Robert McFerrin Sr.

Robert Keith McFerrin was born on the nineteenth of March 1921 at Marianna, Arkansas, the son of the Reverend Melvin McFerrin — a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church — and Mary McFerrin. The family relocated through his father’s pastoral postings from Arkansas to Memphis to Saint Louis across the first fifteen years of his life.

He was placed at fifteen at the Sumner High School at Saint Louis — the principal Black high school of the city — and at the Fisk University at Nashville for two years in 1939–1941. He transferred in 1941 to the Chicago Musical College on a Rosenwald Fellowship and completed the bachelor’s in music there in 1948 under George Graham. He took further graduate study at the Manhattan School of Music from 1948 to 1949 under Hans Heinz.

He was cast in 1949 by William Saroyan in the role of the Quaker fox-hunter in the off-Broadway revival of Saroyan’s My Heart’s in the Highlands at the Carnegie Hall Recital Hall and in 1950 by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson in the role of David in the original cast of Anderson’s Lost in the Stars at the Music Box Theatre.

He gave his New York Town Hall recital debut on the twenty-second of November 1953 and was signed on the strength of the recital by the Metropolitan Opera.

He debuted at the Metropolitan Opera on the twenty-seventh of January 1955 — twenty days after the Marian Anderson (placed in this archive) Met debut of the seventh of January 1955 — in the role of Amonasro in Verdi’s Aïda, opposite Zinka Milanov as Aïda. McFerrin was the first Black male singer to have a regular contract with the Metropolitan Opera.

He sang at the Met across the four seasons from 1955 to 1957 in the roles of Amonasro (Aïda), Rigoletto, Tonio (Pagliacci), and Valentin (Faust).

He dubbed the singing voice of the actor Sidney Poitier in the 1959 Otto Preminger Samuel Goldwyn Studios film Porgy and Bess as Porgy.

He suffered a stroke in 1989 that paralysed the right side of his face and substantially impaired his singing. He continued to teach voice at the Stowe Teachers College at Saint Louis through to 2002.

His son Bobby McFerrin (b. 1950) is the Grammy Award–winning vocal improviser.

He died at Saint Louis on the twenty-fourth of November 2006 of complications of a heart attack, at eighty-five.

He is honored here as the first Black male singer at the Metropolitan Opera.