How Leontyne Price Beat the Odds
It took a lot more than the gene pool she shares with Dionne Warwick and Whitney Houston to turn the opera star into legend.
When Leontyne Price celebrated her 98th birthday on February 10th, my thoughts turned to her famous cousins Dione Warwick and Whitney Houston. But also to her humble upbringing in Mississippi, my old Atlanta schoolmate Gwenn Craig, and the cultural importance of the Ed Sullivan Show. This probably means I suffer from monkey mind. But in this case, all the monkey bars are connected.
Like most people who become celebrated icons, Leontyne Price didn’t start out that way. When she was born, no one imagined that she’d become an internationally renowned soprano. Nor could they have guessed that her debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera would make history twice. One, as the first African American to perform the leading role in Verdi’s Il Trovatore on that stage. And second, as the recipient of a 42-minute ovation, a record matched by no other performer before or since.
After all, she was just a poor Black child from segregated Mississippi—which holds the record for lynching more African Americans than any other state in the union. Between 1882 and 1968, there were 539 unlawful vigilante deaths in the so-called Hospitality State, easily surpassing Georgia, which comes in second, having lynched 492 Black people during the same period.
Fortunately, by the time Leontyne Price was born in 1927, the total number of lynchings across the country had dropped to a mere sixteen. But with racial segregation rigorously—and often brutally—enforced, Mississippi was hardly the most hospitable place for African Americans to live. Which is what makes her spectacular rise all the more incredible.
Wikipedia and other websites say her parents—a carpenter and a midwife—discovered Leontyne’s natural affinity for music while she was still a toddler. These sites mention that she had her first lessons with local pianist Helen McInnis at the age of three on a toy piano. And they tell how her parents eventually traded in the family’s phonograph to make a downpayment on an upright piano. And how a white family, the Chisholms, for whom her aunt worked as a laundress, encouraged her music, often inviting her to sing at house parties.
The genetics of music
In recent years, we’ve learned that Leontyne Price belongs to a family tree that includes Cissy Houston, Dione Warwick, Whitney Houston, and all the other members of that famously musical family.
Which raises the question—how does so much musical talent wind up in a single family when so many other households have none at all? Consider the family of Johann Sebastian Bach. Look at the Mozarts and the Jacksons. Or the Carters, the Pointers, and The Beach Boys. What’s up with that?
Well, recent genetic research may have the answer. Scientists have identified specific gene codes that may account for the presence of musical ability. One study from the National Institutes of Health points to three chromosomes responsible for singing, musical memory, pitch, and perception.
But another study goes even further, indicating that as much as 40% of musical talent is gene-based. High levels of a particular protein called UGT8, which is associated with Alzheimer’s Disease, may also be responsible for musical ability. That same study shows that Alzheimer’s patients have a tendency to retain their musical abilities after losing many other neurological functions.
Remember Tony Bennett’s last concert with Lady Gaga in 2021? At 95, he had full blown Alzheimer’s Disease, but as soon as the orchestra cued any music from his playbook, he remembered all the lyrics, performing each song from beginning to end.
But it takes more than genes
Clearly, there is a reasonable case to be made that it was innate genetic talent that made Leontyne Price a musician. But genes alone do not account for how she became a legend—defying all odds to become an international diva. Chalk that up to passion, hard work, and a Promethean moment when the flame of opera was ignited within her.
That happened when she was nine years old and took a school trip to Jackson, Mississippi, for a recital by Marian Anderson. The year was 1936, three years before Anderson’s historic concert at the Lincoln Memorial (after the Daughters of the American Revolution famously refused to allow her to sing at Constitution Hall). But Anderson was already well known, touring in Europe and across the United States, when Leontyne Price attended her performance in Jackson.
In the years that followed, she would say many times that Marian Anderson’s recital that day had a galvanizing impact on her life. She was deeply moved by the quality of the singer’s voice. But Anderson’s extraordinary dignity and the whole aura of the occasion also made an indelible impression. Enough to create a deep desire in the nine-year-old Price to develop her own innate (God-given) talent in hopes that she too might one day embody a similar nobility of spirit.
On that day in 1936, Marian Anderson demonstrated to the young Leontyne Price that her life need not be defined by those who would deny her humanity. She could rise to her full height, regardless of Jim Crow laws that said the ipso facto color of her skin made her worth less than white people.
It took years of hard work, discipline, and training before Price was able to take a master’s class offered by the legendary Paul Robeson at Antioch College. It was Robeson who organized a benefit concert to help her cover tuition costs at the Juilliard School of Music. But it was the Chisholms—the white family that employed her aunt as a laundress and had believed in her talent all along—who paid the bulk of her tuition.
The rest of her journey is storied and inspirational. But I like to think of that day in 1936 as the true beginning of her career. Because I feel that Anderson transmitted something ephemeral and also ethereal to Leontyne Price during that recital. A truth, an energy, and a meaning that calls to mind the music of the spheres.
Music of the spheres?
Not the album by Coldplay. But the ancient theory that there are natural harmonic tones produced by the movement of celestial spheres or the bodies fixed within them. Pythagoras and Aristotle believed in this theory and so did physicist Johannes Kepler, who called it Harmonia Mundi.
Although Kepler did not believe humans could hear it, teachers of meditation say that OM or AUM is a sonic representation of divine energy. Is that energy found in the music of the spheres? Does divine energy find its way into a human voice tuned to certain frequencies? Some folks say that music is a pathway into the spiritual realm known as the fourth dimension. That it takes the mind on a journey from finite consciousness into infinite consciousness.
In other words music has the power to communicate with the soul. And certain kinds of music—whether it be the music of the spheres, opera, or a popular song—remind us of who we really are. Maybe that’s why Schopenhauer (and also Walter Pater) once said all the arts aspire to the condition of music.
No doubt everyone at Marian Anderson’s recital that day in 1936 received something from her voice. As we all do when we attend any concert or listen to hymns at church. A little joy, a little uplift, a little inspiration. But maybe Leontyne Price got something extra—a kind of jump-start—because her genetic predisposition signaled to her that she really could achieve what Anderson had done. For herself and for humanity.
And humanity was in dire need that year
In 1936 fascism was on the rise all over the globe. Hitler invaded the Rhineland. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. The Spanish Civil War broke out. The Prime Minister of Greece initiated his dictatorship. Stalin began the massacres known as the Great Purge. And on top of all that, polio broke out.
But in Jackson, Mississippi, Marian Anderson lifted her voice in song, and nine-year-old Leontyne Price heard her. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Neither of these women led an army across Europe or brought tyrants like Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini to their knees. But their voices became beacons of dignity, providing encouragement and nourishment to the human spirit. No small thing. Since even a single candle makes a difference when the lights go out.
The Blue Album and my friend Gwenn
In 1961, when Leontyne Price released her first album—nicknamed the Blue Album because of its monochromatic color—an African American librarian in Atlanta, Georgia, bought a copy and took it home. His name was H. Eugene Craig, and his daughter Gwenn Craig was one of my schoolmates. Mr. Craig was an intellectually curious man, who loved music, books, and travel. Like most of our parents during that difficult time, he had a passion for civil rights and justice. And he understood that music held the power to elevate the soul.
Gwenn fell in love with that album and played it all the time. So imagine how she felt in 1967, when her father took her to see Leontyne Price in concert at Atlanta’s Municipal Auditorium. It was a special occasion on several counts.
Only a few years before, they could not have attended anything in that auditorium because of segregation. Now they could enjoy a recital by an African American soprano, as she performed a repertoire they already knew and loved. A recording of that Atlanta concert is currently posted on YouTube, where several commenters who were present that night say that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was also in the audience.
My friend Gwenn was particularly fond of an aria from Puccini’s La Rondine (The Swallow), known as “Chi il bel sogno di Doretta,” (Who can guess Doretta’s beautiful dream?). So Gwenn was disappointed that Ms. Price did not sing the aria during the concert. When the star was called back for an encore, she did not sing it then either. And when she chose a different song for her second encore, Mr. Craig said, “Come on, Gwenn, let’s go.”
As they prepared to leave, Leontyne Price returned to the stage for a third encore. And that’s when she finally sang Gwenn’s favorite piece. It’s a moment she remembers to this very day.1
A powerful dream
Although Puccini’s aria is about romantic love, it’s also about an unforgettable dream. Once upon a time, a nine-year-old girl in Jackson, Mississippi, dreamed she might one day become an operatic soprano. And her dream became reality. And the power of her dream continues to touch people the world over.
It’s worth remembering that her dream had its inception during a year that all hell was breaking loose on the planet. And yet she held onto it. She did the work. She paid her dues. She kept the faith.
And eventually Leontyne Price became a beacon transmitting a signal with each note, a signal that reminds us who we really are, and what it is possible to achieve. Perhaps her voice also transmits the invincible music of the spheres—a harmonic restatement of divine energy, the eternal spark of infinite love, access to a fourth dimension beyond space and time.
Ed Sullivan?
Surely this is what she conveyed in April of 1961, another year when all hell was breaking loose across the Deep South during the struggle for Civil Rights. That’s when I first became aware of her.
In the segregated, working-class home where I grew up, we didn’t listen to opera like Gwenn and her dad. But my mother was keenly aware that there was a much larger world than the one we were allowed to access. And our window into that world came on Sunday nights during the Ed Sullivan Show.
Along with the jugglers, ventriloquists, comedians, and rock-and-roll stars, Sullivan often included a cultural moment. A scene from a Broadway play. Van Cliburn’s Chopin. A Bolshoi pas de deux. A famous opera singer.
Whenever something like that happened, my mother shushed us, a signal that it was time to pay attention. There was something happening onscreen we should take notice of. And so, in April of 1961, that is how I became aware of Leontyne Price. To my surprise, she did not sing an aria in a foreign language. But a piece of music that seemed to speak to the troubled moment in which we found ourselves.
As she sang, we were reminded not to be afraid. That there is something higher. Something beyond temporal power. A transcendent energy, a truth, a meaning that is available to each of us at any moment.
If I were to write a thousand more words to describe what I mean, I would fail to reach that condition of music to which all the other arts aspire. Which is to say, it’s time for me to shut up and let you see and hear for yourself what we witnessed when my mother shushed us and we encountered that astonishing voice for the first time. Ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Leontyne Price…
©Andrew Jazprose Hill | All rights reserved.
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The person who made the YouTube copy stopped the recorder at the end of the concert but turned it back on in time for the encore with Gwenn’s favorite aria and Gershwin’s “Summertime.” It’s not a high quality recording because it was made by a someone in the audience, and there is a bit coughing in the background. But the copy provides a nice (if temporary) keepsake of a memorable event 58 years ago.
Thank you not only for this lovely tribute to an amazing woman but also to the link to her performance of the Lord's Prayer. Music really does touch the soul. As an aside, the aborigines of Australia could not understand how it was possible that the Europeans who came there could not hear the stars.
Thank you for this beautiful reminder of Leontyne Price’s greatness, but I’m especially grateful to you for telling the kind story of my dear mother Gwenn and grandfather H. Eugene Craig. Raised in the home of my grandfather throughout childhood and teen years, I too was well exposed to Leontyne and other great operatic voices. On weekends, my grandfather would let me pick a record from his vast catalogues of opera albums for me to listen to and him to sing along with (did you know he sang as well?). It’s why to this day I adore Rigoletto and Madame Butterfly, and why when I hear Leontyne sing, it brings tears to my eyes. As you so eloquently shared, she holds a very special place in our family’s hearts.