Joyner, Matilda Sissieretta 1869(?)–1933

Matilda Sissieretta Joyner 1869(?)–1933

Singer

At a Glance…

Began Solo Career

Renamed the “Black Patti”

Became a Sought After Star

Began Second Phase of Career

Sources

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Widely hailed as the possessor of one of the great singing voices of her day, Sissieretta Jones enjoyed a successful career as a concert and variety performer from the late 1880s to the World War I era. “A Phenomenal Attraction...the upper notes of her voice are clear and bell-like...and her low notes are rich and sensuous with a tropical contralto qualitya...In fact, the compass and quality of her registers surpass the usual limitations and seem to combine the height and depth of both soprano and contralto,” is how the Washington Post described Jones’ voice in an undated review reprinted in Opera News.

Jones’ career had two phases. First she was a soloist, appearing in concert halls, churches, and other venues in North America and Europe. Later, she spent two decades touring the United States as the star of an all-black variety entertainment show. It is an example of the peculiar nature of race relations in America that Jones, whose extraordinary talent was almost universally acknowledged and whose concerts and variety shows drew mostly white audiences, never appeared in opera.

Jones was born in Portsmouth, Virginia as Matilda Sissieretta Joyner. The year of her birth is usually given as 1869. According to William Lichtenwanger in Notable American Women, no record of her birth has ever been found and the ages listed on her marriage and death records indicate that she was born around 1865. Jones’ father, Jeremiah Malachi Joyner, was a former slave and had been a body servant to his master until the end of the Civil War. After gaining his freedom, he became a minister in the Afro-Methodist Church. Jones’ mother, Henrietta, a former slave as well, was an accomplished amateur singer with a fine soprano voice. She grew up as an only child, her brother having died in infancy. In 1876, Jones’ father accepted an offer to become pastor of a church in Providence, Rhode Island, and the family moved north. A minister’s salary was modest and Reverend Joyner took odd jobs to help make ends meet. Providence had a thriving black community in the 1870s and the atmosphere in the city was relatively progressive in regard to racial matters. Jones attended the Meeting Street and Thayer Street schools, both of which had integrated student bodies and teaching personnel.

As a small child, Jones exhibited a love for singing. “When I was a little girl, just a wee slip of a tad, I used to go about singing. I guess I must have been a bit of a nuisance then, for my mouth was always open,” the adult Jones recalled in an interview with the Syracuse Evening Herald, excerpts of which are included in Willia Daughtry’s doctoral dissertation about Jones. During her teenage years, Jones made her first public appearance as a singer at the Pond Street Baptist Church in Providence and studied voice at the Providence Academy of Music.

In 1883, Jones married David Richard Jones, called

At a Glance…

Born Mati Ida Sissierettajoyner on January 5, 1869 in Portsmouth, VA; daughter ofJeremiahMalachi Joyner (a minister), and HenriettaJoyner.Education: Attended Providence, Rl, public grammar schools; Providence Academy of Music, c. 1884; New England Conservatory of Music, Boston, MA, c. 1887, also studied with private instructors. Married David Richard Jones (a former bellman and newsagent), in 1883 (divorced in 1890s). Died on June 24, 1933 in Providence, Rl.

Career: Singer.

Richard, whom Rosalyn M. Story in And So I Sing: African-American Divas of Opera and Concert says was described in contemporary accounts as a “handsome mulatto from Baltimore.” Richard Jones had worked as a hotel bellman and as a newspaper dealer. The couple is said to have had a child who died in infancy.

Began Solo Career

Marriage does not seem to have hindered Jones’ budding professional career. She is said to have attended the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston in the mid-1880s. Lichtenwanger says that school records do not carry her name but he speculates that she may have been a private pupil with one of the conservatory’s instructors. In 1887, Jones made her professional debut in Boston at a concert to benefit the Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell, whose political career was being jeopardized by a personal scandal. Her performance at the Parnell concert, before an audience of five thousand, drew a strongly positive reaction. The following year Jones made her first New York appearance in a concert at Steinway Hall.

Later in 1888, Jones sang at Wallack’s Theater on Broadway, becoming the first African-American to appear on stage at the prestigious theater. The attention she received at this performance led to her joining a troupe of black musicians on a tour of the West Indies. The West Indian tour lasted eight months and was a triumph. In Jamaica, Haiti, and other countries, Jones was greeted by enthusiastic crowds and presented with jewel encrusted honors from local governments and admirers. Returning to the United States, she appeared with baritone Louis Brown in several East Coast cities and briefly returned to Providence for further study of voice. In the winter of 1890-1891, she made another tour of the West Indies.

Renamed the “Black Patti”

It was during her early concert years that Jones was dubbed the “Black Patti” by the New York Clipper, a theatrical newspaper. The moniker alluded to Adelina Patti, the Italian-American soprano and star of the Metropolitan Opera. Jones’ managers and promoters repeated the “Black Patti” description in advertisements and it became strongly identified with her for the remainder of her career. Although Jones adamantly disapproved of the nickname at the beginning, she then used it to her advantage in the later years. According to Daughtry, instead of finding the comparison to another artist pointless and the “black” qualification condescending, Jones used it “as a weapon-a kind of boomer-ang-which drew the predominately white audience to heran audience which expected to find a freak, a comical, awkward, unusually strange creature before it, but which found instead an artist who exhibited the same training known to the white singer of her time as well as a decorum which gave new dignity and finesse to the Negro image on the concert stage.”

In February 1892, Jones performed at the White House for President Benjamin Harrison and his luncheon guests in the Blue Room. Her vocal selections, typical of her concert repertoire at the time, were the popular songs “Home, Sweet Home,” “Swanee River,” and the cavatina from Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable. Enchanted by Jones’ talent, the First Lady, Caroline Harrison, presented the singer with a bouquet of White House-grown orchids. In later years, she returned to Washington to sing for Presidents Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt. African-American performers at the Executive Mansion were rare but not unprecedented. According to Elise K. Kirk in Opera News, singer Marie Selika performed at the Rutherford B. Hayes White House in 1878, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers performed for President Chester Alan Arthur in 1882. However, it was not until 1901, when Booker T. Washington lunched with Theodore Roosevelt, that an African-American was invited to the White House as a sit-down guest.

Became a Sought After Star

True notoriety came to Jones in April 1892 when she was selected to be the star attraction at the Grand Negro Jubilee at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The Jubilee was a three-day extravaganza featuring hundreds of black singers and dancers, and a military band. Jones sang popular songs and opera selections, including the “Siempre libera” aria from La Traviata. She was said to have been the highlight of the show. Offers for bookings increased so dramatically after this appearance that it was hard for Jones to fully absorb what had happened. “I woke up famous after singing at the Garden, and didn’t know it, “she said in an article quoted by Story.

In June 1892, Jones signed a contract with Major J.B. Pond, a high-powered promoter and manager of entertainers and lecturers whose clients included novelist Mark Twain and clergyman Henry Ward Beecher. Pond built a program around her, featuring classical and popular music. According to Story, the program became “something of a forum for the best black talent of the day.” Among the performers who appeared with Jones were poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and Joseph Douglass, a violinist and grandson of Frederick Douglass. She sometimes sang with accompaniment by black pianist Alberta Wilson, giving audiences a chance to marvel at two accomplished African-American women musicians holding forth on a concert hall stage.

In 1893, under the management of Pond, Jones earned two-thousand dollars for a one-week engagement at the Pittsburgh Exposition. It was said to be the highest salary paid to a black performer up to that time. Also in 1893, she performed at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago where she was a top box-office draw.

Management problems began to plague Jones’ career beginning in 1893. The details are vague. It is possible that she found Pond’s management style exploitative and more focused on making quick money than in fostering a long-term concert career. Other troubles are said to have stemmed when Jones’ husband, Richard, booked engagements for his wife without the permission of Pond. Her marriage was troubled due to Richard Jones’ penchant for gambling and drink, and his inability to hold a job. The couple divorced sometime between 1893 and 1898.

In the mid-1890s, Jones broke with Pond and under new management participated in a charity concert at Madison Square Garden to benefit the New York Herald’s Free Clothing Fund. The concert was conducted by the renown Hungarian composer Antonin Dvorak. Dvorak, then director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, was an admirer of African-American people and culture. Strains of black folk music can be heard in Dvorak’s famous “Symphony No. 9: From the New World.” At the Free Clothing Fund benefit, Jones sang the soprano solo from Rossini’s Stabat Mater with an all black male choir singing the chorus. “Mme. Jones was an enormous success with the audience. To those who heard her for the first time she came in the light of a revelation, singing high C’s with as little apparent effort as her namesake, the white Patti,” wrote a reviewer in the New York Herald. Jones then performed in England, France, and Germany. In London, she participated in a Royal Command performance for the Prince of Wales (future King Edward VII) at the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden.

Began Second Phase of Career

In 1896, Black Patti’s Troubadours were formed under the auspices of New York theatrical managers Voelkel and Nolan. As the name suggests, Jones was the main attraction of this travelling show, which also offered comedians, dancers, acrobats, jugglers, and other variety entertainments. Her appearances in the Troubadours came in what were called “Operatic Kaleidoscopes,” which offered scenes from famous operas, such as La Boehme, Rigoletto, and Carmen, sung with full costumes and scenery.

Jones’ greatest dream was to sing in a full-scale opera. Many critics agreed that her voice and dramatic flair were well-suited to opera. “The thought was irresistible that she would make a superb Aida, whom her appearance, as well as her voice, suggested,” wrote a writer for the Philadelphia Times, quoted by Story. A few offers were made in regard to opera after her initial rise to fame in the early 1890s but nothing ever materialized. Undoubtedly, Jones’ race was the reason she never appeared with prestigious opera companies, such as the Metropolitan. It was not until the 1950s that black singers appeared with major American opera companies. However, Denis Mercier points out in Notable Black American Women that all-black opera performances began to be done after the turn of the century and it is unclear why Jones never participated in any of these productions.

Black Patti’s Troubadours travelled across the United States and were popular with both white and black audiences. A writer for the Detroit Evening News, in an article quoted by Story, said that “without exception the Black Patti Troubadours company is the best colored theatrical organization that has visited this city. Every member of it seems to be a star.”

Despite its success, Jones was not entirely happy as leader of the Troubadours. She felt the company was essentially a minstrel show and not the proper showcase for her serious “Operatic Kaleidoscopes.” The appeal of Black Pattïs Troubadours reached its peak in the first decade of the twentieth century, then began to wane along with a general decline of minstrelsy. In 1916, the company gave its final performance at the Gibson Theatre in New York City.

Jones career came to an end with the demise of the Troubadours. Aside from a concert at Chicago’s Grand Theatre, she made no further professional appearances. Returning to Providence, she looked after her elderly mother, took in two boys who were wards of the state, and occasionally sang at local churches. To gain income, she sold off most of the possessions she had accumulated during her career, and in her last years received public assistance. She died of cancer on June 24, 1933, with only the generosity of friends preventing burial in the city’s “potter’s field.”

Although commercial phonographic technology was in place during most of Jones’ starring career, there are no known recordings of her voice. A record company called “Black Patti,” capitalizing on the prestige still attached to the name in some quarters, especially in the African-American community, operated briefly in Chicago in the late 1920s, recording mostly jazz, blues, and spirituals. There is no evidence the company ever asked Jones to record.

Sources

Books

African American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, Dorothy C. Salem, ed. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993.

Lichtenwanger, William. “Sissieretta Jones.” In Notable American Women 1607-1950, Vol.11. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.

Logan, Rayford W. “Sissieretta Jones,” In Dictionary of American Negro Biography. New York: W.W. Norton, 1982.

Mercier, Denis. “Sissieretta Jones ’Black Patti.’” In Notable Black American Women. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, Inc, 1992.

Rust, Brian.The American Record Label Book. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1978.

Story, Rosalyn M.And So I Sing: African-American Divas of Opera and Concert. New York: Warner Books, 1990.

Periodicals

New York Herald, January 24, 1894, p. 10.

New York Times, August 27, 1893, p.8.

Opera News, November 1, 1980, pp. 15-22, pp.42-43.

Providence Journal-Bulletin, February, 20, 1997.

Unpublished sources

Daughtry, Willia Estelle.Sissieretta Jones: A Study of the Negro’s Contribution to Nineteenth Century American Concert and Theatrical Life. Doctoral dissertation. Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, 1968.

—Mary C. Kalfatovic