejudice first arose in relation to the phonograph. Karl Hagstrom Miller has explained how 1920s race records created new audiences for African American musicians, but also limited them to material readily identifiable as black.Footnote 4 David Suisman has explored the way the black-owned Black Swan Phonograph Company resisted such essentialism, both in its 1923 advertisement challenging the idea that “Colored People Don't Want Classic Music” and in its stealthy selling of white-performed recordings in its all-black list.Footnote 5 Early American radio's potential for crossing the colour line was similarly high but only partly realized. Radio in the 1920s was local, with many small stations offering outlets for ethnic, political and religious minorities.Footnote 6 Derek Vaillant found, however, that while live broadcasts on 1920s Chicago stations gave “African American jazz and blues artists a new level of exposure,” African Americans faced almost total exclusion from programme-making inside stations.Footnote 7
With rapidly growing network dominance, 1930s radio was even less open to African American performers. Producer Frank Griffin recalled in 1941 that while once “every night colored bands held forth on the air,” “since radio has become big business they have hung out the jim crow sign.”Footnote 8 The networks were more consistent practitioners of discrimination than local stations in part because they acceded to segregationist unions and, Barlow concluded, “systematically excluded African Americans from employment opportunities in the radio industry.”Footnote 9 The operation of national commercial broadcasting in a part-segregated nation in fact encouraged exclusion. Susan Douglas writes that “once the networks and advertisers began to control programming in the early 1930s, segregation on the air became more pervasive and rigid.”Footnote 10 “Network radio has its disadvantages,” explained the New York Post radio editor in 1939: “no sponsor dares to put artists on the air who might be deemed objectionable to the good citizens of any corner of our democratic land.”Footnote 11 Network radio's promise of access to non-proximate sympathetic audiences remained highly significant for African Americans, although the immanent colour-line crossing potential of national radio was realized for only a very few of them.Footnote 12
Radio's amateur talent shows in the 1930s held out a particular promise of escape into a prejudice-free soundscape; network amateur shows seemed to offer a relatively unguarded point of access to a national audience. “The amateur hours,” black columnist Charles Isaac Bowen noted in 1935, “are giving sepia singers and musicians one of the best ‘breaks’ in radio broadcasting.”Footnote 13 This article examines the experience of African American contestants on the most popular amateur show, Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour, contrasting their success on the radio with the obstacles they encountered in the segregated world outside. Because the hope about new sound technologies always had to do not just with winning an unprejudiced hearing, but also with gaining freedom from constraining expectations about what black-performed music could be, I have chosen to focus on two black classical music performers – singers Otis Holley and La Julia Rhea.
THE RADIO AMATEUR SHOW
After ratings success on New York station WHN, Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour debuted on the NBC network in 1935, and rapidly became the most popular radio show in America; by August, 46 percent of the available radio audience was tuning in.Footnote 14 In 1936, the show transferred to CBS and remained the most popular show in the nation by a wide margin; Bowes conducted it until he retired in 1945. The Bowes Amateur Hour was part of a broader amateur craze. Variants on the format played on local radio and in theatres all over the country. In 1935 there were fourteen radio amateur hours in New York alone – including Amateur Night in Harlem on WMCA.Footnote 15 The amateur shows in turn belonged to a broader wave of audience-participation shows.Footnote 16 Bowes's Amateur Hour was a participation show in two senses: the amateurs performed, and the listening audience voted. “You within sound of my voice are just as much a part of this show as these youngsters who come to the microphone,” Bowes explained on the first broadcast. “You select the winners by your vote,” he regularly reminded listeners.Footnote 17 The participatory ethos clearly appealed, but so did the avuncular figure of the Major himself, with his trademark “alright alright.” Use of his gong to cut short poor performances added edge; lest it suggest unkindness, he professed regret: “I wish I never had to use the gong … It is a case of hurting me as much as it hurts the amateur.”Footnote 18
For all the old-fashioned vaudeville air of its variety format, Bowes's show also exuded an aura of modernity and industrial-scale organization. Listeners in New York and in one “honor” city each week could vote by telephone, those from elsewhere by mail. Admiring descriptions of the hundred-operator telephone centre at NBC's Radio City emphasized the scale and efficiency of the operation: “the voices of the girls made a high-pitched cacophony … each of them taking a new call every five or six seconds.”Footnote 19 The Major thus also represented a model of business efficiency and consolidation; the radio show was part of a profitable business in which the talent came cheap and the audience was in some ways self-measuring. Time noted that “Bowes has a fearsome reputation in the radio and advertising trade for cashing in to the full on his various activities.”Footnote 20 Winners were invited to tour with one of Bowes's travelling units.Footnote 21 They were paid transport expenses and fifty dollars a week – one and a half times the average weekly wage – but, as one explained, after paying for “hotels, laundry, food, care of stage costumes and all the rest – there isn't much left to save.”Footnote 22 Struggling professional entertainers did not always welcome the amateur phenomenon. “Broadway in New York is packed with ex-vaudeville performers,” Radio Guide pointed out, “whose slender living has been made even more precarious by the competition of low-pay Major Bowes units.”Footnote 23
The biggest appeal of the show was its promise of a means of escape from the struggles of ordinary life. Human interest was developed in brief interviews before each performance. Bowes claimed that most of the contestants were “hungry when they come to my office,” but added, “they are on fire with hope.”Footnote 24 Boot blacks and the unemployed added to the show's drama, raising anew each week the possibility of sudden elevation from the streets to national fame: “Here for the first time the Cinderella story becomes an actuality upon the grand scale.”Footnote 25 One columnist enthused, “Major Bowes’ youngsters. I can't hear them without weeping. Those brave kids – seemingly so doomed, so bound by the shackles of inhumanity and indifference. Yet there they come … some out of dingy, poverty-stricken backgrounds, ignorance and desolation … hurling themselves up and out of the abyss by the sheer force of one thing alone – faith!”Footnote 26
This narrative of fairy-tale rescue was in part based on the idea that hard work and talent would be rewarded. But the show also at times represented worldly success as a matter of chance. Each broadcast Bowes said, “We spin the wheel of fortune. Round and round it goes and where it stops nobody knows.” After the massive general success of the first couple of years, the Bowes audience became skewed towards rural and lower socioeconomic-status listeners.Footnote 27 Radio researcher Paul Lazarsfeld thought the weekly “honor” city's local appeal was one explanation for popularity on the “lower cultural levels”; it is also likely that the theme of the caprice of success had particular appeal to poorer Americans.Footnote 28
The show's success made it an object of fascination for the radio press. Numbers of investigative articles purported to tell its “real” story. In early 1936 Radio Guide ran a well-researched series of investigative articles, demonstrating that the voting could be manipulated, that the show was carefully scripted, that the Major made a lot of money, that those sent on tour were not always the winners, and that the show operated with a fairly generous definition of “amateur.”Footnote 29 Exposés also dwelt upon the low odds of success. Radio Guide thought the contestants naive:
Had they thought first they would have realized that out of fifteen thousand applications a week, only from 700 to 900 could be heard. And from the 700 to 900, only sixteen or twenty would be selected. Even if selected, it guaranteed the performer only five dollars and a chance to perform once over the air.Footnote 30
These odds did not, however, slow the stream of audition-seeking amateurs arriving in New York. The Emergency Relief Bureau complained in 1936 that three hundred amateur entertainers a week were applying for food and shelter. “The city's relief shelters,” the New York Times reported, “are being crowded by the transient entertainers, who include entire dance bands, choirs, instrumental and voice quartets, actors, singers, musical saw players, tap dancers, humorists, monologists, etc.”Footnote 31 The Amateur Hour, however, clearly traded on hope, not rational calculation, and there was no group for whom the hope of breaking free from quotidian constraints by means of the talent show was stronger than the African American contestants on the show, whose listed occupations included porter, coal miner, cotton picker, odd jobs, Civilian Conservation Corps worker, maid, laundry worker, unemployed.
MAJOR BOWES'S AMATEUR HOUR AND AFRICAN AMERICANS
The Amateur Hour was publicized as a colour-blind competition. Bowes auditioned through microphone and speaker rather than face to face.Footnote 32 “More than 2,000 letters come to Major Bowes each day … Of the applications, no creed, no race, no talent has preference.”Footnote 33 In a diverse nation burdened with exclusions and discriminations, that was a powerful promise. The black press consistently praised the Major for his “fairness.” “Very few persons in his position of influence and prominence in the world of entertainment,” observed the Chicago Defender, “have exercised such fairness and utter lack of prejudice in presenting candidates for future stardom as has Major Edward Bowes” – “ability alone seemed to stand as a beacon light by which the Major's decisions … have been made.”Footnote 34 The Defender referred on another occasion to “Major Bowes’ studio, where one is judged by talent and ability not by the color of skin.”Footnote 35 The black press thus played an important role in building up the image of the Major as prejudice-free and colour-blind, a benevolent donor of opportunity.
One of the reasons William Pickens's 1926 optimism was premature was that radio found many ways to convey aural hints about race.Footnote 36 Someone wrote “Negro” in red pencil on many of the African American Amateur Hour applications; the voting summaries prepared for the advertiser regularly used racial descriptors such as “Negro Baritone.”Footnote 37 While Bowes did not explicitly identify black performers on air, to most Americans voice and accent provided easily heard clues to racial identity. There was a condescending, amused air to some of his interactions with African American contestants; the dialogue was as always scripted so that he sounded impressively knowledgeable:
Now we have Franklin Jensen, baritone … Do you study singing?
No. Well just a little bit, to help my voice along. I've always wanted to sing ever since I was a little boy.
Mmhmm. Well, what do you want to be – a concert singer, stage, radio – what's your ambition?
Concert singer.
Another Roland Hayes, Paul Robeson, Eddie Matthews, huh? Well, in that case you either want to sing the Glory Road or Deep River or Water Boy – they all do … What do you want to sing?
Water Boy.
Water Boy, I thought so. Alright, come on.Footnote 38
The Major thus positioned himself as quite as authoritative on “Negro concert singers,” as on every other topic, while maintaining his bemused yet benevolent air and precise diction. The contrast with the nervous voices of the contestants could itself be painful. The Baltimore Afro-American editorialized about three Southern black contestants who it feared could not be understood on radio: “Many a Southern colored child, robbed of an opportunity to attend school or to hear good English, cannot pronounce words distinctly.”Footnote 39
Almost inevitably, the shadow of minstrelsy hung over the Amateur Hour's black contestants. There were many who performed novelty acts: spoons, tap dancing with hands and feet, yodelling, instrumental imitation, playing the one-stringed fiddle, “impersonating all four Mills Brothers,” a bootblack who could “get many odd tunes out of his rubbing rag.”Footnote 40 Acts like these provoked criticism in the black press. “Week after week, Major Bowes parades too many dumb, or dumb acting Negroes before his radio audience,” complained columnist Porter Roberts: “It is beginning to look as though the Major PLANS to have group a group of colored clowns on hand each week.”Footnote 41 In the white South, on the other hand, African American Bowes performers were more likely to be criticized for not being minstrel enough. By August 1936, the Amsterdam News reported, eighty-eight “Negro artists” had already appeared on the Bowes show and he put together an all-black road troupe. The “Jubilee Revue,” of thirty-seven performers, played successfully in Washington, DC and at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.Footnote 42 But a planned tour to Virginia was cancelled when theatres there discovered that the show was full of “smart Harlem acts,” not the “Uncle Tom's Plantation style” show they had been expecting.Footnote 43
BLACK CLASSICAL PERFORMERS ON THE AMATEUR HOUR
Classical music performed by African American musicians had a high symbolic significance especially within urban black communities. The formation of the National Association of Negro Musicians (NANM) in 1919, and the attention devoted to classical music in the black press – notably in Nora Douglas Holt and then Maude Roberts George's regular columns in the Chicago Defender – were institutional signs of the high valuing of classical music performance by the black elite.Footnote 44 But historians have, I think, too quickly dismissed the traditions of black classical music performance and appreciation as only manifestations of an uplift and assimilationist strategy and as a marking of class boundaries within the black community.Footnote 45 Black-performed classical music would, after all, have been ineffective in those roles had it not also garnered broader support and enthusiasm within the African American community. The one exception Vaillant noted to black exclusion from 1920s Chicago radio was WSBC's All-Negro Hour, which represented South Side black elite musical taste in its broadcasts of “quartets, trios, duets, and soloists performing European art songs,” yet despite this, the programme became an enduring popular success.Footnote 46 The reason why we know that black classical performance was an important part of the black public sphere was precisely because it was so often highly valued within the community and not outside it. We get one glimpse of the high valuation and expectations of classical music in the NANM's stated purposes, which included not only fostering the musical gifts of “talented, deserving Negro youth” and “preparation for the advent of real Negro genius,” but assisting in “maintaining a world in which all people may live in peace and harmony.”Footnote 47 Few contemporary white observers fully comprehended this freight of expectations carried by black classical performers.
By the 1930s, African American classical singers Roland Hayes and Marian Anderson had achieved national and international success, fostering hopes that they had blazed a trail that others could follow. Radio seemed to many black classical performers to offer a new means of breaking into the mainstream – of being able to play to mixed audiences, in larger or better venues, and broadcast on mainstream commercially sponsored programmes. Despite these breakthrough stars, however, most black classical performers struggled to find acceptance from mixed audiences or opportunities to play alongside white performers. Because they were denied the opportunities to perform in what were effectively whites-only classical venues and institutions, their uplift mission was compromised and their careers remained only potential or immanent refutations of the idea that blacks were not capable of playing canonical classical music.
Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour featured a significant number of classical music performances, jumbled in with other musical and performance genres; this continued older patterns, from before the sacralization of classical music and its retreat from popular venues.Footnote 48 African American columnist Charles Isaac Bowen singled out openness to black classical performers as one of the most valuable aspects of the Amateur Hour: “It was on the Major Bowes programs that presentation of arias of the most classical type grew to seem a natural thing on the part of colored radio artists, rather than the traditional jazz or spirituals.”Footnote 49 That the presence of black classical performers on the show seemed noteworthy indicates that the proportion was higher than expected. In a sample of Amateur Hour applications marked “Negro,” I found that 60 percent were performers of popular music, 20 percent novelty acts and 20 percent classical.Footnote 50
A separate black classical music world, with its own institutions, venues and hierarchies, was one product of segregation. It was in black churches that black-performed classical music found its earliest, most important – and often only – institutional home.Footnote 51 Ray Allen and George Cunningham point out that segregation, in limiting opportunities for blacks to join mainstream orchestras and opera companies, pushed more black musicians into important local and community roles as soloists, composers and music teachers.Footnote 52 The strength of this relatively separate musical world was one reason, then, for the success of African American contestants on the Amateur Hour. Many had already studied and performed for years within the black classical sphere, but sought in national radio a means of breaking into the mainstream. “My main objective in life is to become a successful pianist,” wrote young Brooklyn pianist Bernard Butcher. “My ambition is to some day become one of the world's outstanding concert and operatic baritones,” wrote George Marshall, a former Pennsylvania coal miner. Several African American contestants mentioned their years of training and experience of public performance within the church-centred black classical world. Mamie Anderson was out of work but had studied singing for six years and wrote that she “would like to do radio work.” Chloe Wade (stage name Jane Barker) had sung in church benefit concerts and studied music for five years in Chicago; she hoped for a job singing “to help my people.” These performers clearly sought a chance to reach beyond the black classical community to mainstream audiences and acceptance.Footnote 53
There was regular controversy about whether the Bowes show contestants were really amateurs. A Chicago Defender columnist estimated that “hardly one in ten of those Major Bowes’ amateurs are simon pures WHICH ACCOUNTS for the program's class.”Footnote 54 Serious, trained African American classical performers were among those likely to be living in the vast twilight zone between having been paid at all and actually earning a living from professional performance. Otis Holley was one African American contestant named in the Radio Guide exposé as not a pure amateur. In 1935 she was living in New York, working as a cook for Pauline Gold, a fifty-two-year-old voice teacher. It was Gold who wrote to Bowes asking for an audition for Holley, adding, “we are enjoying your Sunday evening programs hugely.” Holley had already appeared on the Major's earlier New York radio amateur show (“you were so kind to my little protégé”) but she and Gold now wanted network exposure.
On 23 June 1935, the Major introduced the show, stressing its central theme of hope: “Once again with the turn of fortune's wheel, some dreams will come true. Wise men have said that without hope, there is no life, and indeed hope is the mainspring of our very existence. Our Sunday nights, are nights of hope.” Bowes introduced Holley's white patron:
Now, this is the application of Mrs. Pauline Gold, who is a professional organist and coaches advanced singers. Mrs. Gold has brought here tonight a pupil whose voice she has trained for the past four years … a Negro girl, born in Alabama. Her name is Otis Holley, and Otis Holley is a cook in the household of her teacher.
Bowes then invited Gold, not Holley, to come to the microphone and there ensued a dialogue remarkable for its framing of Gold and Bowes as the active agents. Gold reminded Bowes that he had met Holley on his WHN show:
As I told you then, Otis was a good girl and a very hard worker …
I see. Now you say that Otis is a hard worker and a faithful servant. Tell us a little more about her.
Well, she was left an orphan at the age of eight and, as incredible as it may seem, she has mothered two younger sisters and a brother and it is for their sakes that she wants to make a success in life.
Well now, you, as a teacher, are you optimistic about her future as a singer?
Yes I am. Very much so. But of course, Major, you know there are many elements that enter into the success of a great artist, and I'm not sure that Otis has all of these elements, but she's a keen pupil and studious, and I know of no bad qualities in this girl.
Mmm. Well now, Mrs, Gold, it's refreshing to know that a busy, successful person such as you is willing to give the time and the work that it takes to coach an untrained voice and bring it toward perfection.
Well, Major Bowes, it makes no difference to me whether she is my cook or a person of great fortune. She's a human being, and God has given her a voice. And I'm very happy to be able to develop it.
Well that's wonderful. What are you going to have her sing tonight?Footnote 55
Bowes requested Holley sing the Cavatina from Gounod's Queen of Sheba, for which she received prolonged applause and a “Bravo bravo” from the Major; later in the show, he announced that she had received an “avalanche of votes.”Footnote 56 A week later, after counting of postal votes, Holley was declared the winner.Footnote 57
Far from being an overnight success, Otis Holley was by 1935 well embarked upon a musical career already constrained by the colour line, sustained by nurture within black cultural institutions, and punctuated by repeated white “discovery” of her talent. Born in 1908 in Talladega, Alabama, Holley grew up in Tennessee. Her mother was a singer and her first teacher, but both her parents died when she was eight years old. She learned from Mrs. Cora Clemons, one of the African American founders of the small Lookout Mountain Music Academy; then she took lessons at the Cadek Conservatory of Music in Chattanooga, one of the first southern music schools to admit black students.Footnote 58 The 1930 US census found her a teacher in a public school, living with her grandparents in Chattanooga. She also worked in nearby Chickamauga as a maid. She sang solo recitals in Tennessee, including one to a “large audience” at the Chattanooga Memorial Auditorium. The Nashville Banner observed that Holley was “a young Negro soprano … well on the road toward the same elevation as that great trio of her race, Marian Anderson, Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson.”Footnote 59 Amidst such success, her employer, Elizabeth Andrews, having “discovered” Holley as a singer, arranged for her to study fee-free at the Oscar Seagle Music Colony in the Adirondacks.Footnote 60
After the Seagle school, Holley moved to New York and entered employment with Pauline Gold, who became her “instructor and benefactor.” Gold also developed a story about “discovering” Holley's talent, as she sang in the kitchen.Footnote 61 For the next four years she watched as her pupil became part of the black classical music scene around New York, well known to “attendants at church and civic functions.”Footnote 62 Holley both supported and enjoyed support from black cultural institutions. In 1932 she presented a “special musical program” at a New York NAACP mass meeting, described as a “well-known soprano.”Footnote 63 She sang at a meeting of the James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild, and at the Harlem YWCA and YMCA.Footnote 64
In 1933–34 Holley won a twice-weekly fifteen-minute slot on Newark/New York station WOR (just before it became part of the Mutual network); these were “sustaining” (not commercially sponsored) programmes for which she received five dollars a time.Footnote 65 The broadcasts received many mentions in the black press. Readers were told that it was “worth the twist of your dial!”, that Holley was “youngest of the outstanding Negro sopranos and radio artists of station WOR,” that her latest broadcast pushed up her “already shining reputation,” that she had “one of the most perfect radio voices.”Footnote 66 There was, in contrast, little mention of Holley in the white press, apart from the radio programme listings. It proved difficult for her to take the next step in an American radio career; she recalled that, despite “glowing comments,” programme directors told her “we just can't sell a colored singer for a commercial program.”Footnote 67 In 1935, then, when Otis Holley tried out for Major Bowes, she was neither an untried amateur nor a fully fledged professional. She conscientiously explained her previous experience to the Bowes producers: “I was especially anxious to be above board as I did not want any question later as to my amateur standing. Mr. Reed said that as long as I had had no commercial contracts I was not considered a professional.”Footnote 68
Winning first prize on the most popular radio show in America was a major achievement. No doubt Holley had high hopes for what would follow, but disappointment ensued: she reported that she had been denied the opportunity to tour with Bowes's units because of her colour. The New York World Telegram quoted the Major: “This is an unpleasant situation, but if I send her on the road, hotels would refuse to receive her, there would be trouble at restaurants, theater dressing room problems, and difficulties on Pullman cars.”Footnote 69 NAACP Secretary Walter White wrote to Bowes personally, copying his letter to sponsors Chase and Sanborn, professing “very great shock”:
Negro artists, my dear Major Bowes, in the theatre and on the concert platform, travel in all parts of America. It is true that they meet discrimination in hotels, restaurants and other places; but is this a reason for denying to Miss Holley the opportunity which she won in fair competition?
White added, “your denying this chance to her is all the more regrettable in view of the terrific struggle which she has made, against odds which would have discouraged a less courageous person, to perfect herself in her art.” While White did not question Bowes's motives, he did criticize his “timidity in facing race prejudice” and requested that Bowes “correct this injustice” lest he “alienate many Negro users of the products of the Chase and Sanborn Company, among whom I am one.”Footnote 70 Bowes replied indignantly. White's letter was based on “complete misinformation.” He had never made “any discrimination either for, or against any race, creed or color”; indeed, “many Negroes are represented on my programs, and I am constantly in receipt of letters of thanks from people of the colored race, as well as from newspapers published in the interests of the colored race.”Footnote 71 White asked Holley to see him, and she replied, “I am glad that some one realized the excuse Major Bowes gave was a very poor one.”Footnote 72 Holley and Gold met White and told him “how unavailing had been their efforts to get Major Bowes to keep his promise.”Footnote 73 White wrote to Bowes again, reporting that Holley had told her story with “a remarkable lack of bitterness, in view of the circumstances,” and suggesting that Bowes at least pay her fifty dollars “in keeping with the promises made her.”Footnote 74 Only at this point did the NAACP issue a press release, announcing that “vigorous protest” had been made to Major Bowes, and noting that Bowes still had not explained why Holley had not been sent out with one of the travelling troupes.Footnote 75 A letter writer to the NAACP noted that “the grocery man doesn't ask the color of the person's money when they buy Chase and Sanborn coffee”; another observed that “Negro actors has no trouble on Pullman cars they have their own hotel … So get after that stuff shirt.”Footnote 76
The Bowes episode remained unresolved, but it was a turning point in Holley's career. Almost all the reporting about her thereafter was in the black press, and almost all her subsequent performances were in black cultural or religious institutions. The Amsterdam News reported that Holley “turned for solace and encouragement to those experiences and persons that had not failed her because she was colored”: “she could turn to the Fort Washington Presbyterian Church, where she has been soloist and has been extended friendship, help and encouragement by choir members.”Footnote 77 In 1935 she gave a recital for the Friends of the Sharecroppers at the 138th Street YWCA; the Amsterdam News critic praised her “voice of rare beauty.”Footnote 78 In 1937, married and now Mrs. Otis Holley Berry, she was awarded a fellowship by the Julius Rosenwald Fund “for study of voice at the Fontainebleau School of Music, France.” The fund supported career development for African Americans of “exceptional ability.” Holley was one of only nineteen singers to receive a Rosenwald fellowship during the 1929–48 life of the scheme.Footnote 79 She sailed to Europe in November 1936 and returned finally to the US in February 1938. Back in the US briefly in 1937, she performed in black churches, including Harlem's Mount Olivet Baptist, after which the Amsterdam News praised her “assuring sophistication of interpretation” and expressed “the fervent hope that this gifted young woman will have courage to attain operatic status and transcend limitations imposed by racial bigotry.”Footnote 80 The major appearances reported after her return from Europe were again at civic and church functions within the black community. She sang regularly as soloist with the choir at the Lincoln Congregational Temple in Washington, DC, where she now lived, and in 1944 made her Boston debut at the St. Paul AME church.Footnote 81
Another of the black classical Bowes contestants was “Rea Parada.” Born Lu Julia Ray (named after her aunts Lula and Julia; as an adult she became La Julia) in Louisville, Kentucky in about 1899, she learned piano from the age of five and sang in the choir and as soloist at musical events at the Hill Street Baptist Church, where her aunt Flora was organist and choir director. When she was aged sixteen, after the death of her father, her family moved to Chicago to give La Julia greater singing opportunities; she took lessons from Pauline James Lee at the Chicago University of Music. In 1920 she married Henry Rhea, a Chicago postal worker, whose family had also migrated up from Kentucky. They lived on the South Side; a son was born in 1923.Footnote 82 La Julia also studied, when money permitted, at the Chicago Musical College and with several other voice teachers. Formal musical study was always parallelled with musical experience in churches; for several years she was soloist with the Providence Baptist church.Footnote 83 With a growing reputation, opportunities for paid singing work began opening up. In 1928, for example, La Julia sang an aria from Aida twenty-four times during the opening week at the Balaban and Katz chain's new Regal Theater on the South Side. She made her solo debut in 1929 at Kimball Hall.Footnote 84 In 1931 she toured for a year with the Cecil Mack Choir in its production of Rhapsody in Black, singing solo in the theme song; in 1933 she appeared at Harlem's Apollo Theater with the Mack choir. Gaining confidence, in 1934 she auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, prepared by voice teacher Romano Romani, who told the black press that he was “highly pleased” with the audition.Footnote 85 Back in Chicago, having heard nothing from the Met, she began working as a maid to pay off her debt to the Chicago Musical College and to fund further lessons.
Early nineteenth-century African American classical singers, Peter Hudson observed, were “crossover” artists who regularly “transgressed the boundaries between high and low culture” by playing marginal concert stages, vaudeville and minstrel shows.Footnote 86 By the first half of the twentieth century, despite the achievement of a rich separate world of black classical performance, not much had changed for black classical performers in mainstream venues. Much of Rhea's professional experience involved performing showstopping classical arias on more popular bills of fare – singing, for example, “Pace Pace Mio Dio” from Verdi's Force of Destiny twenty-four or even forty-two times in a week. There were some tensions within the African American classical community – preoccupied as it was with uplift and reputation – over such popularizations. Rhea was an active member of the Nathaniel Dett Club of Music and Allied Arts, one of the two Chicago branches of the National Association of Negro Musicians. She sang at the NANM national conference in St Louis in 1927, but her invitation to perform at the next year's convention was awkwardly withdrawn; she recalled being told, “they don't want you on this program, because you appeared at the Regal.”Footnote 87
Rhea, even more than Holley, thus already had significant professional experience behind her when she appeared on the Amateur Hour in 1935. She sang “Pace Pace Mio Dio,” and came second in the voting.Footnote 88 Given a place in one of the touring units, she “won instant favour with her audiences, principally on account of her sparkling personality and charm.”Footnote 89Defender columnist Dan Burley noted with pleasure “this little brown girl singing opera for jazz-loving theatre audiences and making 'em like it.”Footnote 90 In the touring unit, she performed “Pace Pace Mio Dio” on 168 occasions, alongside such miscellaneous acts as “Meyer Goldberg, the whistling grocery clerk; Joseph Rogato the singing garbage man … Colleen McGonigal screen star impersonator; Leonard Maretta, collegiate trumpeter; Thelma Gaskins, coloratura soprano.”Footnote 91 In this vaudeville-style grouping, Rhea continued to be a genuinely popular opera singer, receiving “frenzied applause” at the Chicago Theater.Footnote 92 The Defender noted proudly that she “sang excerpts from opera when it was said such songs wouldn't be accepted from a member of the Race.”Footnote 93 But for Rhea, too, the path from radio to live success was not smooth. She declined to travel to her native Kentucky with the Bowes unit. “I'd consider it a slur and an insult to my race to sing on stages in Southern cities if I had to ride Jim Crow trains to get to my destination,” she told Bowes; the Defender hastened to add that Bowes was aware of, but powerless to change, conditions in the South.Footnote 94
Years later, Rhea recalled that “though Major Bowes was a wonderful step forward and allowed me to sing operatic arias, it was still a long way from the realization of my dreams. I wanted not only to sing operatic arias, but to really appear in opera itself.”Footnote 95 The high point of her career came in 1937, when she sang the title role in Verdi's Aida with the Chicago Civic Opera Company. She had, according to her husband, been studying Aida for ten years: “she thought, ate, talked, sang and slept Aida.”Footnote 96 The role of Aida was one of the few regularly given to black sopranos. Rhea's publicity ever after proclaimed her as “the first and only Negro artiste to receive recognition from a major opera company in a major opera house in the United States.”Footnote 97 The Aida was, however, not part of the regular season, but a post-season benefit for Chicago's historically black Provident Hospital. The black press reported the occasion with lavish praise: Rhea's voice “held the audience spell-bound through the sheer beauty of its tone and color.”Footnote 98 Buoyed by this success, Rhea wrote requesting another Metropolitan audition through NBC's Metropolitan Opera Auditions program. The reply stated bluntly, “since there is no chance for a colored singer to appear at the Metropolitan, it is unlikely that you will be encouraged to make the audition.”Footnote 99
Rhea's subsequent performances were mainly in black institutional venues. She sang Aida for the National Negro Opera Company in Pittsburgh and Chicago in 1941 and in Chicago with the Chicago Negro Opera Guild in 1942 and 1943.Footnote 100 In 1945 she sang at the Big Bethel AME and the Liberty Baptist churches in Atlanta, but also at a large outdoor concert with the Grant Park Symphony in Chicago.Footnote 101 She performed for Philruth Inc., a company dedicated to organizing concerts by “ambitious and talented youths of both races.”Footnote 102 In 1949 she put her career aside to care for her husband and one of her sons, who had health problems.Footnote 103 Late in life she told an interviewer that, when Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price and other black artists finally broke through opera's colour bar in the 1950s, she was working as a seamstress in a South Side sweatshop.Footnote 104
Holley and Rhea attempted to take advantage of the chink in the wall of segregation that the radio talent show represented. They triumphed on air, but because the prize was touring in the segregated world outside, they were inevitably thrown back to confront the very racial divisions that they had hoped to transcend. For neither of these women did national radio in the end permit the overleaping of prejudice for which they had hoped. In this generation only a few did make that jump. Marian Anderson was about the same age as La Julia Rhea; by the later 1930s she had been able to leverage her European triumphs into professional success in the US, performing in mainstream classical venues, her career assisted by her regular appearance on major commercial radio programmes such as the General Motors Hour and the Magic Key of RCA. But even for an international star such as Anderson, touring in the US in the 1930s was, her biographer records, “a constant source of humiliation and frustration.”Footnote 105 Anderson's talent and career were undeniably exceptional. Holley and Rhea's stories better illustrate the general experience of black classical musicians of this generation. Anderson deferred marriage, and did not have children, her resolute career focus bolstered by the intense praise and encouragement she received in Europe. Holley and Rhea's life decisions were no doubt shaped by the more mixed messages they received about their career prospects in America.
CONCLUSION
It is easy in retrospect to spot the overoptimism and technological determinism in William Pickens's idea that “radio dissipates color.” It is also important, however, to recognize that radio did stimulate hope about the possibility of a race-free sound world, a new sense that such a thing could be possible. That the first generation to test the idea – gifted performers such as Holley and Rhea – often failed to translate radio success into mainstream acceptance should not lead us to overlook the increase in hope that the early mass media provoked. Amateur-hour programmes appealed immediately to African Americans and stimulated new aspirations to break out of a segregated cultural world. Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour proved relatively friendly to black performers and they did well on it, but translating that success into acceptance beyond the structured competition proved difficult before World War II. Radio's colour line weakened a little during the war, as the networks responded to pressure to open up employment in broadcasting to African Americans.Footnote 106 Southern opposition to race mixing in radio entertainment persisted, but slowly began to be exposed and criticized nationally.Footnote 107 In 1947, however, Lena Horne could still observe that “there are a few isolated cases of Negroes in broadcasting, but the lily-white policy is seldom violated.”Footnote 108
I have researched the stories of Otis Holley and La Julia Rhea in part to show that it can be done, that we can disentangle important individual stories from the thicket of newly digitized newspaper and other sources. But I also, and more importantly, wanted to suggest a revision of the way we think about the African American tradition of classical music performance – that it not be solely remembered as an example of class boundary marking, an illustration of the way the black elite performed and celebrated its own gentility and respectability. Juanita Karpf argued in 1999 that, for nineteenth-century African American women, singing classical music was “a resistance strategy” against the dominant white culture's assertion of its “prerogative of exclusive entitlement to art music and its insistence that the majority of black Americans were incapable of comprehending and interpreting that tradition”; that suggestive line of interpretation has not, however, been much further explored since.Footnote 109 Indeed, while W. E. B. Du Bois's assertion in Souls of Black Folk that “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not” is endlessly quoted, black classical musicians’ comparable but often tacit cultural assertions have not found interpretive resonance with historians.Footnote 110
Marian Anderson's 1939 performance at the Lincoln Memorial has entered the textbooks, but the rich black classical subculture that nurtured her career has not. The black classical-music community was supportive and more extensive than is often realized. Before World War II, however, even excellent black classical performers found it hard to transcend that relatively small world – Los Angeles African American pianist Marl Young (1917–2009) recalled of his youth, for example, that “the black churches were the only places where black people could really go and play classical music.”Footnote 111 There was, then, something culturally bold, even resistant, about the African American women and men who so persistently sought mainstream recognition of their classical musical talents. They dreamed not only of breakthrough careers for themselves, but of making classical music performance a ground of racial reconciliation; both their realized careers and their unrealized ambitions deserve to be better remembered and less repetitively interpreted.
