Abbie Mitchell

Abbie Mitchell Cook
Background information
Birth name	Abriea "Abbie" Mitchell
Born	(1884-09-25)September 25, 1884 New York City, U.S.
Died	March 16, 1960(1960-03-16) (aged 75)

Abriea "Abbie" Mitchell Cook (25 September 1884 – 16 March 1960), also billed as Abbey Mitchell, was an American soprano opera singer. She was known for singing the role of "Clara" in the premier production of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess in 1935, and was also the first to record "Summertime" from that musical.

Mitchell was the mixed-race daughter of an African-American mother and a Jewish-German father from New York City's Lower East Side. She was reared by a maternal aunt, Alice Payne, in Baltimore, Maryland, where she attended a Catholic convent school.

After finishing her school education in Baltimore, Mitchell started studying voice in New York in 1897. The next year composer Will Marion Cook and lyricist Paul Laurence Dunbar cast her in their one-act musical comedy Clorindy: The Origin of the Cakewalk (1898). It was so successful that it ran for the whole season at the Casino Roof Garden. She married Cook a year later, and appeared in the lead role in his Jes Lak White Folks (1899). She also appeared in his production The Southerners (1904).

Cook and Mitchell had a daughter, Marion Abigail Cook, in 1900, and a son, Will Mercer Cook, in 1903. Their daughter, raised by family members as Mitchell had been, married dancer Louis Douglas. Their son became a professor at Howard University and a translator, and was later appointed as United States Ambassador to Niger and Senegal.

In London Mitchell premiered the principal role in the 1903 musical In Dahomey, produced by the team of George Walker and Bert Williams, with music composed by her husband Cook, book by J.A. Shipp, and lyrics by poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The cakewalk, considered old fashioned by the cast, was almost cut from the show, but proved popular with audiences. It became a fad in the United Kingdom. Mitchell received international acclaim for her performance, and was invited to appear at the company's command performance for King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra at Buckingham Palace.

Mitchell later performed with the "Black Patti's Troubadours", and in the operetta The Red Moon (1908) by Bob Cole and J. Rosamond Johnson. In 1913, she appeared in the film Lime Kiln Field Day with Bert Williams, which was produced by Klaw and Erlanger, but they never finished or released it. In 1919, Mitchell went to Europe with Cook's Southern Syncopated Orchestra. In New York, she appeared on the concert stage and in opera.

Mitchell was known for performing in the role of "Clara" in the premiere of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935); this was her last musical role on the stage. She was the first singer to record "Summertime" from the opera. After this, "she taught and coached many singers in New York and appeared in many 'spoken' dramatic roles on the stage." She performed in New York City and taught at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

Lee De Forest made a short film, Songs of Yesteryear (1922), of Mitchell singing, using his DeForest Phonofilm sound-on-film process. This film is preserved in the Maurice Zouary film collection at the Library of Congress.

Mitchell died in New York on 16 March 1960.

See also

• African American musical theater
• Rose McClendon
• Evelyn Ellis

References

• McGinty, Doris Evans, '"As Large As She Can Make It": The Role of Black Women Activists in Music, 1880–1945' in Locke, Ralph P., and Cyrilla Barr, editors, Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) (Footnote 33)
• Peterson, Bernard, Profiles of African American Stage Performers and Theatre People, 1816-1960 (Greenwood Press, 2000) p.187
• Paula Marie Seniors, "Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing": The Culture Of Uplift, Identity, and Culture in Black Musical Theater, 2009

External links

• Songs of Yesterday (1922), at Silent Era (with photo of Mitchell)
• Abbie Mitchell at IMDb
• 1922 passport photo of Abbie Mitchell,(courtesy of the puzzlemaster, flickr.com)
• another passport photo, with Elmer Certain