Conference Agenda

Contralto Marian Anderson (1897–1993) is widely celebrated as a Black feminist icon. In accounts of her life, scholars tend to focus on two pivotal events: her subversive outdoor concert at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 and her color line-breaking debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1955. But the intervening years were crucial for Anderson’s career. It was in this period, I suggest, that Anderson cultivated the reputation that ultimately enabled her Met debut. I argue that she did this not only through the classical music industry, but through a series of performances on popular broadcast media, especially television. Historians often emphasize how mid-century Black musicians reached a wider community through radio and LPs; in fact, Black musicians also utilized the television industry and its interconnected network of producers and celebrities to advance their careers and promote justice in white, capitalist America.

Between 1940 and 1954, Anderson capitalized on the normative power of early television to build professional momentum and bolster her reputation as an American singer. Notably, in 1953 Anderson headlined the Ford 50^th Anniversary Show, a variety program that was considered the first musical television spectacular and attracted an audience of 60 million viewers. Through the show, Anderson cultivated a version of Black identity that was easily assimilated into existing cultural norms and was conflated with American accomplishment. Rather than opera or art song, she sang “He’s Got the Whole World in his Hands” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” both of which were framed on Ford 50^th as “great American songs.” Publicity for the show downplayed the issue of racial conflict, as did subsequent reviews. With Ford 50th, Anderson built a reputation not as a revolutionary figure but as an American nationalist icon. When we ignore Anderson’s television performances during this period, we lose a critical way that Black musicians navigated music industries by mobilizing TV variety shows.

Black subjugation—and resistance—in opera has become an important and timely site of scholarly enquiry. Major studies by Naomi André, Kira Thurman, and Nina Sun Eidsheim trace the reception of Blackness in live performance, but there has yet to be a substantial inquiry into how operas and Black artists were captured, cultivated, and conveyed by the recording industry, in sound documents that are still widely circulated and revered today. This paper explores the 1955 operatic debut of Marian Anderson with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), situating it within the context of RCA’s early efforts at industrial integration after World War II.

New archival materials reveal that RCA, one of the leading media corporations of the last century, cast itself as a trailblazer in “industrial race relations” in the 1950s, a mission that strongly depended on expanding and showcasing the presence of their Black employees. These new materials exhibit Black workers in a multitude of spaces in RCA’s media empire, working as editors, censors, engineers, set designers, album artists, camera persons, musicians, and assembly workers. Drawing on the work of Daphne A. Brooks, Alexander Weheliye, and Matthew Morrison, this paper analyzes Billboard articles, RCA’s press materials, and several Black periodicals to recontextualize Anderson’s ground-breaking achievements within RCA’s corporate history. It argues that Anderson in RCA’s recording of Verdi’s A Masked Ball was not only a pivotal achievement toward integration; it was also integral to RCA’s cultivation of an American brand. Examining the impact of the civil rights movement on RCA’s classical music catalogue expands the dearth of scholarship about Black classical musicians and media corporations and offers a foundation for further exploration into opera and the recording industry.