AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

82 Friday afternoon AMS Philadelphia 2009
discursive narratives surrounding each woman and exposing the web of social and political
interactions that these singers negotiated both on- and off-stage.
The panel reveals how reviewers, historians, and biographers set these four women’s performed
selves in opposition to their performed characters, a clash that leads, in Goffman’s
terminology, to a discrediting of their performed selves. Broadening the important work of
Southern (1971), Jackson (1979), and the recent collection of essays by Hayes and Williams
(2007), the panel elucidates some of the historical musical contributions of these four seminal
African American women singers from the nineteenth century to the 1980s, and challenges
our discipline to more fully incorporate methodologies of performance studies and more rigorously
interrogate the myriad meanings of “performance.”
THE “BLACK SWAN” IN AMERICA: A MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY
RECEPTION STUDY OF ELIZABETH TAYLOR GREENFIELD
Julia Chybowski
University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh
Born into slavery decades before the Civil War, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield toured in North
America and England in 1850s and 1860s under the name of “The Black Swan.” Although she
is proclaimed America’s first black concert singer in James Trotter’s 1881 publication, Music
and Some Highly Musical People, and subsequent histories which almost exclusively rely
on Trotter’s narrative, scholars have largely overlooked her mid-nineteenth century reception.
Building upon my previous work on Greenfield’s English sojourn and her position in
the trans-Atlantic abolition movement, this presentation explores reception of her 1851–1853
American tour against the backdrop of a rising mid-century interest in slave culture among
white Northerners, and legislative struggles to define race in the early 1850s.
There are many challenges involved in researching a musician who, although prominent
in her lifetime, has almost been completely lost to history. We know few basic details of
Greenfield’s biography, and her authoritative voice is not in any way preserved. Yet, hundreds
of newspaper reviews document an enthusiastic reception of her mid-century musical performances.
Greenfield sang sentimental ballads, Stephen Foster songs and English versions
of Italian opera arias—that is, the music of upper-class parlors where musical women in the
image of Victorian “singing birds” presided, and of the concert stages that presented European
prima donnas. Greenfield toured in the U.S. simultaneously with the “Swedish Nightingale,”
Jenny Lind, and this historical coincidence provided reviewers with fodder for poignant contrast.
Not only did they judge Greenfield’s accomplishments with favorable comparisons to
her much more famous contemporary, but they used Lind as a foil to the “Black Swan.”
This project builds upon other studies of nineteenth century female African American
musicians such as Marie Selika, Sissieretta Jones, and Nellie Brown Mitchell. In order to
present Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield as an important precursor to these later musicians, I will
emphasize recurring themes in reviews that became long-standing conventions in review of
African American female voices, such as reviewers’ insistence that the African American female
voice be heard as spiritual, powerful, and natural and that her evident musicality be
met with qualified praise. Moreover, reviews tie their characterizations of Greenfield’s voice,
physical appearance, and degree of cultivation measured with the ideology of racial uplift to
their speculation over her “true” racial identity. On one hand, reviewers insist on hearing her
as an “authentic” slave voice, at a time when realist fiction and published slave narratives were