BLACK HISTORY MONTH: LEONTYNE, DIVA

The following is an excerpt from Danyel Smith’s award-winning book Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop (now in paperback). Smith is also the creator and host of the Spotify Original podcast Black Girl Songbook.

Through the year 1860, Black adult human beings in Mississippi—having been purchased at about $1,300 each—often sang as they labored through the bloodiest parts of planting, picking and processing more cotton than in any other state. As in the other fourteen slave states, and throughout the Union, crimes against these shoeless and unpaid workers, who were mostly living on pig intestines and corn, were systematic and profound.

Leontyne Price, the first Black woman to gain international fame as an opera singer—a true diva—was born in February of 1927 and so missed being born into soul-slaughtering, cotton-picking Mississippi slavery by 63 years. But it was in her blood.

The associations I have with opera include dozens of viewings of Julia Roberts as Vivian Ward in 1990’s Pretty Woman, and Cher as Loretta Castorini in 1987’s Moonstruck. In both fairy tales, opera—La Traviata in Pretty Woman, La Bohème in Moonstruck—is a reason for dressing up fancy, and for being moved to tears. Even though there are only quick shots of opera scenes, I am usually intrigued by the wigs, props, and soaring voices. But not intrigued enough to search for hidden doors into the art form.

In 1997, as part of an arts journalism fellowship, I toured the massive stages and back stages of New York City’s Metropolitan Opera. It’s the setting for Nicolas Cage and Cher’s big date in Moonstruck. All bayonets and shelves sagging with costumes, the mazy dreamland was off-limits to Black performers until Marian Anderson was allowed to sing there in 1955. The stages smelled of glue and hummed with the creation and hoarding of culture. I relaxed my shoulders and nodded appreciatively. I didn’t want to seem tense before my fellow fellows. In 2015, the Met, capital of the global opera community, would decide to discontinue blackface. For a time, Leontyne Price had made this beloved and plodding institution her kingdom.

Drowning in magnolia. Teeming with catfish. Poor, secluded, and swampy Jones County is Leontyne Price’s beloved home. One of the most brilliant artists in the history of American music, she has won thirteen Grammy Awards, was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964 and was honored by the Kennedy Center for lifetime achievement in 1980.

Her catalog is vast. Her version of Francis Poulenc’s “C’est ainsi que tu es” haunts. Her “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” admonishes as it celebrates. She wrings wretched truths from Gershwin’s “Summertime.” All casual splendor and serene strength, Price wore Afros and tiaras and shimmering press ’n’ curls.

By the time Mary Violet Leontyne Price came into her own as a professional, the United States was headed to Vietnam. Opera—redolent with posh whiteness and European excess—was experiencing an American boom. The United States was awash in opera-length dresses, opera- length pearls, opera-length cigarette holders, and jeweled opera glasses. The pomp and vividly non-American melodrama of the art form— onstage, on television, and via radio and recorded albums—provided distraction for the middle- and upper-class masses: Dame Joan Sutherland, Maria Callas and Luciano Pavarotti were among the most admired pop stars of the era.

And it wasn’t just the big names who made a lasting impact. Patricia Hickey, Mariah Carey’s mother, was a part of New York City’s opera scene in the 1960s and ’70s. (“It’s in my genes,” [Mariah] Carey has said. “My mother was an opera singer. I’m clearly dramatic.”) When Hickey, who is white, was rehearsing at home for the small role of Maddalena in Verdi’s Rigoletto, young Mariah apparently mimicked her mother perfectly. It was then that the recently divorced Patricia Hickey Carey began coaching her daughter, a light-lyric
coloratura soprano and five-octave prodigy.

Leontyne Price, a lirico-spinto soprano [i.e. possessing both the light tone of a lyric soprano and the ability to “push” without strain into more dramatic territory] with a three-and-a-half- octave range, had her soles on the shoulders of women like soprano Sissieretta “Black Patti” Jones (1868–1933), who toured Europe, South America, and the Caribbean with the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and Mississippi’s own Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield (1819–76). And with her thick and shapely body, lustrous coffee skin and profound cheekbones, Price was every inch a diva—in the way the word was originally meant.

“Diva” is an honorific often applied derisively to modern women pop stars. Sometimes, that title is taken on as an empowered self- identification. The word itself is traced to opera’s prima donnas: white lady leads of operatic companies. “I never sit on my laurels,” Price said in 1985. “The thing that’s been misunderstood is that I don’t give a lot of rhetoric before I say, ‘No.’ I just say, ‘No.’ It saves everybody time, and maybe because I don’t give a reason, it’s taken in a negative way.” These white lady sopranos were the best of those allowed to compete to be the best. Until Leontyne.

The relationship between the heights of opera and the heights of pop is straight and strong. “Something that few people are aware of is that the legendary opera star Leontyne Price is my cousin,” Dionne Warwick says in her 2010 memoir, My Life, as I See It. “Her relationship to me is from my mother’s side of the family. Leontyne lived in the south and was not a constant in my life. But when we see each other at functions, we acknowledge each other with ‘Hey, Cuz.’ ”

So, Warwick, born Marie Dionne Warrick in December 1940 in East Orange, New Jersey, is thirteen years younger than her cousin Leontyne Price. Warwick’s aunt Emily “Cissy” Drinkard Houston was born in September 1933 in Newark, New Jersey. Cissy’s daughter, Whitney Elizabeth Houston, was born in August 1963, also in Newark. All are pop-cultural royalty. Women who kicked down doors and influenced generations. All are of the Drinkard family bloodline.

Hey, Cuz, indeed.

On January 3, 1985, Price stood on stage at the New York City Metropolitan Opera amid “cheering, bouquet throwing and confetti strewing,” enjoying an ovation that lasted 25 minutes. This after a final, soaring performance of Aida, broadcast via public television to millions. Among the guests in Price’s box that night were her brother and his wife, Georgina, and her friend Peggy Chisholm, from Jones County, Mississippi.

In the week ahead of her performance Price told The New York Times that she was close to 58, and that about her age she could not care less. The writer describes her as being “turbaned and be-pearled, muffled in a turtleneck sweater and dramatically long tartan scarf . . . dewily luscious as a ripe peach.” “But at 58, I’ve got to steal some time for myself,” Leontyne Price said. “I’d like to give the woman in me a bit of attention.’’

Price’s conversation was described as a mélange of “French and Italian words and American slang.” The prima donna assoluta talked of taking on students. And of living her life. Ground zero in a musical dynasty of women who would literally change the face of American and global pop, Leontyne Price said, “I come from the stage, warmed in the light of center stage. This is the beginning of a virgin voyage. I want to know how to pass something on."