Eva Jessye

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Eva Jessye (January 20, 1895 — February 21, 1992) was the first black woman to be recognized internationally as a professional choral conductor.

During the Harlem Renaissance, she is best known as a choral conductor.

She formed her own choral group, which performed well.

Her career spanned decades of teaching as well.

Any woman's accomplishments in this field were illuminating.

She performed in three Acts (1933), directed her choir, and appearing with Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein on Four Saints (1933), as well as George Gershwin on his experimental opera Porgy and Bess (1935).

Early life and education

Eva Jessye was born in Coffeyville, Kansas, on January 20, 1895. She attended Western University, a historically black university in Kansas, and Langston University in Oklahoma. She later worked privately with Will Marion Cook in New York City.

Jessye began performing as the choir director at Morgan State College in Baltimore in 1919. She went west for a time to teach at an AME Church school in Oklahoma. She returned from Baltimore in 1926 to her "Eva Jessye Choir," where she performed regularly with her group, the "Eva Jessye Choir." They were first identified as "Original Dixie Jubilee Singers," but various organizations began to use the term "Dixie Jubilee Singers," so she changed her name.

Eugene Ormandy conducted the orchestra in New York, and she and the company travelled to New York, where they appeared frequently in the stage show at the Capitol Theatre. They were also regular performers on NBC and WOR radio in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1920s, they appeared on Brunswick, Columbia, and Cameo records. Jessye went to Hollywood in 1929 as the choral director of MGM's Hallelujah!, which had an all-black cast directed by King Vidor. When speaking out against the discriminatory acts she endured while on the set of this film, she was lauded by members of the black press.

Jessye spent time in New York with creative multi-racial teams in pioneering works of art, music, and stories. She conducted her choir in Virgil Thomson's and Gertrude Stein's opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, which was also presented as a Broadway theatre performance in 1933. According to Steven Watson, the Eva Jessye Choir's appearance in Four Saints marked a musical and economic breakthrough for African-American singers at the time. Jessye is quoted by Watson as "quite a departure" because up to that point, there were only opportunities for things like "Swanee River" or "Old Black Joe" or "Old Black Joe." They said, "our music," and said we could only sing those things by God's grace, and we wouldn't have any at all." "Want to rely on a deeply entrenched system of discriminatory pay, rampant kickbacks, and nonpayment of choruses during rehearsals," Jessye writes. George Gershwin selected her as his music director for his opera Porgy and Bess in 1935.

Jessye began publishing My Spirituals, a collection of her spiritual arrangements, in 1927, as well as tales about growing up in southeast Kansas.

Jessye has also written her own choral works: The choral works by Jessye were also composed:

These are a blend of spirituality, religious epic, or biblical text as well as orchestral compositions.

Jessye and her choir, a vocal supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, were present in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

She taught at Pittsburg State University (Pittsburg, Kansas), and the University of Michigan as an active student in her 80s. She donated her extensive collection of books, scores, paintings, and other items to the University of Michigan, which became the foundation of the university's African American Music Collection. Dr. Jessye was a member of Sigma Gamma Rho sorority.

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