Caterina Jarboro

Catherine Yarborough was born on the twenty-fourth of July 1903 at Wilmington, North Carolina, the daughter of John Wesley Yarborough — a Wilmington carpenter of Cherokee-African American descent — and Elizabeth Harris Yarborough, a domestic worker. She was raised in the Black middle-class Black-Cherokee Wilmington of the Reconstruction period and educated at the Saint Thomas Catholic Convent School at Wilmington.

She ran away from Wilmington at thirteen in 1916 on the urgings of an aunt and made her way to Brooklyn, New York, where she completed her secondary education at the Saint Joseph’s Catholic High School at Brooklyn in 1921.

She took employment as a chorus singer in the Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle 1921 Broadway revue Shuffle Along — the first Black-written, Black-directed, Black-cast Broadway musical of the twentieth century — and as a chorus singer in the 1922 Sissle and Blake follow-up Runnin’ Wild.

She moved to Paris in 1926 on the savings of the Broadway chorus years and took private voice study under the soprano Marguerite Beriza, who Italianized the surname Yarborough to the stage name Caterina Jarboro.

She gave her European operatic debut at the Puccini Theatre at Milan on the twelfth of May 1930 in the title role of Verdi’s Aïda. She sang the role of Aïda over twenty times across the Italian provincial opera houses across the 1930 and 1931 seasons — at Bologna, Padua, Bari, Salerno and the Politeama Genovese of Genoa.

She returned to the United States in 1932 and was engaged by Alfredo Salmaggi at the Chicago Civic Opera Company for the role of Aïda at the Hippodrome at New York and the Chicago Auditorium Theatre of July 1933. The Hippodrome performance of the twenty-second of July 1933 was the first appearance of a Black singer in a leading operatic role with a major American opera company — twenty-two years before Marian Anderson (placed in this archive) at the Metropolitan Opera.

She sang the role of Selika in Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine at the Hippodrome in February 1934 and the role of Aïda at the Salzburg Music Festival in August 1934 under Bruno Walter — the first Black singer at the Festival.

She retired from the operatic career in 1955 and taught voice at the Manhattan School of Music from 1955 to 1981.

She died at Manhattan on the thirteenth of August 1986 of complications of cancer, at eighty-three.

She is honored here as the first Black singer in a leading role at a major American opera company.