IT AIN'T NECESSARILY SO

IT AIN’T NECESSARILY SO PERSPECTIVES WHY PORGY AND BESS IS UINTESSENTIALLY MERICAN Q A

By Yvonne Bynoe

Cultural Critic & Author

Porgy and Bess is an example of an African-American playing the hand she’s been dealt and ending up with a Royal Flush. George Gershwin didn’t foresee that his opera would be the springboard for the world’s first African-American opera superstar. In 1952, Leontyne Price (photo), a young Juilliard graduate from segregated Mississippi was receiving critical acclaim for her performance in the Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess. Subsequently, in 1953 Price was invited to sing “Summertime” for the Metropolitan Opera’s fundraising radio broadcast. Two years later Price would break racial barriers by singing the lead role in Tosca on NBC television’s Opera Theater. Price’s brilliant career ushered in opera legends Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle.

I remember as a kid watching a PBS program about Price’s 1978 recital at the White House and being transfixed by her elegance and by the beauty of her voice when she sang “Summertime.” I didn’t know that “Summertime” was from Porgy and Bess. Growing up, I saw ballets and went to museums. My parents took me to The Magic Flute but never mentioned Porgy and Bess.

There is an old Southern adage, “Chew the meat. Spit out the bones.” It means take the good and leave the rest behind. Porgy and Bess really isn’t about African-Americans. Much of what we call American culture are actually snippets of foreign languages, folklores, and traditions that have been indiscriminately cobbled together or entirely fabricated and sold to the public as factual accounts.

In this sense, Porgy and Bess is quintessentially American. DuBose Heyward a white man, wrote “Porgy,” a 1925 novel about African-Americans living in the tenements of Charleston, South Carolina. Gershwin, a Jewish man from Brooklyn, New York chose “Porgy’’ for his American folk opera and composed songs for the Southern characters. For his novel Heyward fictionalized Charleston’s Cabbage Row and modeled “Porgy” on Samuel Smalls, a disabled man who used a goat cart to get around. He liked to gamble and had a few run-ins with police. Smalls died a year before Heyward’s novel was published. The impoverished man’s grave finally received a headstone in 1986.

In culling through the history of Porgy and Bess it’s unsurprising to learn that numerous recommendations were made to Gershwin to have the roles in Porgy and Bess played by White actors in blackface rather than cast African-American singers. Gershwin however was firm that there be an all-Black cast in productions of his opera.

European operas are rife with murderers, adulterers, thieves, rapists and even child abusers but the audience knows that the villains are fictional. No one sees La Bohéme and thinks that it’s a documentary on the French. Unfortunately for decades, legions of white Americans and Europeans have left opera houses believing that they’d gotten a glimpse of life within a “colored” community in the United States.

African-Americans understandably have mixed feelings about Porgy and Bess. The ones who enjoy it have frequently said they’re happy to attend an opera with performers who look like themselves. Others however refuse to see it saying it promotes stereotypes of African-Americans as being poor, criminal, and morally deficient. There are also Black American opera singers who refuse to be cast in it.

While many opera fans wax poetic about Gershwin’s songs, particularly the duet, “Bess You Is My Woman Now,” African-Americans often wince throughout the libretto. They lament the rich Gullah-Geechee language, which tied the descendants of enslaved Africans to their ancestors being unnecessarily used and then bastardized into a generic “Negro dialect.”

Progress isn’t canceling Porgy and Bess, it’s also supporting operas such as Scott Joplin’s 1911 Treemonisha that present different perspectives on the American story. Joplin, better known as the “King of Ragtime Writers,” was a classically trained pianist.

Treemonisha is about a free Black woman who battles unscrupulous conjurers in the rural South. In his heyday Joplin was arguably just as popular as Gershwin was in his, however Joplin couldn’t get funding for his opera. Consequently, Treemonisha faded into obscurity until 1972 when it was finally performed. In 1976 Joplin received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his contributions to American music (Joplin’s life story would also make a great American folk opera).

Yvonne Bynoe

is a Charlotte-based cultural critic, author, and founder of the online visual arts platform @SHELOVESBLACKART