THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 26, 1995 TAG: 9502220390
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GEORGE TUCKER
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
Sissieretta Matilda Jones, the Portsmouth-born African-American dramatic soprano whose glorious voice gained her the snidely condescending sobriquet ``Black Patti,'' was born too early to achieve her full potential as a leading international prima donna.
Had she belonged to later generations of her race that included Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price, opera impresarios would have clamored for her services. But Jones was a victim of the vicious racial prejudice of her time.
After a few years of youthful triumphs, including an 1892 invitation by President Benjamin Harrison to sing at the White House, Jones spent the rest of her career as a star in traveling vaudeville troupes.
Born three years after the close of the Civil War, Jones was a daughter of the Rev. Jeremiah Malachi Joyner and Henrietta B. Joyner of Portsmouth. As a very young child, she began to sing, drumming out her accompaniments with her tiny fingers on the kitchen table top since her family could not afford a piano. At 7, she moved with her parents to Providence, R.I. Soon little Sissieretta's unusual voice attracted the attention of Baroness Ada Lacombe, an instructor at the Providence Academy of Music.
Even though her progress was rapid, Jones nearly wrecked her budding career by marrying David Richard Jones, an opportunist who repeatedly cheated her out of her earnings. In 1898, she divorced him for drunkenness and non-support.
After further vocal training at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Jones began to attract so much attention by her singing that a critic on the New York Clipper flippantly dubbed her ``Black Patti'' after Adelina Patti, the most celebrated white opera soprano of her time. This displeased Jones.
``Do you know it rather annoys me to be called `Black Patti?' '' she said. ``I am afraid people will think that I consider myself an equal of Patti, and I assure you I do not, but I have a voice and am striving to win the favor of the public by honest merit and hard work. Perhaps someday I may be as great in my way.''
This youthful dream was never completely fulfilled. For even though several musical connoisseurs suggested that Jones be given a chance to star in ``dark roles'' such as Aida and L'Africaine at New York's Metropolitan Opera, she was snubbed because of her race.
Jones embarked on a European tour and was well-received, even giving a command performance in London for the then Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII.
When she returned to this country, however, Jones had to content herself by starring in several African-American touring companies specializing in comedy, art songs, opera, folk songs and gospel music. Ironically, one of these troupes was called The Black Patti Troubadours, which toured throughout the United States and appeared in the West Indies and South America for 19 seasons.
Even then, Jones was the victim of racial discrimination. For instance, on Sept. 18, 1902, The Portsmouth Star printed a front page story giving an account of a white actress in Richmond who balked at being given the dressing room that Jones had used a week before.
Jones made the best of such unfair criticism and never sang down to her mostly musically illiterate hearers. But her insistence on sticking to the classical repertoire with which she hoped to maintain her artistic integrity was her eventual undoing.
By 1916, Jones had become so depressed with the way her career had plummeted she retired to Providence, R.I., where she spent the rest of her life as a semi-recluse, her only companion being a parrot she had acquired in South America. She died of cancer in 1933, and was buried in Grace Church Cemetery.
But Jones has not been completely forgotten. Her life and career was used as a theme for a doctoral dissertation in 1967 by Willia Estelle Daughtry, B.S., Hampton University, 1952, and M. Mus. (Mus. Ed.), Syracuse University, 1957. Based largely on surviving scrapbooks that Jones compiled during her career, Daughtry's dissertation is titled: ``Sissieretta Jones: A Study of the Negro's Contribution to Nineteenth Century Concert and Theatrical Life.''
In Portsmouth, Jones was further honored in 1976 when a bronze plaque in the city's main library was set up in her honor by the National Music Council, the Virginia Federation of Music Clubs, and Exxon Corp.
Its inscription reads:
LANDMARK OF MUSIC/SISSIERETTA JONES/ ``BLACK PATTI''/ c. 1868-1933/ PORTSMOUTH WAS THE BIRTHPLACE OF ONE OF/ AMERICA'S EARLY OPERATIC SOPRANOS. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
After a few years of youthful triumphs, Sissieretta Matilda Jones
spent the rest of her career as a star in traveling vaudeville
troupes.
by CNB