Musician
In 1892, he began performing music professionally. Polk Miller and his "Old South Quartette" had a variety show of "Stories, Sketches and Songs" depicting African American life before the Civil War. Miller was white, and the four members of the quartet were black, only 2 of the 20 or so black singers that sang were ever identified James L. Stamper and Randall Graves. They gained national prominence, and toured between 1900 and 1912.
At one performance, Mark Twain introduced Polk Miller at Madison Square Garden. Although he did not perform in blackface, Polk sometimes billed himself as "The Old Virginia Plantation Negro" and performed Negro spirituals and pop and folk tunes such as James A. Bland's Carry Me Back to Old Virginny. Miller and his quartet played colleges and military schools, as well as the "most exclusive social clubs" in New York, Boston, Baltimore, Washington, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. Polk Miller and the Old South Quartette also performed at African American churches.
Polk Miller's and the Old South Quartette were featured on some of Thomas Edison's earlier phonograph recordings.
Read more about this topic: Polk Miller
Famous quotes containing the word musician:
“He doesn’t know a damn thing about China ... That’s what makes him an expert. He knows nothing about music, being tone deaf. That’s what makes him a musician ... And he’s batty in the head. That’s what makes him a philosopher.”
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
“The mastery of one’s phonemes may be compared to the violinist’s mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor’s renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies.”
—W.V. Quine (b. 1908)
“Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,
The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates
Of snails, musician of pears, principium
And lex. Sed quæritur: is this same wig
Of things, this nincompated pedagogue,
Preceptor to the sea?”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)