Abstract
African American soprano Sissieretta Jones (1868–1933) first appears in Tyehimba Jess’s poetry collection Olio (2016) through a cheeky introduction that critiques the United States’ racist entertainment industry: “They dubbed her ‘Black Patti’. We thrall her Miss Jones…the first Black Diva to croon in Carnegie” (2). “They” highlights the entertainment industry’s racist identification of Jones in relation to Italian opera singer Adelina Patti, while “We” amplifies those who respect her individuality. Jones begins her first “imagined testimony” (Rutter 2015, 58–59), reflecting on this power of naming: “Once word got out about the way I sing, the world wanted to bleed all the sass out my name” (Jess 2016, 156). “They”, or, “the world”, sought to “bleed” all of Jones’s individuality by shaping her celebrity status in relation to a European counterpart. This chapter argues that throughout Olio, Jones’s imagined testimonies speak back to the entertainment industry that denies her individuality through language underpinned with racism. Through analyzing how Olio represents Jones’s material conditions as an African-American woman singer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this chapter participates in widening the Eurocentric frame of primary texts that Word and Music Studies scholars are exploring.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Maureen D. Lee explains that “no birth certificate has yet been found to verify Matilda Sissieretta Joyner’s birth date. Various sources give different dates for her birth”, providing various texts, including her death certificate, the 1880 federal census, 1905 Rhode Island Census, and an 1896 interview with Jones that said 1869 (256). Jones (1868/9?–1933) was born in Portsmouth, Virginia. Her father was an African Methodist Episcopal Minister and her mother was a washerwoman and a church choir member. Their family moved to Providence, Rhode Island, for her father’s minister career.
- 2.
Jones first performed at the White House in February 1892 for President Benjamin Harris, and returned for Presidents Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt. She performed for the British Royal Family in London, as well as Paris, Berlin, Milan, Munich, St. Petersburg, the Caribbean, South America, Australia, India, and Southern Africa (Lee 2013, 9).
- 3.
According to Lee, Adelina Patti (1843–1919) “was a white Spanish-born opera singer” considered “the most famous soprano of the last half of the nineteenth century” (Lee 2013, 12).
- 4.
In her article “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”, the term intersectionality highlights institutional failures in focusing on and legitimizing experiences of marginalized identities in legal discourse. She draws a direct connection between legal discourse’s failure and “contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses” that fail to “consider intersectional identities such as women of color” (Crenshaw 1991, 1242).
- 5.
According to Lee, “There were at least three African American companies traveling around the country with this kind of show. For example, in the fall of 1895, white manager John W. Isham established the Octoroons company, which performed a three-part show. It began with a one-act farce with song and dance, followed by several vaudeville specialty acts, and finished with ‘Thirty Minutes around the Operas’. It also included a female chorus and gave leading parts in the show to women. This show was so successful that Isham formed another show in 1896 called Oriental America, which was like the Octoroons but ended with ‘Forty Minutes of Grand and Comic Opera’. What the Black Patti Troubadours had that these shows did not was Black Patti—a well-known star whose name and reputation would draw large audiences and ensure the success of Voelckel and Nolan’s venture” (Lee 2013, 97–98).
- 6.
Jones’s Black Patti’s Troubadours performances first included three segments, reflecting traditional minstrel shows, called “At Jolly ‘Coon-ey’ Island”, “Songs and Those Who Sang Them”, and “Vaudeville Olio Performers”. The fourth section “The Operatic Kaleidoscope” was the only segment in which Jones performed; this segment included classical music in contrast to the traditional minstrel songs in the first three segments. Specifically, Mascagni’s “Ave Maria” was the first song in the segment, sung by the chorus. The first song listed in the program that Jones would perform solo is Verdi’s Il Trovatore and La Traviata (Lee 2013, 111).
Works Cited
André, Naomi. 2018. Black opera: History, power, engagement. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1244.
Jess, Tyehimba. 2016. Olio. Seattle: Wave Books.
Lee, Maureen D. 2013. Sissieretta Jones: “The greatest singer of her race,” 1868–1933. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Rutter, Emily R. 2015. ‘The story usually being’: Revising the posthumous legacy of Huddie Ledbetter in Tyehimba Jess’s leadbelly. South Atlantic Review 77 (1–2): 58–59.
Southern, Eileen. 1983. The music of Black Americans: A history. New York: Norton.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Reznik, A. (2021). “The World Wanted to Bleed All the Sass Out My Name”: Interrogating the Popularity of Words and Music in Tyehimba Jess’s Olio. In: Gurke, T., Winnett, S. (eds) Words, Music, and the Popular. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85543-7_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85543-7_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-85542-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-85543-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)