Eva Jessye

Eva Jessye (January 20, 1895, Coffeyville, Kansas—February 21, 1992, Ann Arbor, Michigan)—the first black woman to receive international distinction as a professional choral conductor. She is notable as a female choral conductor during the Harlem Renaissance. Her accomplishments in this field were historical for any woman regardless of ethnicity.

Jessye was educated at Western University (formerly Quindaro State) in Kansas and Langston University in Oklahoma. She later studied privately with Will Marion Cook in New York. In 1919 she worked as the choir director at Morgan State College in Baltimore and then returned west to teach at an AME Church school in Oklahoma. She returned to Baltimore in 1926 where she began to perform regularly with her choir, the "Eva Jessye Choir", who were originally called the "Dixie Jubilee Singers". She and the group moved to New York where they appeared frequently in the stage show at the Capitol Theatre where Eugene Ormandy conducted the orchestra. They were also a frequent presence on NBC and WOR radio in New York in the 1920s and 1930s and recorded on Brunswick, Columbia, and Cameo records in the 1920s. She went to Hollywood in 1929 as the choral director for the MGM film "Hallelujah" directed by King Vidor. In 1933, she directed her choir in the Broadway production of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein's opera, "Four Saints in Three Acts" and in 1935, she was the choral director chosen by George Gershwin for "Porgy and Bess".

In 1927 Jessye published "My Spirituals," a collection of arrangements of spirituals with stories about growing up in southeast Kansas. Further, Jessye composed her own choral works, including her folk oratorio "Paradise Lost and Regained" (1934), "The Life of Christ in Negro Spirituals" (1931), and "The Chronicle of Job" (1936) that combined spirituals, religious narrative or biblical text, and her own orchestral compositions.

An active supporter of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, Eva Jessye and her choir participated in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. She was active into her 80s and, shortly before her death, established the Eva Jessye African-American Music Collection at the University of Michigan and left most of her personal papers to Pittsburg State University in Kansas.

External links

* [http://www.umich.edu/~afroammu/jessye_more.html Short biography at the University of Michigan]
* [http://library.pittstate.edu/spcoll/ndxjessye.html Short biography at Pittsburgh State University]
* [http://openvault.wgbh.org/saybrother/MLA001072/index.html/ Interview with Eva Jessye] for the WGBH series, * [http://openvault.wgbh.org/series/Say+Brother/ Say Brother]
* [http://www.kshs.org/people/jessye_eva.htm]

References

*"My Spirituals". Eva Jessye. Robbins-Engel, 1927.
*"The Music of Black Americans: A History". Eileen Southern. W. W. Norton & Company; 3rd edition. ISBN 0-393-97141-4