Cultural Uplift and Double-Consciousness: African American Responses to the 1935 Opera Porgy and Bess

Abstract

On 16 January 1936, a week before the closing of the initial Broadway run of Porgy and Bess, an article entitled “Negroes Are Critical of ‘Porgy and Bess’: Gershwin Opus Held Over at the Alvin Because of Popularity with Whites” appeared in the New York World-Telegram. The article concluded: As previously quoted, “No Negro could possibly be fooled by ‘Porgy and Bess.”’ Not Duke Ellington, who agrees that “the times are here to debunk Gershwin’s lampblack Negroisms.” Not Hall Johnson, who insists that George Gershwin has composed “an opera about Negroes rather than a Negro opera.” Not Ralph Matthews with his contemptuous “musical hybrid,” . . . ‘Porgy and Bess,’ it seems, was concocted for the white folks. Old Massa Garland adores it!1 “Old Massa Garland” was Robert Garland, the white playwright who, between 1928 and 1937, served as the chief drama critic for the New York World-Telegram. Garland, one of the more enthusiastic reviewers of Porgy and Bess, declared in his opening-night review that the opera was a “modern masterpiece” and “something significant in the American theater.”2 Like many first-night reviewers, Garland revisited Porgy and Bess for a more sustained discussion of its artistic merits and its importance to American theater, music, and creative culture. Unlike his white colleagues in the major daily newspapers, Garland devoted his second take not to his own thoughts but to reporting African American responses to the work. Alone among mainstream critics, he acquainted his readers with black opinions about Porgy and Bess by committing the lion’s share of his article to direct quotations from an interview with the jazz musician and composer Edward Duke Ellington, an extensive commentary by the playwright and choral director Hall Johnson, and the opening-night review by Ralph J. Matthews, the critic of Baltimore’s Afro-American. The thrust of Garland’s piece, summed up in the title and final quip, “concocted for the white folks,” was that African Americans were far less enthusiastic about the work than were the white audiences who attended the production.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.