Conference Agenda

Sallie Martin (1895-1988), who teamed with Thomas A. Dorsey from 1929 to 1939 and formally partnered with Kenneth Morris from 1940 until 1973, was foremost among a handful of Chicago musical agents who laid the foundation for early Black gospel’s marketing infrastructure. Yet, her partnerships flourished not only from her organizational skills, but also her performing, founding and leading choirs, evangelizing with song, and furthering the work of the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses. Her moniker, the Mother of Gospel Music, is well-earned, but her natural acerbity and a voice considered unlovely by many left her vulnerable to more than her share of criticism in her day. In the years since her death, her legacy has fallen prey to a reductionism likely emanating from the lore surrounding her fractious persona. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s much anticipated documentary entitled GOSPEL (2024) is but the latest installment in a popular history that ultimately devalues the fuller legacy of Sallie Martin; after her organizational genius, her many other contributions to Black gospel have remained largely unaddressed.

Part of a monograph considering the fullness of her professional life, this paper documents Martin’s life on the road, marketing gospel music with an ensemble of singers and a pianist, over four decades from the 1930s through the 1960s. Extant recordings witness the growing cohesion of the Sallie Martin Singers as she and her musical collaborators Julia Mae Smith Whitfield, Dinah Washington, Dorothy Simmons, Cora Martin-Moore, Gwendolyn Cooper Lightner, and others sang their way to and back home from conventions, board meetings, and expositions. A surviving record book subtitled “Where Miss Martin Goes” is a list of addresses and phone numbers that witness the significance of the pathways she established, before there was a Green Book and the Deep South was a lion’s den for itinerant Black musicians. Underpinning her business savvy, it turns out, is the fact that Sallie Martin possessed great intuition and an extraordinary sense of self-worth, advantages she carried before her as a shield as she personally brought gospel music to a diverse American public.

Despite his status as one of America’s most prolific Black composers, Ulysses Kay (1917–1995) has scarcely been the subject of musicological inquiry. Emily Abrams Ansari’s work on Kay’s 1958 involvement with U.S. cultural diplomacy efforts and her subsequent article on Kay’s multiculturalist opera Jubilee (1976) remain the only significant studies of Kay’s life and music. And yet, as adept as these studies are, the depiction of Kay’s early career therein merely serves as foil, where Kay’s “long standing aversion to race-related themes in his music” is finally overcome in his later works.

In this paper, I seek to complicate the current understandings of Kay’s early period (c. 1946–54), positioning Kay as an active agent in the development of Black classical music in postwar New York City. Relying on interviews, newspaper articles, score analysis, and correspondence between Kay and both composer William Grant Still and poet Langston Hughes, I suggest Kay’s contribution is two-fold. First, Kay developed a subtle, individualized approach to incorporating “African American cultural topics” (Horace Maxile Jr., 2008) into several of his scores, most prominently in his Serenade for Orchestra (1954). And second, Kay composed several works that address racial themes explicitly, including his ballet Danse Calinda (1947), an unfinished chamber opera of Langston Hughes’s one-act play, Soul Gone Home (1945–), and the documentary film score, The Quiet One (1948).

Building on Erich Nunn’s suggestion that the potential permeability of the racial sound barrier was enough to pose a threat to the cultural logic of segregation, I view Kay as a transgressive figure. His discreet use of African American cultural topics and themes differed greatly from his peers and forbears, such as Still, Margaret Bonds, and Florence Price, who treated these topics as fundamental. In this sense, Kay’s early success was a demonstration to the white-dominant field of American classical music that Black composers were free to compose in a multiplicity of styles, moving beyond the confines of an expressive color line. As products of a postwar environment characterized by elusive progress toward racial equality, Kay’s early works represent the complex negotiations between music and race in pre-civil rights era America.

In the early 1930s, soprano Caterina Jarboro (née Katherine Yarborough, 1898–1986) was at the height of her fame, hailed as America’s first Black prima donna for her performances in the title role of Verdi’s Aida at Milan’s Puccini Theatre (1931) and the New York Hippodrome (1933). Amid this buzz of newfound international celebrity, Jarboro returned to her hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina, to give a series of solo recitals at Thalian Hall: two in autumn 1932 (September 19 and October 3), and a third on December 15, 1933. Contemporary press coverage suggests these recitals were fraught events for Wilmington’s Black community: for, though Jarboro’s recent accomplishments were a source of pride, the segregated seating arrangements reinforced the city’s disenfranchisement of its Black citizens. Moreover, Thalian Hall was a cursed site in local history, the same place where white supremacist Alfred Moore Waddell had delivered a vitriolic speech threatening to “choke the current of the Cape Fear with carcasses” less than a month before the 1898 Wilmington Massacre and coup d’état.

African American newspapers also presented conflicting images of Jarboro’s “diva” behavior during her homecoming visits, with some correspondents lauding her charitable activities and others accusing her of neglecting her own community. Yet I argue that Jarboro embodied Lauren Berlant’s (1997) concept of revolutionary “diva-citizenship” through her recitals themselves. As Daphne Brooks (2006) has shown, America has a long tradition of Black divas who have powerfully transformed their socio-political marginalization into self-actualization through their performances—and Jarboro was no different. Using Naomi André’s (2018) analytical model of engaged musicology, I interpret Jarboro’s Wilmington recital programs as rich in double-entendres and layered meanings. For white audience members, Jarboro’s performance of Italian and French repertoire displayed her European classical training and promoted an ideology of “racial uplift” (Schenbeck 2012); she also embodied a spectacle of exoticized “authenticity” through her performance of Aida’s aria “Ritorna vincitor” in costume, as well as the minstrel song “Swanee River” and Spirituals. For Black audiences, however, Jarboro’s repertoire offered commentary on the tensions of memory, trauma, and nostalgia, while delivering subtly encoded messages of protest, resilience, and mourning.