["Black Swan"] Greenfield, Elizabeth. (1824–1876)
1852 Utica Vocal Concert Playbill
Daily Gazette Office, Utica, NY: R. Forthway & Co., Printers. 1852. CONCERT HALL. / THE BLACK SWAN, Under the entire direction and management of Col. J. H. WOOD, late Proprietor of Wood's celebrated Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio, assisted by PROF. HOBSON, WILL GIVE A GRAND VOCAL CONCERT, At Concert Hall, Utica, on MONDAY EVENING, JANUARY 12, 1852. Original program for a recital by Elizabeth T. Greenfield "The Black Swan" in Utica, NY. 2 pp. Printed on fragile paper, a few nicks to edges and light creasing, but otherwise very well-preserved. No copies recorded by OCLC.Dubbed "The Black Swan", Elizabeth T. Greenfield was first in a lineage of African American women vocalists to earn national and international acclaim. Born a slave in Natchez, Mississippi, her owner relocated to Philadelphia, freed Greenfield, and paid for voice lessons for her. She made her professional singing debut in Buffalo, New York, in 1851, shortly after the highly publicized Jenny Lind tour. Mimicking Jenny Lind's sobriquet, the "Swedish Nightingale," a Buffalo reviewer dubbed Greenfield "the Black Swan," a name that remained for many years. As contemporary newspaper reviews reflect, critics attributed Greenfield's sell-out performances in upstate New York and Massachusetts to the novelty of an African-American opera singer and the area's support for abolition as much as to her singing abilities. Soon after her debut, she obtained a performance contract with Col. J.H. Woods, a white promoter who had operated a P.T. Barnum-style museum in Cincinnati. As an African American musician with slavery in her past, she sang what many Americans understood to be “white” music (opera arias, sentimental parlor song, ballads of British Isles, and hymns) from the stages graced by touring European prima donnas on other nights, with ability to sing in a low vocal range that some heard as more typical of men than women. In February 1852, the Oneida Herald, describing another concert in Utica, reported that the “mellifluousness and flexibility in her voice, blended with an electric something…which takes the heart captive and literally bewilders all the senses.” (10626)
Program, unsigned Song