Early Life and Education
Eva Jessye was born January 20, 1895 in Lawrence, Kansas. She was educated at Western University (formerly Quindaro State), a historically black university in Kansas, and Langston University in Oklahoma. She later studied privately with Will Marion Cook in New York.
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.
In New York, Jessye worked with creative multi-racial teams in groundbreaking productions that experimented with form, music and stories. In 1933, she directed her choir in Virgil Thomson's and Gertrude Stein's opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, produced as a Broadway theatre work. In 1935, George Gershwin chose her as his music director for his opera Porgy and Bess.
In 1927 Jessye published My Spirituals, a collection of her arrangements of spirituals, together with stories about growing up in southeast Kansas.
Jessye also composed her own choral works:
- The Life of Christ in Negro Spirituals (1931);
- Paradise Lost and Regained (1934), a folk oratorio; and
- The Chronicle of Job (1936).
These combined spirituals, religious narrative or biblical text, and her orchestral compositions.
An active supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, Jessye and her choir participated in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Active into her 80s, she taught at the University of Michigan. She donated her extensive collection of books, scores, artwork, and other materials, which became the basis of the university's African American Music Collection. Dr. Jessye was a member of Sigma Gamma Rho sorority.
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