Ruby Elzy

Ruby Elzy was born on the twentieth of February 1908 at Pontotoc, Mississippi, the daughter of Charles Elzy — a tenant farmer of the Pontotoc cotton-share economy who abandoned the family when Ruby was three — and Emma Pope Elzy, a domestic worker and singer of the Pontotoc Mount Olive Baptist Church choir. She was raised by her widowed mother in the Pontotoc rural Black household.

She was placed at six at the Pontotoc Coloured Schools and at fourteen entered the Rust College Preparatory School at Holly Springs, Mississippi — among the historically Black colleges of the Mississippi Hill Country — on a Methodist Episcopal Church South scholarship secured by her mother through the local AME pastor.

She was heard at sixteen in 1924 at a Rust College recital by Charles Stewart McCain — a Mississippi-born professor of music at the Ohio State University at Columbus — who arranged her transfer to Ohio State on a full scholarship for the bachelor’s in music. She completed the bachelor’s in music at Ohio State in 1930.

She took further study at the Juilliard School of Music from 1930 to 1934 under Lucia Dunham — the same teacher who supervised Anne Brown (placed in this archive) at Juilliard in overlapping years — and made her New York Town Hall debut on the fifteenth of January 1933.

She was cast in 1934 by George Gershwin in the role of Serena — the second-soprano lead — in the premiere production of Porgy and Bess. Serena’s My Man’s Gone Now of the second act was at the time of premiere and remains one of the principal lament arias of the twentieth-century American operatic repertoire, and Elzy sang it nightly through the original 1935 Broadway run, the 1936 national tour, and the 1937 Carnegie Hall concert performance under Alexander Smallens.

She sang the role of Bess at the Cheryl Crawford 1942 revival of Porgy and Bess on the alternating performances on which the principal soprano Etta Moten Barnett (placed in this archive) was off — among the first soprano-doubling assignments at a Broadway musical of the period.

She was scheduled in May 1943 to sing the title role of Aïda at the Chicago Civic Opera Company in the September 1943 season — having signed the contract — when she died unexpectedly at thirty-five.

She died at Detroit, Michigan on the twenty-sixth of June 1943 of complications of routine surgery for a benign fibroid tumor, at thirty-five.

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