The Passion and Pageantry of Shirley Graham’s Opera Tom-Tom

Abstract

Shirley Graham, prior to her 1951 marriage to W.E.B. Du Bois, had an extended career as a composer, playwright, and biographer. From the late 1920s she struggled as a single parent with two young boys, and did her best to disassemble the fact of her divorce to ensure her respectability. At the highlight of her career her opera Tom-Tom premiered at the Cleveland Opera Festival in the Summer of 1932. Ten thousand people attended the opening night performance. The opera was a sensation and critically acclaimed. The article offers a critical reading of the opera, and a sympathetic accounting of her struggle for autonomy, respectability, and a radical political and intellectual legacy.

Keywords:

• opera composer
• race woman
• struggle for respectability

Acknowledgments

I thank the Music Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz for inviting me to present an earlier version of this paper at a colloquium and for the helpful questions and discussion that followed. I am very grateful to the musicologist Sarah Schmalenberger who generously corresponded with me about her research on the opera, and for providing me with a CD of a private performance of the overture and some of the arias from the opera. My wife, Kate Miller, provided invaluable critical readings of the manuscript. Above all, I thank David Graham Du Bois (1925–2005) for his encouragement to pursue this research, the many details of his mother’s life with which he provided me, and his loving friendship.

Notes

Du Bois, Shirley Graham, 1896–1977, Papers (hereafter “SGD Papers”), 1865–1998 (inclusive), Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in American, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. MC 476 Box 23, Folder 23.1, Playbill from Tom-Tom by the Morgan College Choral and Dramatic Club, Written by Shirley Graham McCanns, directed by S. Randolph Edmonds, Friday 31, 1929 at the Douglass High School Auditorium. Please also see Kathy A. Perkins, “The Unknown Career of Shirley Graham,” Freedomways 25, no. 1 (1985). 6–17, and Alesia E. McFadden, “The Artistry and Activism of Shirley Graham Du Bois: A Twentieth Century African American Torchbearer” (Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 2009).

Sarah Schmalenberger, “Debuting Her Political Voice: The Lost Opera of Shirley Graham,” The Black Musical Journal 26, no. 1 (2006): 12.

Ibid., 15.

Ibid., 15.

Ibid., 16.

Ibid., 17.

Ibid., 18.

SGD Papers, Box 25, Folder 15.

SGD Papers, Box 25, Folder 15, “A New Negro Opera,” New York Times, June 19, 1932.

SGD Papers, Box 15, Folder 10.

SGD Papers, Box 25, Folder 15. Cleveland Press, June 28, 1932 and June 30, 1932.

SGD Papers, Box 25, Folder 16.

SGD Papers, Box 25, Folder 16.

SGD Papers, Box 23. Archie Bell, “Largest Throng of Week Cheers Rebuilt Tom-Tom … ” Cleveland News, July 10, 1932.

SGD Papers, Box 23, Folder 23.1, Herbert Elwell, Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 1, 1932.

SGD Papers, Box 23, Folder 23.1, Eleanor Greenwood, “An American Opera,” The Front Rank, vol. XXXVIII, no. 7, 25.

SGD Papers, Box 25, Folder 17, Amsterdam News, August 1, 1936.

In a personal conversation with me Shirley Graham Du Bois told me about her son’s death many years later. She told me he was taken to Bellevue Hospital in New York, but by then it was too late. She strongly believed that racism had prevented earlier and more timely, proper treatment of Robert.

I was at the Du Bois’s wedding in St. Albans, Queens, in June 1951. I was almost 7 and remember it vividly. This was the second, public ceremony after they had been hastily and privately married in February due to the pending indictment of Dr. Du Bois. See, Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 134.

David Graham Du Bois and I were close, life-long friends since my childhood. After years of separation, we were reunited by a mutual friend at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in spring 1990. Among our many conversations over the years David shared information with me about the opera. The score for Tom-Tom may also be found in the papers of Jules Bledsoe at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jules Bledsoe, 1898–1943, Papers, 1931–1939, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts and Archives, SC MG 255. This copy of the score contains penciled notations by both Bledsoe and Graham.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bettina Aptheker

Bettina Aptheker is a professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she has taught for 35 years. Her books include a memoir, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech and Became A Feminist Rebel (2006) and The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis (Second edition, 1999). She held a UC Presidential Co-Chair in Feminist Critical Race & Ethnic Studies (2012–2016). Her current research is on a “queer history of the Communist Left.”