When African American artists began to appear on European stages in the late nineteenth century, concert promoters used their race as a selling point. Sissieretta Jones may have claimed that in Europe no one cared about the color of her skin, but when she came to Berlin in 1895 she was billed as “the Black Patti,” after the popular Italian diva Adelina Patti. Thurman discovers that a singer named Jenny Bishop was using the same nickname in Berlin at the time, a source of amusement for the local press. “They both appear to be right,” one journalist wrote, “because the one is as Black as the other, and the one sings [as] beautifully as the other.”
Part of what these artists were selling was their story. Thurman quotes a profile of Jones in a Berlin newspaper that explained how a “simple Negro maiden” was discovered by Thomas Edison, recorded on his newly invented wax cylinder, and then taken under the wing of First Lady Frances Cleveland, who hired a music teacher for her and arranged for her debut concert in the White House.
Thurman describes this account as “wildly fabricated and sensational.” In fact, Jones, who was raised in Providence, Rhode Island, was trained at the New England Conservatory of Music. But if it tells us nothing of value about the singer, it’s quite informative about German expectations and fantasies. Thurman dwells particularly on the detail that Mrs. Cleveland challenged Jones’s music teacher to see if proper training could “overcome the unpleasant, strange, and unmelodic guttural sound” of her speaking voice. Here was a perfect colonialist fable of European culture overcoming African nature.
German critics implicitly affirmed that binary when they insisted, intending it as a compliment, that Jones wasn’t really Black. “The only thing ‘Black’ about her is the beautiful shining hair,” one reviewer said, while another protested that the “adjective ‘Black’ seems to us unnecessarily impolite.” To insist on the singer’s race would be to suggest that she hadn’t transcended it, as any Black person would have to do in order to participate in German musical culture. German audiences were also simply unfamiliar with how African Americans looked and often expressed surprise at how the category “Black” was defined. “A twist: Miss Jenny Bishop actually has a chocolate-brown coloring, and the epithet ‘Black Patti’ is therefore out of place,” one critic wrote about Jones’s rival.