Abbie Mitchell

Abbie Mitchell was born on the twenty-fifth of September 1884 at New York City, the daughter of a German-Jewish merchant of the Manhattan Lower East Side and an African American mother of Norfolk, Virginia, of whom no further record survives. She was sent at four to the household of an aunt at Baltimore on her mother’s death.

She was placed at twelve at the Baltimore branch of the Negro Music School and at fourteen returned to New York for further study at the Manhattan studios of Emilia Serrano and the Manhattan Music School.

She was cast at fourteen by the Black composer Will Marion Cook in the principal soprano role of the one-act opera Clorindy, or the Origin of the Cakewalk — premiered at the Casino Theatre Roof Garden on the third of July 1898. The opera was the first all-Black-cast musical work mounted on a Broadway-area stage, and Mitchell was at the time the youngest singer to head a Broadway-area cast.

She was married in 1900 to Will Marion Cook and they had two children, including the violinist Will Marion Cook Jr. and the actress Marion Cook.

She toured the European concert circuit with Cook’s Memphis Students orchestra from 1904 to 1908 — through London, Berlin, Paris, Saint Petersburg and Moscow — and was received at Buckingham Palace by King Edward VII in March 1906.

She took further study at the Conservatoire de Paris between 1908 and 1911 in lyric soprano on the recommendation of the violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, who had heard her at the Brussels concerts of 1907.

She was cast in 1935 by George Gershwin in the role of Clara — the soprano of the opening Summertime aria — in the premiere production of Porgy and Bess at the Alvin Theatre on the tenth of October 1935. She was at the time of casting fifty-one and the most experienced classically trained singer of the production’s Black cast.

She taught voice at the Tuskegee Institute from 1931 to 1934 and at the Manhattan School of Music from 1944 to 1954.

She died at New York on the sixteenth of March 1960 of complications of pneumonia, at seventy-five.

She is honored here as the original Clara of Porgy and Bess.