Anne Brown - Early Life and Career (1912-1936)

Early Life and Career (1912-1936)

A native of Baltimore, Maryland, Annie Wiggins Brown was the daughter of Harry F. Brown, a physician, and his wife, the former Mary Allen Wiggins. Her father was the grandson of a slave and her mother's parents were of black, Cherokee Indian, and Scottish-Irish origins. She had three sisters. As a young child, Brown showed a great musical talent and according to family legend she could sing a perfect scale at just 9 months old. However, because she was an African-American she was not allowed to attend a Baltimore Catholic elementary school.

Brown trained at Morgan College and then applied to the Peabody Institute, but was rejected from the school due to her race. Brown then applied to the Juilliard School in New York at the encouragement of the wife of the owner of The Baltimore Sun. She was admitted to Juilliard when she was 16, becoming the first African-American vocalist to attend there. She was awarded Juilliard's Margaret McGill scholarship when she was 20 years old. At the age of nineteen she married a fellow Juilliard student, but the marriage soon ended in divorce.

In 1933, by this time a second-year graduate student at Juilliard, Brown learned that George Gershwin was going to compose an opera about African Americans in South Carolina. She decided to write him a letter which led to Gershwin's secretary calling her to come and sing for him. After singing several classical arias and the spiritual "A City Called Heaven" for Gershwin, Brown was frequently invited by the composer to come down and sing parts of the opera for him as he was composing the work's music. As a result, the role of Bess grew from a secondary character, like it was in DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy, to one of the opera's leading roles. Brown recalled that:

" would telephone and say, 'I've finished up to page 33 or so. Come down. I want you to sing it. When can you come down?' 'When I get out of school today,' I would say. I'd always start off singing "Summertime". I loved it so. Then I would sing whatever he had written since the last time I'd been there, whatever the roles might be -- sometimes I even sang Sportin' Life, sometimes we sang duets together. I knew that opera before I went onstage. Not only the songs. I wound up playing about 500 performances in the original and then the 1942 revival. I can tell you what every instrument played. Finally, in our last days of rehearsals in New York before heading up to Boston for previews, George took me to lunch. 'Come on,' he said, 'I'm going to buy you an orange juice.' Then, when we were seated, he made this announcement. I remember his words exactly because they thrilled me so. 'I want you to know, Miss Brown,' he said, 'that henceforth and forever after, George Gershwin's opera will be known as Porgy and Bess."

Brown took part of opera history when she sang Bess for Porgy and Bess's world premiere at the Colonial Theatre in Boston on September 30, 1935 - the try-out for a work intended initially for Broadway where the opening took place at the Alvin Theater in New York City on October 10, 1935. The production was directed by Rouben Mamoulian and ran on Broadway for 124 performances. Olin Downes in The New York Times praised Brown's performance as "a high point of interpretation." However, critical reaction to the work was conflicting; with reviewers uncertain as to whether or not Porgy was a folk opera, musical comedy, jazz drama, or something completely different. Others expressed concerns over the use of "negro stereotypes". Brown said, "My father was very displeased. He thought that those were the old cliches of black people -- dope peddlers, near-prostitutes; he especially didn't like his daughter showing her legs and all that. I thought that DuBose Heyward and Gershwin had simply taken a part of life in Catfish Row, South Carolina, and rendered it superbly."

Following the show's run on Broadway, a United States tour started on January 27, 1936 in Philadelphia and traveled to Pittsburgh and Chicago before ending in Washington, D.C. on March 21, 1936. During the Washington run, the cast—as led by Todd Duncan—protested segregation at the theater. Brown said of her role in the protest, "I told them: 'I will not sing at the National. If my mother, my father, my friends, if black people cannot come hear me sing, then count me out.' I remember Gershwin saying to me, 'You're not going to sing?' And I said to him, 'I can't sing!'." Eventually management gave in to the demands, resulting in the first integrated audience for a performance of any show at the National Theatre. When the curtain came down on the final performance of Porgy and Bess, segregation was reinstated.