Happy Saturday. Today we are sharing an episode from our predecessors, Sarah and Deblina. Back in eleven, they talked about contralto Marian Anderson, whose concert at the Lincoln Memorial made a huge impression on the young Martin Luther King Jr. So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chuck Reboarding. And today we're gonna be talking about a famous singer. But we're gonna start by talking about a famous speech, one of the most famous speeches in history. It took place August nineteen sixty three. It's Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. Of course, that was made on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. But more than twenty years before that, a ten year old Martin Luther King had been affected by another Lincoln Memorial event, one that had been also covered nationally broadcast coast to coast by NBC Radio, covered in all the newspapers. Are a really big event, and that was the concert of African American contralto singer Marian Anderson, and she had opened her performance by singing America and then Donna Zetti and Ave Maria and Spiritual is a selection of spirituals to this utterly ecstatic crowd. They were just thrilled to see her singing, an internationally renowned singer, and see her sing there on the National Mall. Seventy five thousand people were actually there, and that was the largest group to gather at the Lincoln Memorial since Lindbergh's appearance there in ninety. It was a huge event that that concert was actually a result of earlier discrimination. The Daughters of the American Revolution had refused to allow Anderson, who was by that point an internationally acclaimed singer, to perform at DC's Constitution Hall. So in protest, first Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the d a R and arranged an alternate venue for Anderson's performance, the National Mall. So with a backstory like that, in a voice like Anderson's, the Easter nineteen nine performance proved to be a landmark moment for the early civil rights movement, and one that undoubtedly affected young Martin Luther King. Yeah, we actually have a quote from him at age fifteen, So just a few years After this concert by Marian Anderson, Martin Luther King entered a speaking contest, and he noted the performance and the inequalities that it had yet to address. In the speech, he wrote, here's what he had to say. She's saying is never before with tears in her eyes when the words of America and nobody knows the trouble I've seen rang out over that great gathering. There was a hush on the sea of uplifted faces, black and white, and a new baptism of liberty, equality and fraternity. That was a touching tribute. But miss Anderson may not as yet spend the nine in any good hotel in America. So who was Marian Anderson? How did she wind up singing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in front of this crowd of seventy thousand people? And what did she think of her her sort of unwilling or reluctant role as a civil rights figure. Well, we're gonna get to that, but first we're gonna start with her childhood. She was born in Philadelphia in eight and she was the eldest of three girls. Her mother had trained as a school teacher in Virginia and her father worked delivering coal and ice, and Anderson started singing at a really early age. She joined the junior choir of the Union Baptist Church at age six, and she actually gotten trouble back then because she would drown out all the other kids in her class. So in class she'd said as close as she could to the music room so that she could overhear the songs being taught through the wall. So really obsessed with music, she would when she finally would get to music class from her her other studies, she would already know all the songs. She would have memorized as them already. But she was also interested in piano and violin. She bought a used violin herself by saving up money from scrubbing steps, and supposedly was not very great at violin. She realized that was not her instrument, but still practiced really hard at it. And this was kind of an interesting time in classical music, one that we need to discuss a little bit before we we can really understand how Marian came to be what she was. But it was a time that seemed a little more welcoming to African Americans, time when classical music seemed a little more accessible than it had in the past because just a few years before Anderson was born, and tonin Dvorgiacque had announced that African Americans would be able to attend the National Conservatory free of admission. And he made that decision because he thought that spirituals and American Indian music was sort of the way that American composition was headed, that would be the major influence in the future of a Erican music. So he thought that people with fewer privileges should be able to to train up to be a part of that future. And Anderson certainly seemed like she would be part of that future. She had promised. She joined the People's course at Church of the Crucifixion at age eight and had to stand on a chair to see the conductor. So that's how young she was compared to everyone else. And it was around this time that paper started advertising her church concerts as shows by quote the baby contralto. Yeah, and that was the first little contralto nickname she had. But I think it's it's funny to imagine an eight year old with a contralto. In case anybody doesn't know, that's one of the lower the lower registers for women singers. So imagine an eight year old with a very powerful, slightly low voice, but must have been surprising two people. Yeah, and impressive for sure even then. But in nineteen o nine, Marian's family sort of underwent some major trouble. Her father had a head injury at work, and after a month of illness related to this injury, he died at age thirty four, and that left Marian's mother having to go back to work. Unfortunately, she couldn't teach, even though that's what she had done in Virginia, because she didn't have the proper certification to teach in Pennsylvania. So she did laundry and cleaning and sewing, and it also caused Marian to have to go to work herself, drop out of high school and help support the family. And she did that mostly with menial work as well, helping out her mother with cleaning and and stuff like that, but also occasionally taking on gig at a small concert, something something to make a little money off of her singing, and she got help with that too. People who had heard her sing they weren't about to let her slip off into a life of manual labor, so she continued to sing with the People's Chorus and Union Baptist Church, often filling in for soloists and sometimes even helping fill out the tenor section. As Sarah indicated before another another great example of her reign. She had three octaves actually, so she could go from covering for the tenor section to singing soprano. So she studied with a teacher, Mary Saunders Patterson, who would often waive her lesson fees, and she was supported by the Union Baptist folks who basically took up a collection for her in order to send her to school. Yeah, they wanted to to see her go somewhere. They actually thought that her voice was a gift from God and it shouldn't be wasted. So you'd think that such a talented young woman who was the pride of her community and had all of these supporters would would be able to get into a conservatory, be able to get some professional training. So, with money in hand, she actually applied to a local conservatory in nineteen fourteen, but had this terrible experience there. The receptionists made her wait until everyone in line behind her had been served, and then finally, when she was the last person in the room, the woman told her we don't take colored and dismissed her without even giving her a chance to sing. But she still managed to continue her train and even though she couldn't get into a school like this, she went back to high school instead with the support of our church. So she had that kind of hoping that she'd be able to get a higher paying day job eventually to continue her singing. And then the churches Marian Anderson's Future Fund also helped her continue funding these private lessons, and by the time she started touring regionally, momentum around her was really really building. Finally, yeah, we mentioned people from where she was locally collecting money from her, but at a concert for the National Association of Negro Musicians convention in Chicago, someone in the audience actually called for a collection for her there too. She eventually applied and was accepted to Yale, but she still couldn't attend due to the price. Meanwhile, though, the principle of her high school, Dr. Lucy Wilson, kept working with Marian and introduced her to Giuseppe Boghetti, a well known voice teacher, and he remembers their first meeting in this way quote at the end of a long, hard day when I was weary of singing and singers, and when a tall, calm girl poured out deep river in the twilight and made me cry. Yeah. And so he was really affected by this young woman and her voice, and he cleared his schedule for her, and he was pretty frank with her too. He told her, I will need only two years with you. After that you will be able to go anywhere and sing for anybody. And that really proved to be true. But they started intensive training, and she she did have a lot to learn. She had a great natural gift, and she was really good at what she had been singing, which was spirituals and gospel, but she needed to hone her foreign language diction to be able to sing art songs and sing arias from operas, and to practice the style for that type of singing. She made her more formally. Yeah, He trained her formally, and so she practicing all of this all the while with him, she toured black colleges and churches on the East Coast, and in nine nineteen twenty four, she also started making recordings with Joseph Pastor Nach, who was the conductor of the Philharmonic Society of Philadelphia. And interestingly, these were the first recordings African American concert artist recordings of spirituals for a major label. And um Marian has so many first that we're not going to be able to acknowledge all of them. But I thought that was that was an interesting recording milestone. But with all the success, disappointment still had a surprisingly big effect on her. Yes, probably the worst one came in April nineteen four when she made her town Hall, New York City debut to a nearly empty house. The reviews were really bad, and after that she had to take time off to reconsider her career before she finally decided to jump back in for a smack collaboration with the Philharmonic Society of Philadelphia. So she came back, but she was really down. There ended up being a bump in the road, but she she just had to think about whether this was something she really wanted to pursue. But by she was confident enough with her abilities and a strong enough singer that but Getty secretly entered her name into this contest with a very grand prize. Indeed, the winner would appear as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic and as you can imagine, it was competitive. There were three hundred singers trying to get this prize, and by the time Anderson appeared, the judges had already heard fifty singers that day. So I guess imagine those early American idol tryouts. They're probably pretty burnt out, except they were cutting people off with a buzzer. Yes, they were cutting people off in the middle of the buzzer. So she was seeing this before she went up and performed, and was just dreading she would go out there, pour her heart out, sing her beautiful song and be cut off in the middle by the buzzer. But they listened the whole way through. They called her back, they had her sing a few different times, and she ended up winning the competition and performed before a crowd of seven thousand, five hundred people. So after that town hall debacle, this was a real triumph and really gave her the confidence to move on to the next step in her career right, and that next step was to head to Europe. There were fewer racial barriers. There more of an opportunity to learn the languages of classical music, including French, Italian, and German, as well as European vocal style, so it just seemed to make sense that this was this was the next logical step for her. So in the fall of n she left for her first trip, and she spent the next several years going back and forth between there in the United States, and at first she mostly studied in Germany. She studied language addiction there and toward in Scandinavia, and the Scandinavians really loved that her name was Anderson, just because yeah, the newspapers there talked about quote maryon fever. So she was really big there. But eventually she was touring the whole continent and Asia as well. In four she made her Paris debut, and in the Soviet Union she featured spirituals and songs like ave Maria. She just changed the titles to suit censors a little bit. They didn't want overtly religious songs, but those were the songs. She wasn't willing to not sing spirituals. That's what she had always done, So just change things around a little bit. I made a few adjustments. The government there actually liked her so much they arranged for recordings to inspire Soviet young people in the Soviet Union, which is is really bizarre if you think about it, that this, uh, this young woman from Philadelphia would be a model for Soviet youths. But there you go. So during all this touring, though, she also obviously came into contact with a lot of great European composers and performers and directors, and she met Finnish composer Jean Spilius for instance, and Arturo Toscanini perhaps gave her one of her most famous compliments, which is, yours is a voice such as one, here's only once in a hundred years. And um, in some of the things I read about Anderson, a lot of people said, we're not anywhere close to that hundred years being up quite yet. So it still holds true today, still holds true in in some people's opinion. But by the mid nineteen thirties, obviously Europe was getting to not be such a hospitable place for Anderson anymore, so she started reconsidering where her career was going to go, and at one point she was even invited to sing in Berlin, where of course she had performed extensively in the nineteen twenties, but organizers called it off when they heard that she was not quote one hundred percent arian surprise. Um, so she just starts looking at at different options. It's time to move on in her career yet again. So it was time to come home for an extended stay. And fortunately her success in Europe meant that she could bring on a better manager because while her European tours had been a grand success US, her state side manager, who was Arthur Judson, had been pretty lackluster. He didn't book much for her, and he even tried to convince her to be a soprano and pursue the role of Aida, which was a traditionally black song role. But at one point she got so fed up with him that she booked it for Sweden and actually stayed abroad there for two years. Ditched or manager, and she was basically hiding from him. But in Paris she had met impresario Soul Harrick and he signed her away from Judson by guaranteeing at least fifteen stateside concerts with a five hundred dollar fee per concerts. So she was all about that. She was like, okay, let's do it, and her homecoming concert was scheduled for December thirtieth, ninety five at New York City's town Hall, the site of her first major failure that we mentioned. And to further complicate those bad memories that she must have already had of the place, she also had just broken her ankle, so she had this cast on her foot, but she had to do the show anyway, leaning against the piano, wearing a long, elegant dress to cover the cast, standing on one foot. I mean, can you imagine how much somebody like this too, when when you're gonna hear her voice later in the podcast, somebody who clearly has to put so much energy and power into her voice standing on one foot, that would be pretty agonizing. But this time her performance at the town Hall is a huge success. The New York Times says there was no doubt of it. She was mistress of all she surveyed, so big success in New York. She's got this good tour going on, making a lot of money. Actually, in nineteen thirty eight, she made a quarter of a million dollars, So just to give you an idea of how successful she really was, it wasn't just good reviews. That's the equivalent of three point seven million dollars today. So I mean a quarter of a million sound. It still sounds pretty I know. So she was. She was doing very well for herself and as an artist. It seemed like she was ready to perform in the nation's capital, to perform in d C, and herrock wanted her to debut at Constitution Hall, which was really the only venue that could contain her many many fans. It was the biggest venue in d C. But in the early nineteen thirties, the d a R Daughters of the American Revolution, which owned Constitution Hall, had instituted this policy against black performers. They had originally allowed black performers, but they thought it attracted too much of a black audience, so they made a just blanket policy against black performers at Constitution Hall. So Park tries to get them to maybe change their roles for Anderson, and she is such a huge, celebrated star. But even under pressure from him and from the n double a CP and from Howard University, the d a R refuses to back down from their policy. And unfortunately, the next biggest venue in town, which was a local white high school, was also out of the question because the school board refused to allow Anderson to perform there. So enter Eleanor Roosevelt. She was a member of the d a R, probably its most prominent member. She resigned publicly wrote the scathing letter to them, and started working with her husband, who was the president at the time, and others to book Anderson at the National Mall. So if you, if you can't perform in the biggest concert venue, perform at the most high profile place in the national capital instead. And she did just that, and the Boy Scouts handed out programs to a mixed race audience that was there in attendance, and she was introduced by the Secretary of the Interior, who introduced her by saying, quote, in this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free. And after that introduction, she started her performance with My country tis of thee. And here's what it sounded like. That clip is pretty moving just listening to it, but you can also see video footage of it, and at the end she just breaks into this huge smile. She's clearly aware of what an effect it had, and looking back, it's clearly a moment of activism. It seems like a preface to the civil rights movement that really doesn't kick off for a few more years, but at the time, Anderson herself didn't really identify as an activist. She wasn't really interested in doing that or or being that person. In fact, she had spent most of her career avoiding racially charged situations altogether. She would take her meals in hotel rooms to avoid uncomfortable situations at restaurants. She'd sometimes have her white accompaniess fetch her food from a restaurant that she wasn't able to go into. And she'd even try to take cars instead of segregated trains since it was such a hassle navigating all of the social situations involved with that. And she would stay with friends whenever she could. In Princeton, New Jersey, for example, and nasaw In refused her room, so she ended up staying with her pal Albert Einstein instead, which doesn't sound so bad to me. And while she had refused to sing in horizontally segregated venues, she accepted vertically segregated concerts, So we were talking a little bit about that before. Horizontally segregated means that there would be white people in the orchestra section and then the black people would be up in the kind of Nosebleed speaks about. Yeah, and vertical segregation was everybody sort of had the opportunity to have a good seat, but they were secret. So imagine a line down the middle. So if whether you're black or white, you could still buy a cheap seat, or you could buy a really good seat up close. So she made that distinction. She at least insisted on that. She wanted people to be able to buy the seats they wanted. So, yeah, she wasn't. She wasn't looking to be this figure of activism. And she had even had misgivings about performing the Lincoln Memorial Concert in the first place, because by this point, because of the D A. R controversy and Eleanor Roosevelt's involvement, it was really really high profile. But part of her misgivings were just voice related. They were just about the music. She had only performed once before outside, so imagine your second concert outside in front of seventy five thousand people and broadcast nationally. But she did it anyway, and and she certainly didn't dwell on the triumph once it was over either. In her autobiography, she initially wished that the National Mall Concert, which is probably the most identifiable part of her life was not in the book her I think her co writer insisted that it was. But to her the success she had had in Europe, where she was celebrated just as a great singer and not a public figure, not some sort of civil rights figure, was more important to her. But the concert also marked the real pinnacle of Anderson's career. The Roosevelt's remained champions and fans of hers, and Anderson became the first African American performer at the White House, and later in nineteen thirty nine she performed there in front of the King and Queen of England. And then in nine she was invited by none other than the d A. R. To perform a benefit concert. So they came around it on faith. In a few years and she she continued really high profile events too. She performed at Eisenhower's second inauguration, she performed at John F. Kennedy's inauguration, and in the nineteen fifties, even with a kind of fading voice, by this point she had traveled extensively, she had sunk so many concerts, and she was getting older, she still made her Metropolitan Opera debut in Verdi's and Bala on Mascara, and um, I am not familiar with that opera, but supposedly, even though it's a small part, it's a really really good part. It's vital to the story, and it's got great music. And she had done Aria's obviously all through her career, but she hadn't ever done an opera before, so you know she was going to have to act and where a costume and really really sort of take on new roles in performing. And the part also extended into notes that were now uncomfortably high for her. So she was reluctant to to get into this in the first place, but finally she agreed because, after all, I mean, who could resist a debut at the Met in in there. I think she's in her fifties or sixties by this point, her fifties. Um, he was pretty nice. Rst have been a good lure too. She was paid one thousand dollars per show, which at that point was the highest fee paid to h MET singer to date. Attendees to the show included Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Truman, and the Duchess of Windsor, and she got a five minute ovation at the end, so she probably didn't have as much reason to worry as she thought. When people just wanted to see her after the show and she finally got to go back to her dressing room, she had two thousand telegrams come in. I mean, can you imagine what that would be like? Then? That was actually even when some people were starting to call for her to maybe consider retirement, she just had so many people who still wanted to see her that she didn't really consider it for a while. So she kept on touring, even though she did slow her pace a little bit. She eventually visited every continent except for Antarctica. She will just give you a few highlights of these global tour. She performed in front of the Imperial Court in Japan. She was the first African American to do so. She toured Israel because she really wanted to see places that had inspired spirituals, like the River Jordans, the Walls of Jericho. And an interesting detail about that, since German was not um a very highly considered language in Israel at that time, She performed a bronze piece which was originally written in German translated into Hebrew, and I read a little Metropolitan opera piece about that, and it noted that the audience would not have cared if she had performed it in German, but they were just thrilled that she did take the extra step to to learn it in Hebrew and sing it that way. After that, she traveled to Australia and also to New Zealand and her sixties, and she didn't integrated tour of Texas later too, and she also made recording, so while she wasn't travel lng, she was putting her voice on to tape. She did a hundred and fifty tracks for R. C. A Victor, as well as a documentary that was narrated by another great voice, Edward R. Murrow, that was called The Lady from Philadelphia. And during all of this work she settled down to she married an old sweetheart. She had known him for I think since her her twenties, Orpheus Fisher, and together they bought a farm in Danbury, Connecticut, and they called it Marianna. So she she was semi retired. I think that she was still a pretty busy lady, though, yes she was. In August nineteen sixty three, she returned to the side of her previous triumph to sing He's got the whole world in his hands, but her voice had gone to this point so that she only got a light applause for this. So that made her start to think really seriously at this point about retirement, and she began a farewell tour. That final tour started with a performance in October nineteen sixty four Constitution Hall, and it included fifty cities overall, in the last performance was at Carnegie Hall. She lived in Connecticut until the last year of her life, when she finally moved to Oregon to live with her nephew, who was a conductor. And she died in nine at age ninety four. Yeah, and there's some discrepancies about her age. She I read in two different sources. One that she adjusted her age so that she would be allowed to sing as a child in a certain choir. She moved it up a couple of years. Another thing I saw, though, she was so disappointed that she had had to drop out of high school temporarily and not graduate high school until she was twenty four, that she's subtracted six years from her birthday, making her younger than her two younger sisters. So yeah, it's it's kind of I think she even had seventy five and eightieth birthday celebrations that were definitely not her seventy and eightieth birthdays. But there you go just a little. Don't totally trust any age you c associated with Mary Anderson. Good to know. Well, I guess when you're that talented, you can get away with a lot. So we have a few more fun random facts for you about Marion Anderson. She is on the five thousand dollar savings bond, which is pretty cool. I mean that's almost like being on a bill, like a dollar bill. That's a hefty savings bond. It's pretty heavily the best people know about you. Yeah, and yeah, actually it's the highest one right now because the ten thousand bond was apparently discontinued according to the Treasury site. Um. She's also on a US postage stamp, and I thought this was really kind of poignant, But the d a R hosted the dedication ceremony for the unveiling of her postage stamp. They are really sorry about their treatment of Marion Anderson, judging by their website, And if you want to learn more about her, there's just so much out there, so many pictures, so many recordings. It was really refreshing to to research something like this after I don't know some of the more medieval topics than doing. She's very well documented. Um, there's a University of Pennsylvania collection with all sorts of stuff on her, and a really great tribute in The New Yorker by Alex Ross. And that's actually how I first heard about her. UM. John Fuller, who hosts Stuff from the B Side, suggested her after reading the Ross profile, any recordings that you'd recommend, Um, I guess to start with watching that whole Lincoln Memorial concert. That's that's what I did. I think I didn't. I didn't listen to it at all until I was about halfway through with research, and by that point it was it was so extra poignant, I think. I mean, you and I were talking about how when we were sort of going over this. Yeah, I watched it right before we came in here, and I got kind of tiary. Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of the archive, if you at an email address or a Facebook, U r L or something similar during the course of the show, that may be obsolete. Now. So here's our current contact information. We are at history podcasts at how stuff works dot com, and then we're at missed in the history. All over social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com

Happy Saturday. Today we are sharing an episode from our predecessors, Sarah and Deblina. Back in eleven, they talked about contralto Marian Anderson, whose concert at the Lincoln Memorial made a huge impression on the young Martin Luther King Jr. So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chuck Reboarding. And today we're gonna be talking about a famous singer. But we're gonna start by talking about a famous speech, one of the most famous speeches in history. It took place August nineteen sixty three. It's Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. Of course, that was made on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. But more than twenty years before that, a ten year old Martin Luther King had been affected by another Lincoln Memorial event, one that had been also covered nationally broadcast coast to coast by NBC Radio, covered in all the newspapers. Are a really big event, and that was the concert of African American contralto singer Marian Anderson, and she had opened her performance by singing America and then Donna Zetti and Ave Maria and Spiritual is a selection of spirituals to this utterly ecstatic crowd. They were just thrilled to see her singing, an internationally renowned singer, and see her sing there on the National Mall. Seventy five thousand people were actually there, and that was the largest group to gather at the Lincoln Memorial since Lindbergh's appearance there in ninety. It was a huge event that that concert was actually a result of earlier discrimination. The Daughters of the American Revolution had refused to allow Anderson, who was by that point an internationally acclaimed singer, to perform at DC's Constitution Hall. So in protest, first Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the d a R and arranged an alternate venue for Anderson's performance, the National Mall. So with a backstory like that, in a voice like Anderson's, the Easter nineteen nine performance proved to be a landmark moment for the early civil rights movement, and one that undoubtedly affected young Martin Luther King. Yeah, we actually have a quote from him at age fifteen, So just a few years After this concert by Marian Anderson, Martin Luther King entered a speaking contest, and he noted the performance and the inequalities that it had yet to address. In the speech, he wrote, here's what he had to say. She's saying is never before with tears in her eyes when the words of America and nobody knows the trouble I've seen rang out over that great gathering. There was a hush on the sea of uplifted faces, black and white, and a new baptism of liberty, equality and fraternity. That was a touching tribute. But miss Anderson may not as yet spend the nine in any good hotel in America. So who was Marian Anderson? How did she wind up singing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in front of this crowd of seventy thousand people? And what did she think of her her sort of unwilling or reluctant role as a civil rights figure. Well, we're gonna get to that, but first we're gonna start with her childhood. She was born in Philadelphia in eight and she was the eldest of three girls. Her mother had trained as a school teacher in Virginia and her father worked delivering coal and ice, and Anderson started singing at a really early age. She joined the junior choir of the Union Baptist Church at age six, and she actually gotten trouble back then because she would drown out all the other kids in her class. So in class she'd said as close as she could to the music room so that she could overhear the songs being taught through the wall. So really obsessed with music, she would when she finally would get to music class from her her other studies, she would already know all the songs. She would have memorized as them already. But she was also interested in piano and violin. She bought a used violin herself by saving up money from scrubbing steps, and supposedly was not very great at violin. She realized that was not her instrument, but still practiced really hard at it. And this was kind of an interesting time in classical music, one that we need to discuss a little bit before we we can really understand how Marian came to be what she was. But it was a time that seemed a little more welcoming to African Americans, time when classical music seemed a little more accessible than it had in the past because just a few years before Anderson was born, and tonin Dvorgiacque had announced that African Americans would be able to attend the National Conservatory free of admission. And he made that decision because he thought that spirituals and American Indian music was sort of the way that American composition was headed, that would be the major influence in the future of a Erican music. So he thought that people with fewer privileges should be able to to train up to be a part of that future. And Anderson certainly seemed like she would be part of that future. She had promised. She joined the People's course at Church of the Crucifixion at age eight and had to stand on a chair to see the conductor. So that's how young she was compared to everyone else. And it was around this time that paper started advertising her church concerts as shows by quote the baby contralto. Yeah, and that was the first little contralto nickname she had. But I think it's it's funny to imagine an eight year old with a contralto. In case anybody doesn't know, that's one of the lower the lower registers for women singers. So imagine an eight year old with a very powerful, slightly low voice, but must have been surprising two people. Yeah, and impressive for sure even then. But in nineteen o nine, Marian's family sort of underwent some major trouble. Her father had a head injury at work, and after a month of illness related to this injury, he died at age thirty four, and that left Marian's mother having to go back to work. Unfortunately, she couldn't teach, even though that's what she had done in Virginia, because she didn't have the proper certification to teach in Pennsylvania. So she did laundry and cleaning and sewing, and it also caused Marian to have to go to work herself, drop out of high school and help support the family. And she did that mostly with menial work as well, helping out her mother with cleaning and and stuff like that, but also occasionally taking on gig at a small concert, something something to make a little money off of her singing, and she got help with that too. People who had heard her sing they weren't about to let her slip off into a life of manual labor, so she continued to sing with the People's Chorus and Union Baptist Church, often filling in for soloists and sometimes even helping fill out the tenor section. As Sarah indicated before another another great example of her reign. She had three octaves actually, so she could go from covering for the tenor section to singing soprano. So she studied with a teacher, Mary Saunders Patterson, who would often waive her lesson fees, and she was supported by the Union Baptist folks who basically took up a collection for her in order to send her to school. Yeah, they wanted to to see her go somewhere. They actually thought that her voice was a gift from God and it shouldn't be wasted. So you'd think that such a talented young woman who was the pride of her community and had all of these supporters would would be able to get into a conservatory, be able to get some professional training. So, with money in hand, she actually applied to a local conservatory in nineteen fourteen, but had this terrible experience there. The receptionists made her wait until everyone in line behind her had been served, and then finally, when she was the last person in the room, the woman told her we don't take colored and dismissed her without even giving her a chance to sing. But she still managed to continue her train and even though she couldn't get into a school like this, she went back to high school instead with the support of our church. So she had that kind of hoping that she'd be able to get a higher paying day job eventually to continue her singing. And then the churches Marian Anderson's Future Fund also helped her continue funding these private lessons, and by the time she started touring regionally, momentum around her was really really building. Finally, yeah, we mentioned people from where she was locally collecting money from her, but at a concert for the National Association of Negro Musicians convention in Chicago, someone in the audience actually called for a collection for her there too. She eventually applied and was accepted to Yale, but she still couldn't attend due to the price. Meanwhile, though, the principle of her high school, Dr. Lucy Wilson, kept working with Marian and introduced her to Giuseppe Boghetti, a well known voice teacher, and he remembers their first meeting in this way quote at the end of a long, hard day when I was weary of singing and singers, and when a tall, calm girl poured out deep river in the twilight and made me cry. Yeah. And so he was really affected by this young woman and her voice, and he cleared his schedule for her, and he was pretty frank with her too. He told her, I will need only two years with you. After that you will be able to go anywhere and sing for anybody. And that really proved to be true. But they started intensive training, and she she did have a lot to learn. She had a great natural gift, and she was really good at what she had been singing, which was spirituals and gospel, but she needed to hone her foreign language diction to be able to sing art songs and sing arias from operas, and to practice the style for that type of singing. She made her more formally. Yeah, He trained her formally, and so she practicing all of this all the while with him, she toured black colleges and churches on the East Coast, and in nine nineteen twenty four, she also started making recordings with Joseph Pastor Nach, who was the conductor of the Philharmonic Society of Philadelphia. And interestingly, these were the first recordings African American concert artist recordings of spirituals for a major label. And um Marian has so many first that we're not going to be able to acknowledge all of them. But I thought that was that was an interesting recording milestone. But with all the success, disappointment still had a surprisingly big effect on her. Yes, probably the worst one came in April nineteen four when she made her town Hall, New York City debut to a nearly empty house. The reviews were really bad, and after that she had to take time off to reconsider her career before she finally decided to jump back in for a smack collaboration with the Philharmonic Society of Philadelphia. So she came back, but she was really down. There ended up being a bump in the road, but she she just had to think about whether this was something she really wanted to pursue. But by she was confident enough with her abilities and a strong enough singer that but Getty secretly entered her name into this contest with a very grand prize. Indeed, the winner would appear as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic and as you can imagine, it was competitive. There were three hundred singers trying to get this prize, and by the time Anderson appeared, the judges had already heard fifty singers that day. So I guess imagine those early American idol tryouts. They're probably pretty burnt out, except they were cutting people off with a buzzer. Yes, they were cutting people off in the middle of the buzzer. So she was seeing this before she went up and performed, and was just dreading she would go out there, pour her heart out, sing her beautiful song and be cut off in the middle by the buzzer. But they listened the whole way through. They called her back, they had her sing a few different times, and she ended up winning the competition and performed before a crowd of seven thousand, five hundred people. So after that town hall debacle, this was a real triumph and really gave her the confidence to move on to the next step in her career right, and that next step was to head to Europe. There were fewer racial barriers. There more of an opportunity to learn the languages of classical music, including French, Italian, and German, as well as European vocal style, so it just seemed to make sense that this was this was the next logical step for her. So in the fall of n she left for her first trip, and she spent the next several years going back and forth between there in the United States, and at first she mostly studied in Germany. She studied language addiction there and toward in Scandinavia, and the Scandinavians really loved that her name was Anderson, just because yeah, the newspapers there talked about quote maryon fever. So she was really big there. But eventually she was touring the whole continent and Asia as well. In four she made her Paris debut, and in the Soviet Union she featured spirituals and songs like ave Maria. She just changed the titles to suit censors a little bit. They didn't want overtly religious songs, but those were the songs. She wasn't willing to not sing spirituals. That's what she had always done, So just change things around a little bit. I made a few adjustments. The government there actually liked her so much they arranged for recordings to inspire Soviet young people in the Soviet Union, which is is really bizarre if you think about it, that this, uh, this young woman from Philadelphia would be a model for Soviet youths. But there you go. So during all this touring, though, she also obviously came into contact with a lot of great European composers and performers and directors, and she met Finnish composer Jean Spilius for instance, and Arturo Toscanini perhaps gave her one of her most famous compliments, which is, yours is a voice such as one, here's only once in a hundred years. And um, in some of the things I read about Anderson, a lot of people said, we're not anywhere close to that hundred years being up quite yet. So it still holds true today, still holds true in in some people's opinion. But by the mid nineteen thirties, obviously Europe was getting to not be such a hospitable place for Anderson anymore, so she started reconsidering where her career was going to go, and at one point she was even invited to sing in Berlin, where of course she had performed extensively in the nineteen twenties, but organizers called it off when they heard that she was not quote one hundred percent arian surprise. Um, so she just starts looking at at different options. It's time to move on in her career yet again. So it was time to come home for an extended stay. And fortunately her success in Europe meant that she could bring on a better manager because while her European tours had been a grand success US, her state side manager, who was Arthur Judson, had been pretty lackluster. He didn't book much for her, and he even tried to convince her to be a soprano and pursue the role of Aida, which was a traditionally black song role. But at one point she got so fed up with him that she booked it for Sweden and actually stayed abroad there for two years. Ditched or manager, and she was basically hiding from him. But in Paris she had met impresario Soul Harrick and he signed her away from Judson by guaranteeing at least fifteen stateside concerts with a five hundred dollar fee per concerts. So she was all about that. She was like, okay, let's do it, and her homecoming concert was scheduled for December thirtieth, ninety five at New York City's town Hall, the site of her first major failure that we mentioned. And to further complicate those bad memories that she must have already had of the place, she also had just broken her ankle, so she had this cast on her foot, but she had to do the show anyway, leaning against the piano, wearing a long, elegant dress to cover the cast, standing on one foot. I mean, can you imagine how much somebody like this too, when when you're gonna hear her voice later in the podcast, somebody who clearly has to put so much energy and power into her voice standing on one foot, that would be pretty agonizing. But this time her performance at the town Hall is a huge success. The New York Times says there was no doubt of it. She was mistress of all she surveyed, so big success in New York. She's got this good tour going on, making a lot of money. Actually, in nineteen thirty eight, she made a quarter of a million dollars, So just to give you an idea of how successful she really was, it wasn't just good reviews. That's the equivalent of three point seven million dollars today. So I mean a quarter of a million sound. It still sounds pretty I know. So she was. She was doing very well for herself and as an artist. It seemed like she was ready to perform in the nation's capital, to perform in d C, and herrock wanted her to debut at Constitution Hall, which was really the only venue that could contain her many many fans. It was the biggest venue in d C. But in the early nineteen thirties, the d a R Daughters of the American Revolution, which owned Constitution Hall, had instituted this policy against black performers. They had originally allowed black performers, but they thought it attracted too much of a black audience, so they made a just blanket policy against black performers at Constitution Hall. So Park tries to get them to maybe change their roles for Anderson, and she is such a huge, celebrated star. But even under pressure from him and from the n double a CP and from Howard University, the d a R refuses to back down from their policy. And unfortunately, the next biggest venue in town, which was a local white high school, was also out of the question because the school board refused to allow Anderson to perform there. So enter Eleanor Roosevelt. She was a member of the d a R, probably its most prominent member. She resigned publicly wrote the scathing letter to them, and started working with her husband, who was the president at the time, and others to book Anderson at the National Mall. So if you, if you can't perform in the biggest concert venue, perform at the most high profile place in the national capital instead. And she did just that, and the Boy Scouts handed out programs to a mixed race audience that was there in attendance, and she was introduced by the Secretary of the Interior, who introduced her by saying, quote, in this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free. And after that introduction, she started her performance with My country tis of thee. And here's what it sounded like. That clip is pretty moving just listening to it, but you can also see video footage of it, and at the end she just breaks into this huge smile. She's clearly aware of what an effect it had, and looking back, it's clearly a moment of activism. It seems like a preface to the civil rights movement that really doesn't kick off for a few more years, but at the time, Anderson herself didn't really identify as an activist. She wasn't really interested in doing that or or being that person. In fact, she had spent most of her career avoiding racially charged situations altogether. She would take her meals in hotel rooms to avoid uncomfortable situations at restaurants. She'd sometimes have her white accompaniess fetch her food from a restaurant that she wasn't able to go into. And she'd even try to take cars instead of segregated trains since it was such a hassle navigating all of the social situations involved with that. And she would stay with friends whenever she could. In Princeton, New Jersey, for example, and nasaw In refused her room, so she ended up staying with her pal Albert Einstein instead, which doesn't sound so bad to me. And while she had refused to sing in horizontally segregated venues, she accepted vertically segregated concerts, So we were talking a little bit about that before. Horizontally segregated means that there would be white people in the orchestra section and then the black people would be up in the kind of Nosebleed speaks about. Yeah, and vertical segregation was everybody sort of had the opportunity to have a good seat, but they were secret. So imagine a line down the middle. So if whether you're black or white, you could still buy a cheap seat, or you could buy a really good seat up close. So she made that distinction. She at least insisted on that. She wanted people to be able to buy the seats they wanted. So, yeah, she wasn't. She wasn't looking to be this figure of activism. And she had even had misgivings about performing the Lincoln Memorial Concert in the first place, because by this point, because of the D A. R controversy and Eleanor Roosevelt's involvement, it was really really high profile. But part of her misgivings were just voice related. They were just about the music. She had only performed once before outside, so imagine your second concert outside in front of seventy five thousand people and broadcast nationally. But she did it anyway, and and she certainly didn't dwell on the triumph once it was over either. In her autobiography, she initially wished that the National Mall Concert, which is probably the most identifiable part of her life was not in the book her I think her co writer insisted that it was. But to her the success she had had in Europe, where she was celebrated just as a great singer and not a public figure, not some sort of civil rights figure, was more important to her. But the concert also marked the real pinnacle of Anderson's career. The Roosevelt's remained champions and fans of hers, and Anderson became the first African American performer at the White House, and later in nineteen thirty nine she performed there in front of the King and Queen of England. And then in nine she was invited by none other than the d A. R. To perform a benefit concert. So they came around it on faith. In a few years and she she continued really high profile events too. She performed at Eisenhower's second inauguration, she performed at John F. Kennedy's inauguration, and in the nineteen fifties, even with a kind of fading voice, by this point she had traveled extensively, she had sunk so many concerts, and she was getting older, she still made her Metropolitan Opera debut in Verdi's and Bala on Mascara, and um, I am not familiar with that opera, but supposedly, even though it's a small part, it's a really really good part. It's vital to the story, and it's got great music. And she had done Aria's obviously all through her career, but she hadn't ever done an opera before, so you know she was going to have to act and where a costume and really really sort of take on new roles in performing. And the part also extended into notes that were now uncomfortably high for her. So she was reluctant to to get into this in the first place, but finally she agreed because, after all, I mean, who could resist a debut at the Met in in there. I think she's in her fifties or sixties by this point, her fifties. Um, he was pretty nice. Rst have been a good lure too. She was paid one thousand dollars per show, which at that point was the highest fee paid to h MET singer to date. Attendees to the show included Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Truman, and the Duchess of Windsor, and she got a five minute ovation at the end, so she probably didn't have as much reason to worry as she thought. When people just wanted to see her after the show and she finally got to go back to her dressing room, she had two thousand telegrams come in. I mean, can you imagine what that would be like? Then? That was actually even when some people were starting to call for her to maybe consider retirement, she just had so many people who still wanted to see her that she didn't really consider it for a while. So she kept on touring, even though she did slow her pace a little bit. She eventually visited every continent except for Antarctica. She will just give you a few highlights of these global tour. She performed in front of the Imperial Court in Japan. She was the first African American to do so. She toured Israel because she really wanted to see places that had inspired spirituals, like the River Jordans, the Walls of Jericho. And an interesting detail about that, since German was not um a very highly considered language in Israel at that time, She performed a bronze piece which was originally written in German translated into Hebrew, and I read a little Metropolitan opera piece about that, and it noted that the audience would not have cared if she had performed it in German, but they were just thrilled that she did take the extra step to to learn it in Hebrew and sing it that way. After that, she traveled to Australia and also to New Zealand and her sixties, and she didn't integrated tour of Texas later too, and she also made recording, so while she wasn't travel lng, she was putting her voice on to tape. She did a hundred and fifty tracks for R. C. A Victor, as well as a documentary that was narrated by another great voice, Edward R. Murrow, that was called The Lady from Philadelphia. And during all of this work she settled down to she married an old sweetheart. She had known him for I think since her her twenties, Orpheus Fisher, and together they bought a farm in Danbury, Connecticut, and they called it Marianna. So she she was semi retired. I think that she was still a pretty busy lady, though, yes she was. In August nineteen sixty three, she returned to the side of her previous triumph to sing He's got the whole world in his hands, but her voice had gone to this point so that she only got a light applause for this. So that made her start to think really seriously at this point about retirement, and she began a farewell tour. That final tour started with a performance in October nineteen sixty four Constitution Hall, and it included fifty cities overall, in the last performance was at Carnegie Hall. She lived in Connecticut until the last year of her life, when she finally moved to Oregon to live with her nephew, who was a conductor. And she died in nine at age ninety four. Yeah, and there's some discrepancies about her age. She I read in two different sources. One that she adjusted her age so that she would be allowed to sing as a child in a certain choir. She moved it up a couple of years. Another thing I saw, though, she was so disappointed that she had had to drop out of high school temporarily and not graduate high school until she was twenty four, that she's subtracted six years from her birthday, making her younger than her two younger sisters. So yeah, it's it's kind of I think she even had seventy five and eightieth birthday celebrations that were definitely not her seventy and eightieth birthdays. But there you go just a little. Don't totally trust any age you c associated with Mary Anderson. Good to know. Well, I guess when you're that talented, you can get away with a lot. So we have a few more fun random facts for you about Marion Anderson. She is on the five thousand dollar savings bond, which is pretty cool. I mean that's almost like being on a bill, like a dollar bill. That's a hefty savings bond. It's pretty heavily the best people know about you. Yeah, and yeah, actually it's the highest one right now because the ten thousand bond was apparently discontinued according to the Treasury site. Um. She's also on a US postage stamp, and I thought this was really kind of poignant, But the d a R hosted the dedication ceremony for the unveiling of her postage stamp. They are really sorry about their treatment of Marion Anderson, judging by their website, And if you want to learn more about her, there's just so much out there, so many pictures, so many recordings. It was really refreshing to to research something like this after I don't know some of the more medieval topics than doing. She's very well documented. Um, there's a University of Pennsylvania collection with all sorts of stuff on her, and a really great tribute in The New Yorker by Alex Ross. And that's actually how I first heard about her. UM. John Fuller, who hosts Stuff from the B Side, suggested her after reading the Ross profile, any recordings that you'd recommend, Um, I guess to start with watching that whole Lincoln Memorial concert. That's that's what I did. I think I didn't. I didn't listen to it at all until I was about halfway through with research, and by that point it was it was so extra poignant, I think. I mean, you and I were talking about how when we were sort of going over this. Yeah, I watched it right before we came in here, and I got kind of tiary. Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of the archive, if you at an email address or a Facebook, U r L or something similar during the course of the show, that may be obsolete. Now. So here's our current contact information. We are at history podcasts at how stuff works dot com, and then we're at missed in the history. All over social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. 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