Ruby Elzy

Ruby Pearl Elzy was born on the twentieth of February 1908 in Pontotoc, Mississippi. When she was five years old, her father, Charlie Elzy, abandoned the family, leaving her mother, Emma, to raise the children alone. Emma — a schoolteacher and a devout woman of the Methodist church — supported them by teaching at the Pontotoc Colored School, picking cotton, and taking in laundry. Ruby, who sang her first solo in church at the age of four, learned spirituals at the knee of a grandmother who had been born into slavery.

Her gift carried her out of poverty. In 1927, while a student at Rust College, she was overheard singing by Dr. C. C. McCracken of Ohio State University, who arranged her transfer there; she graduated with honors in 1930 and, on a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, went on to the Juilliard School, completing her studies in 1934.

On the thirtieth of September 1935, Ruby Elzy created the role of Serena at the world premiere of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, singing the searing lament "My Man's Gone Now." She would perform the part more than eight hundred times. Beyond the opera she appeared on film — as Dolly opposite Paul Robeson in The Emperor Jones (1933) and in Birth of the Blues (1941) — made her New York recital debut at Town Hall in 1937, and sang at the first Gershwin Memorial Concert at the Hollywood Bowl, broadcast worldwide by CBS radio.

Ruby Elzy died in Detroit on the twenty-sixth of June 1943, at only thirty-five, following surgery to remove a benign tumor, her long-hoped-for operatic career still ahead of her. From a Mississippi cotton town to the world's great stages, her voice lifted a people's song into the concert hall — and we honor her still.