Sissieretta Jones

Matilda Sissieretta Joyner was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, on the fifth of January 1868, the daughter of a Methodist minister. Her family moved to Providence, Rhode Island, in 1876. She studied voice at the Providence Academy of Music from 1883 and at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston from 1888.

She made her concert debut at Steinway Hall in New York in April 1888, and her career as an operatic soprano in the recital tradition followed across the next twenty-five years. She was called Black Patti — a comparison to the Italian-Spanish soprano Adelina Patti — by both Black and white press, a comparison Sissieretta Jones resisted on the grounds that she was the equal of any soprano of her generation under her own name.

She performed for four successive United States presidents — Benjamin Harrison (1892, the first Black artist to perform at the White House for an official state event), Grover Cleveland (1893), William McKinley (1898), and Theodore Roosevelt (1902).

She was the first Black artist of any musical discipline to perform at Carnegie Hall — at the Grand Negro Jubilee on the twenty-sixth of April 1892, eighteen months after Carnegie Hall's opening in 1891. She subsequently performed at the Royal Albert Hall in London (1894), the Royal Opera House (1894 and 1898), and across the major European concert circuit through the 1890s.

The American opera houses of her era refused to cast her as a stage soprano on racial grounds. She organized her own touring company — Black Patti's Troubadours — in 1896 and led it across the United States as the principal Black-led traveling musical production of the period (one hundred and fifty performers at peak) for nineteen years through 1915.

She retired in 1915 in financial difficulty after the death of her mother. She died in poverty at her Providence home on the twenty-fourth of June 1933, age sixty-five.

She is honored here as the soprano who was the first Black artist on the Carnegie Hall stage and on the White House platform.