Eva Jessye

Eva Jessye (January 20, 1895 — February 21, 1992) was an American conductor who was the first black woman to receive international distinction as a professional choral conductor. She is notable as a choral conductor during the Harlem Renaissance, who created her own choral group featured widely in performance. Her professional influence extended for decades through her teaching as well. Her accomplishments in this field were historic for any woman. She collaborated in productions of groundbreaking works, directing her choir and working with Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein on Four Saints in Three Acts (1933), and serving as musical director with George Gershwin on his innovative opera Porgy and Bess (1935).

Eva Jessye was born January 20, 1895 in Coffeyville, Kansas. She was educated at Western University), a historically black university in Kansas, and Langston University in Oklahoma. She later studied privately with Will Marion Cook in New York City.

In 1919 Jessye began work as the choir director at Morgan State College in Baltimore. She returned west for a time to teach at an AME Church school in Oklahoma. In 1926 she went back east to Baltimore, where she began to perform regularly with her group the "Eva Jessye Choir". She had first named them the "Original Dixie Jubilee Singers", but many groups began to appropriate the name Dixie Jubilee Singers, so she changed hers.

She and the group moved to New York, where they appeared frequently in the stage show at the Capitol Theatre, where Eugene Ormandy conducted the orchestra. They were also frequent performers on NBC and WOR radio in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. They recorded on Brunswick, Columbia, and Cameo records in the 1920s. In 1929 Jessye went to Hollywood as the choral director for the MGM film Hallelujah!, which had an all-black cast directed by King Vidor. She received praise from members of the black press when she spoke out against the discriminatory practices that she endured while on the set for this film.

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