Sissieretta Jones

Matilda Sissieretta Joyner was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, on the fifth of January 1868, the daughter of Jeremiah Joyner, a minister of an African Methodist Episcopal church, and Henrietta, who sang in the church choir. When she was about six years old, around 1874, the family removed to Providence, Rhode Island, where the child sang in her father's church and revealed a voice of uncommon richness and reach.

She trained at the Providence Academy of Music and afterward at the New England Conservatory in Boston, refining a soprano that would carry her far beyond the parlors of her youth. She made her New York debut in 1888, and in June 1892 she became the first Black artist to sing at New York's Music Hall — the auditorium renamed Carnegie Hall the following year. That same year she sang at the White House for President Benjamin Harrison, one of four presidents she would perform before.

Acclaim followed her across the United States, the Caribbean, South America, and Europe, where she appeared before crowned heads and was praised as one of the finest voices of her age. Billed, to her own distaste, as "the Black Patti" after the celebrated Adelina Patti, she preferred to be known simply as Madame Jones. From 1896 she headlined the touring company that bore that unwelcome name, commanding the stage for two decades as the most renowned and highly paid Black performer of her era.

When the tours ended she returned to Providence and lived quietly, tending her home and her church until her death from cancer on the twenty-fourth of June 1933. Though no recording of her voice survives, her triumphs opened doors that had been shut to Black artists, and her name endures as a herald of every dignity the concert stage later granted. May her song be honored, and her memory kept.