I’d had the program for months, so long that I didn’t even remember when I had bought it at auction. It was likely among some documents in a box lot and, upon finding it once I got home, I knew it was a keeper.
The Arion Musical Club of Milwaukee, WI, was presenting Marian Anderson in a concert at Milwaukee Auditorium on Wed., Jan. 26, 1949. I can imagine how thrilling it must have been for ticket-holders (likely not many or any of whom looked like me) for this event.
At the recital, Anderson engaged her audience with Handel, Gluck, Scarlatti, Dvorak and lots of Shubert. The program seemed to be tucked between ads for pianos and accordions, corsets and hat cleaning, cameras and photo supplies, and upcoming concerts.
As I perused it, something else caught my eye that could easily have slipped by. It was a section at the end titled “Negro Spirituals.” She also sang five songs arranged by composers Harry T. Burleigh, Edward Boatner and Hall Johnson. I was familiar with Burleigh and Johnson, but not Boatner. I was pleasantly surprised to see that among the European classics Anderson had paid homage to her own spiritual roots – and thereby creating her own classics.
I wanted to know more about this aspect of the program, so I went hunting. I found that she had long been incorporating spirituals as a postlude to her concerts, and by doing so, she was following a proud tradition. Spirituals had been around for decades, but the Fisk Jubilee Singers helped to popularize them in the late 19th century.
By the early 20th century, they were coming out of the shadows and into the mainstream, finding their way into the offerings of African American concert artists and composers, according to a 1994 University of Pennsylvania exhibit called “Marian Anderson: A Life in Song.”
Anderson’s portfolio contained more than 100 spirituals, according to one account, and she usually ended her concerts with “He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands” arranged by Hamilton Forrest. One site surmised from her programs that her favorite arrangers were Burleigh, Johnson and Nathaniel Dett.
Many of those composers and arrangers were friends or acquaintances, and several dedicated arrangements to her. In other cases, she popularized some songs.
Dett’s “Poor Me” was dedicated to Anderson, who sometimes sang with his Hampton Institute Choir. Burleigh’s “My Lord, What a Morning” became the title of her 1956 autobiography. Florence Price’s “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord” was sung often by Anderson. Roland Hayes was her teacher and her inspiration.
My program from auction showed that she sang four spirituals, among them one of the Boatner’s best-known, “Trampin’.”
“These are the songs of my people,” she said once in reaction to a warning not to sing spirituals in the USSR when she performed there. “I shall sing them whenever and wherever I please.”
On piano at each of her concerts was Franz Rupp, a German-American who accompanied Anderson for 25 years starting in 1940.
Anderson seemed to have returned to Milwaukee pretty often for concerts sponsored by the Arion, which had been around since 1877. On March 26, 1944, the “world famous Negro contralto” – as the Milwaukee Sentinel described her – performed at a sold-out concert at the 6,450-seat auditorium. She sang Brahms, Haydn, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Charles Griffes, and her spirituals: Burleigh’s “Ride On, King Jesus”; Hayes’ “Lord, I Can’t Stay Away,” Dett’s “Poor Me” and Price’s “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord.”
Two years later, she sang at the Wisconsin State Teachers Association convention in another sold-out concert during the Arion’s season. In 1952, she helped the music society celebrate its Diamond Jubilee.
All of this activity was a far cry from the 1939 incident in which the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her to sing at Constitution Hall in Washington. That snub created such an outcry that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the organization.
Anderson instead gave a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, and she ended the performance with “Gospel Train,” “Trampin'” and “My Soul Is Anchored in the Lord.”
In the years before the incident, Anderson was said to have averaged about 70 concerts a year, and she apparently kept up the pace afterward. She was a busy woman during the 1940s and 1950s, entertaining U.S. troops at war, and touring Europe, South America, the West Indies and other nations.
Here are snippets of some of the spirituals.
