Mary Cardwell Dawson grew up in rural North Carolina and went on to found the National Negro Opera Company in Pittsburgh in 1941. A new play, starring Denyce Graves and performed by Opera Carolina in Charlotte last month, brought her life to the stage.
Next week, an original exhibition opens at the Charlotte Museum of History looking at Dawson’s achievements in the face of discrimination. It will also highlight other Black opera singers who have been overlooked in the past, and places outside of Europe where opera has thrived.
The National Negro Opera Company was the first commercially successful Black opera house in the country. A few others lasted for only a single production or a handful of runs before closing. But Dawson’s tenacity led to more than two decades of staged productions in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., and other cities. Her niece, Barbara Edwards Lee, who was also Dawson’s secretary, talked about her aunt’s legacy in a documentary produced by Pittsburgh PBS station WQED.
“Aunt Mary was delightful and she was quite the musician,” Lee said. “She could do it all. She was tough, a hard taskmaster — everybody would tell you that — but she got results. Her reputation was all over the country, you see. She left a love of good music and an appreciation of the arts as her legacy.”
WFAE’s Gwendolyn Glenn spoke to Charlotte Museum of History CEO Terri White about Dawson and the exhibition. White says until Dawson was about 7 years old, she lived just north of Greensboro in the small town of Madison. The family moved to Pittsburgh during the early years of the Great Migration, when large numbers of Black people left the Jim Crow South for better jobs and less segregation in northern cities.
All of Dawson’s family members sang in the church choir, which was when Dawson’s parents realized she had exceptional talent.
“They wanted her to have formal training, so they saved for years and years to send her off to Boston to study music at the New England Conservatory,” White said.
But opera companies wouldn’t hire African American performers — and so many talented Black musicians turned to teaching. White says Dawson turned down a teaching job in Georgia and instead earned money by giving private piano and voice lessons to students in Pittsburgh, where she was living.
White: In fact, the jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal studied under her, and it just goes to show how her influence spread across musical genres.
Glenn: Yes, I love his music. And my understanding is that he was a 7-year-old little boy when she was teaching him.
White: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah.
Glenn: And she was teaching piano lessons in this particular house that was known as the Mystery Manor, I understand.
White: Yes. It was in Pittsburgh and served as a place at a time when Black entertainers, athletes, etc., etc., weren't allowed to stay in the local hotels. They knew that they were welcome to stay at Mystery Manor. And it was so called because you just never knew who was going to be there or what was really going on in there.
Names like Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, Roberto Clemente, and just a list of who's who, stayed at the Mystery Manor. It is where Dawson auditioned members for the choir she formed in the late 1930s, which performed nationally, including at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. With that success under her belt, Dawson forged ahead with her mission to create opportunities for Black musicians by establishing the National Negro Opera Company — using many of the vocalists in her choir.
White: She took the vast majority of vocalists and musicians that worked with her choir and just formalized them into this opera company. The people who sang in this group would go on to be powerhouses in multiple musical genres, including opera, around the world.
The thing the company struggled with was funding. Throughout its 21-year reign, it was just a constant battle for fundraising and sponsors from the organizations that were already supporting institutions like the Met and other established opera companies.
Glenn: Because it was a Black opera company. And my understanding is that the first show she did in New York, financially, it was not a success, and many thought the company would fold. It didn’t. And about two years later, after founding the company in 1943, Dawson put together a big show in Washington, D.C., correct?
White: Yes. She eventually moved the operations of the company from Pittsburgh to D.C. because her husband moved to D.C. for a job. But while in D.C., she wasn't permitted to bring her company into any of the established theaters. And so, what she did is she outfitted barges with these massive, elaborate sets where the symphony was on them, there was a stage with a full production layout, and audiences would have their chairs and blankets on the shore of the Potomac, while this barge is floating. Unfortunately, it rained for days straight, so the first night they had to cancel. The second night they had to cancel, so it really took a big financial hit to the company that the weather just did not cooperate with them.
Glenn: Too, it was important to her that her audiences be integrated.
White: I think it's something she struggled with all the time because she would find theaters and they would say, ‘OK, you can come, but Negroes must be upstairs or Negroes aren't allowed to buy tickets.’ Even within her company, although it was majority Black, she had white musicians and a white music director and would bring in non-Black people. This was a way to show African Americans can compete and perform with all people in these high-art forms.
Glenn: The exhibit, "Open Wide the Door" looks at Dawson’s life, but also the contributions of other African American opera singers and musicians who have been overlooked.
White: This is something we, as a people, have always done. And we want to show in this exhibition that it's the people from rural North Carolina, nowhere Tennessee, the backwoods of Alabama, who went on to become these mega superstars.
We also go into just opera as a genre and how it is not just a European music form. We talk about Asian opera and African opera, and stuff like that.
But then beyond that, we go into the individual profiles of people who were in the company and people who, through today, have been influenced by this company — Robert McFerrin, Sr., whose son, Bobby McFerrin, Jr., is out there still making music to his day. We talk about Carol Brice, who went on to found an opera company of her own in Oklahoma, and people who are still carrying on the tradition of what Mary Cardwell Dawson started 80 years ago.
Glenn: In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Dawson to the National Music Committee. Dawson died a year later of a heart attack in 1962. She was 68 years old.
The exhibition "Open Wide the Door" at the Charlotte Museum of History opens March 26. It will be on display through Dec. 31.
