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SPOTLIGHT ON HISTORYSPOTLIGHT ON HISTORY
Black Professional Musicians before the Civil War
E
ven before the end of the Civil War brought
freedom to Southern slaves, free blacks in the
North had been fi nding niches in the Ameri-
can music business. One such musician, Francis
“Frank” Johnson (1792–1844), a Philadelphia-born
composer, bandleader, and performer on violin
and keyed bugle, found such success as a self-taught
leader of dance bands and concert ensembles that
in 1837–38 he traveled to London, where he received
from Queen Victoria a silver bugle in appreciation
of his musical gifts. According to one Philadelphia
observer, Johnson had “a remarkable taste in dis-
torting a sentimental, simple, and beautiful song,
into a reel, jig, or country-dance”; perhaps the “dis-
tortion” involved rhythmic complexities derived
from the musicians’ African heritage.
Another niche where a few black entertainers
found work was the musical stage. William Henry
“Juba” Lane became a full-fl edged star as a dancer
and tambourine player. Born around 1825, possi-
bly in New York, Lane won fame as a teenager when
English novelist Charles Dickens, then touring the
United States, saw him perform in 1842 and called
him “the greatest dancer known.” Like Johnson
before him, Lane toured England, where in 1849
his performances wowed critics, one of them won-
dering how Juba could “tie his legs into such knots,
and fl ing them about so recklessly, or make his feet
twinkle until you lose sight of them altogether in his
energ y.”
A few African American musicians also began
to appear on the concert stage, most notably Eliza-
beth Taylor Greenfi eld, also known as “The Black
Swan.” Born a slave in Natchez, Mississippi, around
1824, she was taken as a young child to Philadelphia,
where she grew up free in a Quaker household. She
received singing lessons as a girl and learned to play
harp, piano, and guitar on her own. But it was her
voice that caught listeners’ attention: an instrument
of wide range and unusual sound. In 1851 she settled
in Buffalo, New York, where she made her concert
debut. After touring in the northern United States
and Canada, she traveled to England in the spring
of 1853 for further study. Harriet Beecher Stowe,
whose novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been publishedthe previous year and who was visiting England to
promote the abolition of slavery, described a salon
performance by “The Black Swan”:Miss Greenfi eld’s turn for singing now came, and
there was profound attention. Her voice, with its
keen, searching fi re, its penetrating, vibrant qual-
ity, its timbre as the French have it, cut its way like
a Damascus blade to the heart. She sang the bal-
lad “Old Folks at Home,” giving one verse in the
soprano, and another in the tenor voice. As she
stood partially concealed by the piano, Chevalier
Brunsen thought that the tenor part was performed
by one of the gentlemen. He was perfectly aston-
ished when he discovered that it was by her. This
was rapturously encored.Stowe helped introduce Greenfi eld to socially
prominent British patrons, and in 1854 Greenfi eld
sang for Queen Victoria.
Returning to the United States, Greenfi eld con-
tinued a musical career that included concertizing,
teaching in Philadelphia, and staging programs in
the 1860s with an opera troupe. As the fi rst black
American concert singer to win acclaim on both
sides of the Atlantic, Greenfi eld was able to parlay
her English training and public experience into
something of an American career as a vocal star.K Elizabeth
Ta y l o r G r e e n fi e l d
(18 24 ?–18 76), e x- s l a v e
and concert singer,
on the eve of her
departure for Europe.172028_04_086-105_r2_vs.indd 95 23/01/13 10:07 AM