“A Woman Is a Sometime Thing”: - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

“A Woman Is a Sometime Thing”:
(Re)Covering Black Womanhood
in Porgy and Bess

Daphne A. Brooks

This essay reexamines the legendary opera-musical Porgy and Bess by first tending
to its origins in the dual phenomenon of early 1920s racialized sonic experimen-
tation and the Southern literary conceits of DuBose Heyward, author of the 1925
novel Porgy on which the theater production was based. It traces the ways in which
Heyward and George Gershwin’s undertheorized fascination with “the vice of Black
womanhood” effectively shaped the form and the content of a work often referred to
as “America’s most famous opera,” and it ultimately considers the ways that Black
women artists navigated, complicated, and transformed the charged aesthetics of a
Porgy and Bess. Their performance labor ultimately subverts an archetype whose
novel roots threatened to circumscribe their representational and artistic possibility.

W e are being teased, abruptly invited to linger for no more than a mo-

ment in the billowy flutter of a flirtatious trill. So we begin in the regis-
ter of both seduction and weariness, a clarinet glissando synonymous
with the languor and steaminess of precoital mating calls, of postcoital exhaus-
tion and other bedroom rituals moves swiftly out the window of cramped tene-
ment housing into the bustling streets below where European immigrant hustle
meets the grandeur of metropolitan possibility framed by “colorline” encounters,
charged interracial socialites, and the dizzying opportunity to make art and com-
merce out of this noisy urban “experiment.”

Perhaps Leonard Bernstein’s 1959 version of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue
is closer to being “a sonic manifestation of the American Dream”1 than the original
performance was, but Gershwin famously participated in this kind of mythmaking
dall'inizio: questo è, from 1924, when orchestra leader Paul Whiteman premiered
the work at New York City’s Aeolian Hall. It’s the rhythms of a locomotive, Ger-
shwin would insist years later, that shook something loose in him while traveling
from New York to Boston, sparking in him a vision of “a definite plot of the piece . . .
a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America,” a symphonic rendering of a “vast melt-
ing pot, our unduplicated national pep, or of blues, our metropolitan madness.”2

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Only mildly implicit here is the suggestion that the shtetl and the ghetto, so
to speak, would have to mix it up in this piece in order to capture this “modern”
moment like lightning in a bottle. Son of Russian immigrants George Gershwin’s
remarks attest to this, just as early jazz history’s well-known tales of racial prox-
imities, cultural expropriations, “black skin and white noise” forever remind us.
But it’s that opening phrase, that glissando, a citational gesture that swift-
ly threads together New Orleans woodwind lyricism with klezmer ascent, Quello
holds my attention, fascinates and frustrates me, and is the key to understanding
something deeply submerged yet central to what would become the most influen-
tial, most well-known, most lasting, lauded, beloved yet persistently controver-
sial, and also loathed work in the Gershwin archive, IL 1935 “folk opera” Porgy
and Bess.

Quello 1924 Gershwin sound is, to me, everything: the synecdoche to the secret
history of Black womanhood and sonic modernity that yet still receives scant
mention in Gershwin studies and in studies of cultural modernisms more broadly.
That sound is to me the place where literary critic Michael North’s classic claims
about white “linguistic rebellion through racial ventriloquism” meet up with Af-
rican American literature scholar Farah Griffin’s equally landmark observations
about the “spectacle” of sonic Black women as the hinge by which a nation comes
to define itself as resuscitated and renewed, as resilient, shiny, and new. It is the
sound of a racially and gendered idea about jazz, about America’s “modern” mu-
sic that white male composers, conductors, and critics would cook up together in
tux and tails, deep in the heart of the 1920s concert hall, a place where they could
sublimate all sorts of complicated impulses, ideologies, and desires in putative
pursuit of their own self-aggrandizing innovation.3

This musical moment is where everything jumps off, where the “dialect of
modernism” (pace North) diverges to such an extent that we are hearing neither
pure mimicry nor excessively aestheticized, Steinish racial masquerade but rather
a staged encounter between the composer and the racially feminized personifi-
cation of this music whose name bears the markings of sexual derisiveness (“jis”
becomes “jazz”) conjured up by outsiders.4 This is the launching pad where the
women of the so-called slum, the sisters who cut an “errant path” through the city
as Saidiya Hartman has so beautifully shown us, those sisters who remain “ab-
stracted dark forms” in the archive that is also the white cultural imaginary, take
shape as sonic allegory and come aurally into view in this orchestrated Rhapsody.5
This is the moment, Poi, when George Gershwin and Charleston, South Caroli-
na, novelist DuBose Heyward would begin to call out to each other through and
across the figure of Black womanhood in their work for the next eleven years.

What’s new to some ears strikes my own as something more nagging, a mu-
sical figuration of Blackness and womanhood subtending this sonic rapture, UN
kind of wretched enchantment inasmuch as it signals the sound of 1920s white

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150 (1) Winter 2021Daphne A. Brooks

musicians’ racialized and gendered approaches to jazz as a self-indulgent exer-
cise in “conquest and discipline.” Think of esteemed music critic Walter Dam-
rosch’s infamous line in the program notes to Gershwin’s 1925 Concerto in F (Quale
I thank my friend and colleague Brian Kane for sharing with me) that traffics in
white patriarchal clichés, the intent to “make a lady out of jazz.” Or consider crit-
ic Deems Taylor’s review in the immediate wake of the Rhapsody concert in which
he mused that “Mr. Gershwin will bear watching . . . he may yet bring jazz out of
the kitchen.”6

Yet the “kitchen,” as we know, “was the field and the brothel,” thus making it
ever more clear that if jazz “is a woman,” as many a musician (from Whiteman
to Ellington) would suggest across the 1920s, 1930S, 1940S, and 1950s, if jazz was
either a “hot thing” to be “tamed” or provincial servant awaiting her Pygmalion-
esque calibration and transformation, if this was the undercurrent of “modern
music” ideologies framing the conditions of Gershwin’s rise among the ranks
of popular composers, then it stands to reason that one could draw a parallel be-
tween what he was up to in his “rapturous” transduction of ideas about gendered
Blackness with that of DuBose Heyward’s oft-overlooked yet egregiously disturb-
ing figuration of Black womanhood in his 1925 novel Porgy.7

Though I begin with these imaginings conjured up by this cadre of white male
artists, the renderings of and references to Black women and Black female iconic-
ity often with, early on, nary a Black woman thinker of any sort in the room with
them, the larger context of my essay would have to include the recentering of the
avant-garde practices of Black women culture workers–vocalists, musicians, ac-
tori, playwrights, and arrangers–who not only managed but who also, for some
eighty-five years now, actively adapted, translated, and rearranged an archive of
concatenate cultural works: Porgy the novel (written by Heyward in 1925), Porgy
the play (cowritten by Heyward and his dramatist wife Dorothy in 1927), and the
opera that Gershwin, lyricist brother Ira, as well as Heyward would bring to the
Broadway stage in 1935.8

What other work comes to mind that presents a series of affective and aesthet-
ic claims about Black womanhood and manifests itself across literary, dramatic,
and musical forms and has so persistently captured the cultural imagination on so
vast a global scale and for such a long-lasting period of time? Perhaps there will
come a day when Toni Morrison’s prodigious meditation on the afterlives of slav-
ery will rightly assume this title.9 But for now, we are left with Porgy and Bess, an
opera that once was a novel, and continues to spin out a mythical novel of its own.
Oh yes, Porgy and Bess. To be sure, Black folks have been wrestling with the
musical-theater-meets-operatic whale since the show’s 1935 debut: celebrating
it as J. Rosamond Johnson (James Weldon Johnson’s bro) did when he called it
“a monument to the cultural aims of the Negro” (he also had a small part in the
show); chastising it as Duke Ellington did when he infamously declared that “The

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences“A Woman Is a Sometime Thing”

times are here to debunk Gershwin’s lampblack Negroisms”; or trying to reject it
altogether, as did Sidney Poitier unsuccessfully when the role of Porgy was offered
to him in the ill-fated 1959 Otto Preminger train wreck film adaptation.10

As music scholar Gwynne Kuhner Brown points out in her fine work on the
collaborative history of Porgy and Bess, this is a show that African American per-
formers “have . . . engaged . . . from the beginning: helping to create and shape it in
a variety of ways, taking roles or refusing them, and deepening” our “understand-
ing of its various meanings through analysis, criticism and commentary.”11 The
grooves in the archival record reveal the extent to which Black actors and vocalists
return again and again to Porgy and Bess: a grandly ambitious symphonic experi-
ment in both racial mimicry as well as interracial encounter, a dual dynamic that
begs for active forms of critical listening.

From its earliest performances when the libretto was riddled with the
“N-bomb” to its most recent and “controversial” 2012 revival as musical theater
on the Great White Way, Porgy and Bess is a show that continues to both trouble
and encapsulate American culture’s canonical tales of racial aesthetic power and
appropriation to such an extent that post–civil rights era Black casts and, much
more often than not, their white directors have had to negotiate its terms like a
theatrical SALT treaty.12

Which begs the question: why bother? And more to the point, what specifical-
ly does this text offer Black women performers who played the legendary role of
Bess and transformed that character’s sonic repertoire into an alluring, abstract
riddle, a sociopolitical, cultural, historical, and aesthetic problem as well as an
opportunity? If, as opera critic Burton Fisher argues, the “composer of opera or
‘music drama,’ becomes the ‘dramatist’ and ‘narrator’ of the story through the
music,” then it should be ever so clear that these women were counter-composers
as well as arrangers, artists who have remained committed to “disobeying” the
constrictions of the “script” handed to them, yet nearly never in theater histories
of Porgy and Bess referred to as such.13

As adapters, translators, and arrangers in their own right, these were artists
who interpolated their own interpretative vision into a work that asked both ev-
erything and nothing of them aesthetically, that required them to dwell in the vi-
olence of plantation time while drawing on the virtuosity and risk of a sonic cos-
mopolite. They were artists who employed a whole range of performance strate-
gies that subtly and yet consistently turned the Porgy and Bess archive of content
and multigeneric forms into their own objects of inquiry, thus enabling them, In
turn, to produce their own rhapsodic proclamations of the “new” and to, likewise,
announce a patent refusal to sustain the “regime of brutality so normalized” with-
in the Gershwin and Heyward repertoire. It was their sound and aesthetic fury
(like that which Dilsey most surely suppressed) that shook the archive that two
men were building brick-by-brick in that pivotal year of 1924.14

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150 (1) Winter 2021Daphne A. Brooks

S he first appears as detritus in the literary landscape that DuBose Heyward

dreamed up for her as he wrote his debut novel in a feverish rush, deep into
that summer of 1924.

Through the early night a woman had lain in the dust against the outer wall of Maria’s
cook-shop. She was extremely drunk and unpleasant to look upon. Exactly when she
had dropped or been dropped there, no one knew. Porgy had not seen her when he had
driven in [in his “goat cart”] at sunset. But he had heard some talk of her among those
who had entered later. One of the men had come in laughing.
“I seen Crown’s Bess outside,” he said. “Must be she come aroun’ tuh look fur um . . . .”15

Casual racial misogyny is endogenous to Heyward’s homegrown literary aes-
thetics. It shapes his strategy of characterization, operates as the engine of his
plot, and fuels the suspense framing his narrative involving a junky “strumpet” (COME
some critics would refer to her) and the ill-fated love triangle in which she finds
herself, bound on the one hand to Crown, a “brute” “monstrosity” of menacing
Black manhood, and on the other to the so-called “crippled beggar” Porgy. IL
latter was a figure for whom Heyward and his wife Dorothy took equal pride in
citing as having been inspired by disabled local African American Charleston res-
ident Samuel Smalls (whose family would for decades seek from the Heywards–
unsuccessfully, I might add–financial compensation for the use and distortion of
Smalls’s image). As is the case in the stage versions that would follow, the fleeting
rehabilitation of Bess as a result of her intimacy with Porgy, the moral economy
of the grace he bestows on her shifts the affective mood of the text from graphic
sociological tragedy to dime-story romance. The woman who was once “gaunt”
is “rounded out, “bringing back a look of youthful comeliness . . . her face,” we are
told, “was losing its hunted expression.”16

Heyward, the grandson of Charleston planter-class parents whose familial vi-
cissitudes hit rock-bottom following the “War of Northern Aggression,” would
claim throughout the course of his literary career that the financial precarity
framing his postbellum childhood combined with his own community’s region-
al proximity to vibrant and populous Black life in Charleston–Gullah life that
he and his mother Janie had watched with intent and great interest–thereby in-
stilled in him a supposed local color authority and credibility to invent and narra-
tivize the fictional “Catfish Row,” the setting for Porgy and Bess and a place that he
and the city’s increasingly booming tourist industry would unite in claiming was
based on an actual neighborhood: what became known as “Cabbage Row.”17

As historian Ellen Noonan makes clear in her marvelous and exhaustive study
of Charleston, Porgy and Bess, and long civil rights history, by 1922, the location that
was Cabbage Row “had been ‘vacant for some time,’” due, in parte, “to a petition,"
she speculates, that had been “brought to the Charleston City Council” that year
“by indignant neighbors . . . who demanded the immediate eviction of all of the Af-

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences“A Woman Is a Sometime Thing”

rican American tenants there.” White Charlestonians claimed that Cabbage Row’s
inhabitants were, according to Noonan’s account of the petition, “involved in a
range of illegal and unsavory activities, ‘including the prostitution of black women
to white sailors and civilians, knife and gun fights, deplorable sanitary conditions,
and the continual usage of ‘the most vile, filthy, and offensive language.’”18

It was a site that would become the grist for Heyward’s runaway literary am-
bitions first nurtured in the Poetry Society of South Carolina, which he cofound-
ed in 1920 with Ohio transplant and obsessive low-country Gullah culture am-
ateur ethnographer John Bennett. That group staked its identity on contrasting
itself with other all-white literary enclaves in the South who were galvanized to
respond to H. l. Mencken’s infamous 1917 throw-the-gauntlet-down excoriation
of Southern artistic life (in his essay “The Sahara of the Bozart”), and who “em-
braced a nostalgia for a time long gone,” as Heyward biographer James Hutchis-
son points out in his study of the author.19

Unlike, for instance, the New Orleanian group whose members included so-
called adopted Creoles like “Faulkner, Dos Passos, William Spratling, and Roark
Bradford,” who wholly embraced the postwar modernist experimental winds
blowing their way as the 1920s unfolded, the Charlestonians pushed back on
Mencken’s criticisms of the South as “a vast plain of [aesthetic] mediocrity, stu-
pidity, and lethargy.”20 They doubled-down on an inward-looking preservation
of local lore as well as what was in their minds an emphasis on the “artistic mis-
sion” of “representing southern black life,” as Hutchisson refers to it. Many of the
group’s members were white women, painters and poets who gravitated to Gul-
lah tales and portraiture that they cultivated and shared among themselves. Such
rituals would have been very much familiar to Heyward, who grew up admiring
the started-from-the-bottom-now-we’re-here successes of mother Janie DuBose
Heyward, a widow who kept the household afloat by turning herself into an in-
demand, local, “darky recitalist” and author of several blackface song and sketch-
books in the 1910s and 1920s.21

Note that Junior Heyward shared with his mother and the majority of his fel-
low white Charleston brethren a deep and abiding resentment toward Black so-
cial and cultural autonomy and self-making masked as a familiar desire for “sim-
pler times.” Like his Mama, as Noonan reveals, “Heyward’s authentic South was
unhurried, earthy, and perfectly symbolized by its resilient and forgiving black
workers. His poetic antimodernism,” she argues, “had a nonfiction counterpart
in the [1930] manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, a collection of essays” featuring South-
ern writers “who dubbed themselves ‘Agrarians’” and “argued that industrial de-
velopment fostered a culture of consumption that undermined small-town, rural
southern values.”22

Somewhere in that place between a celebrity minstrel mom and the busy liter-
ary conceits of a group dually invested in an unreconstructed South and the pres-

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150 (1) Winter 2021Daphne A. Brooks

ervation of their own parasitic ideas about local “blackness,” Heyward was de-
veloping a style of writing that trafficked in the white writer racial dialect craze
that would flourish particularly between 1922 E 1927 on the transatlantic scene.
And while his brand of literary primitivism does not garner substantial attention
from critics the way say a Stein, a Pound, or an Eliot does–for any number of rea-
sons but largely as a result of what Heyward’s poetry and prose lack in terms of
originality and invention (called “florid” by more than a few scholars, DuBose
Heyward’s poems and fiction were cringe-worthy for reasons that went well be-
yond its racial macro- and microaggressions)–my interest in his work lies at the
level of what we might think of as his adaptive technique and aesthetic transla-
tion skills that seem to run parallel to Gershwin’s creative energies and impulses
during what would turn out to be the same period of time.23

As Heyward would gradually distance himself from Bennett’s leadership in the
Poetry Society, as he would look to seize upon “the prospect of artistic liberation
and a plumbing of his social conscience with the unfettered spirit he had glimpsed
among the Gullahs,” as he would “grow,” as he put it, “to see the primitive Negro
as neither a professional comedian, nor an object for sentimental charity, but a
racially self-conscious human being, living out his destiny beside us, and guided
by a code,” he set to writing a novel that could, in parte, follow the path set by his
mother, a racial ventriloquist and racial fetishist who gravitated to mimicking and
reifying the sounds of “black womanhood,” first in print and then perhaps on re-
cord (there is indication in the archive that she may have attempted to take her act
to the Victor label).24 From Janie Heyward’s nameless Sea Island seafood peddlers
(to which she composed odes in her pamphlets), Poi, to the mythical drug ad-
dicted heroine at the center of her son’s lifelong lucrative artistic passion project,
the figure of “black womanhood” emerges as adaptive grist, the ghost in the ma-
chine of what would ultimately become a particular white modernist turn toward
innovations in sound and performance.25

And crucial to that turn, the one that Heyward and the Gershwins would even-
tually make once they set to working together in earnest on Porgy and Bess in the
fall of 1933, was a fascination with aestheticizing their perceived notions of the
“vice of Black womanhood”: the thief, the sex worker, the jook joint brawler, IL
women who turned to survival by way of an “informal economy” (as Cynthia
Blair and LaShawn Harris and other wonderful Black feminist historians have put
Esso) and who, in turn, were subject to the “juridical production of black female de-
viance [Quale] meant that,” as Sarah Haley has powerfully shown, Black “women
were arrested more often, and were forced to endure protracted periods of captiv-
ity” in the early twentieth-century makings of the carceral state.26

The figure of the “too-too” girls, as Griffin has called them, women of excess
who elude and reject social mores and who were (and are) acutely vulnerable to
surveillance and subjection, the women of which there is both too much and too

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences“A Woman Is a Sometime Thing”

little of them in the archive, as Hartman and others have shown, was the figure on
which to capitalize, to mine the depths of old school naturalist tragedy crossed
with the thrill of syncopation and the sheer immensity of Black sound’s cultural
heterogeneity, the constitutive power of a sound that encapsulates the spectrum
of modern musicking–from spirituals to the blues, from ragtime to jazz.

It makes sense, Poi, to read Heyward’s circling around the mythical vice of
Black womanhood in his first iteration of Porgy as a novel as a continuity with his
mother’s blackface womanhood and yet also a pivotal departure from her planta-
tion hangover scenarios. Here he continuously lingers on the idea of Bess’s crim-
inal precarity.

In this first narrative versioning of her, she is the woman who will go from
“dust” to dawn in the arms of a lover living his own fragile existence in the imag-
ined Gullah neighborhood of “Catfish Row,” only to “fall” again: into jail for a
time sharing “a steel cage” with other women that “resembled a large dog-pound,"
where a “peculiarly offensive moisture clung to the ceiling.” Here the narrator’s
pontificating is especially pronounced when stating that “when all was said and
done, what must one expect if one added to the handicap of a dark skin the indis-
cretion of swallowing cocaine and indulging in a crap game.”27

Though carceral Bess makes no further appearances in either the play or the op-
era that would follow, we might consider the ways that Heyward is here setting in
motion a translation of the performative colonization of Black womanhood from
one medium (white supremacist “dialect recital” live act) he’d grown up observ-
ing to another (a literary rendering of a white supremacist racial romance-tragedy
as his first novel). Just as well, he was likely looking askance at someone like the
racially liminal Jean Toomer, who, extraordinary as it may seem, had been a “non-
resident member” of the Poetry Society of South Carolina in 1923 on the eve of
the publication of his masterpiece Cane.28 The subsequent “exposure” of Toom-
er’s Blackness led to the threat of his expulsion from the group (a decision against
which Heyward apparently vehemently fought) but the more fascinating point to
probe is the extent to which Cane would have served as a rich model for Heyward
to mine the figure of the melancholic Black woman: the “Karinthas” and “Ferns,"
the ones whose “skin like dusk” you can barely see (“oh can’t you see it”) as the
“sun goes down,” the ones whose “eyes said to [men]” that “they were easy.”29

Heyward, like his mother, like Gershwin, turns to Black womanhood and
turns, in a moment of creative emergence in his career, to literary Black woman-
hood, illicit and socially dangerous, just as Toomer was breaking through, and just
as Bessie (Smith) was breaking out with her first single from Columbia Records.
Such a cultural context, it would seem, has much to do with the “Bess” anatomy,
as she would continue to transition from literary archetype to operatic and mu-
sical theater Black dame noire, doomed to utter tragedy. Caught in the crucible
between Black rural angst and urban blight, she is a figure who absorbs and man-

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ifests Heyward’s multiple fantasies and aspirations, his proximity to and ersatz
renderings of Toomer’s oblique visions of languid and aching Black women in the
early 1920s South and the sensual declarations of empress musicians finally get-
ting their sounds down on and for the record for the first time.30

The crude cartography of Heyward’s heroine is the summation of all these in-
fluences. Her character’s fatalistic plotting yields its own crescendos, a series of
“falls” in the narrative that extend to the point of violation at the hands of Crown
(scripted in the novel ambiguously somewhere between rape and utter sexual sur-
render), to her ultimate recidivism turning back to narcotics and finally fleeing
for the big city with her pimp in the play and the opera. Most critics don’t even
bother to comment on the fact that, in the novel, she is “carried away on de ribber
boat” after having drunk herself into a stupor with “a dozen of de mens gang” at
the close of the narrative.31 But make no mistake, while his narrative either sells
her down the river or lets her loose into the “wild” of the city, DuBose Heyward
needs his Bess. He needs this figure as something more than leitmotif, as in fact a
catalyst for the kind of dramatic experimentation that would drive his shared op-
eratic ambition with Gershwin.

If, as Linda Hutcheon makes clear in her germinal study of this subject, Quello
“adaptation is repetition, but repetition without replication,” Heyward and Ger-
shwin set their sights on repeating an idea about Blackness and womanhood and
vice in another form without purely replicating it.32

On an evening in the early summer of 1926, George Gershwin set to reading
a copy of Heyward’s bestselling novel, allegedly devouring it in one sitting, E
swiftly soon after sending a letter off to the author expressing his desire to explore
Porgy as a sonic venture, as an opera that he might use as a platform to essentially
pursue the “pseudomorphosis,” as comparative literature scholar Brent Edwards
has put it, at the heart of Heyward’s narrative. The “process of pseudomorpho-
sis,” he adds, “can be a way to expand boundaries . . . discover new possibilities . . .
transform a medium precisely by making it become other.”33

In their joint adaptation of the text into a “folk opera,” which begins in earnest
In 1933, the Gershwins along with Heyward deepened and showcased the angle
of the “love triangle” between that aforementioned disabled “beggar,” the “drug
addicted strumpet,” and the brute, lascivious lover Crown who struggles to seize
back control of Bess as she falls for Porgy and as she contemplates a life free of that
“happy dust” supplied by her pusher Sportin’ Life. All this set against the back-
drop of the fictional world of rural Black squalor where tight-knit community
nonetheless endures. Spectacular tragedy of operatic proportions ensues.

I n October 1935, Porgy and Bess made its Broadway premiere, running for a “dis-

appointing” (by musical theater rather than opera standards) “124 shows” be-
fore closing. But Gershwin’s first and last opera before succumbing to a brain

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tumor at the age of thirty-eight was the fullest manifestation of that “jazz thing”
he’d been chasing all along. Porgy and Bess was a production that bristled with for-
malistic complexity and cultural cross-pollination. Heyward and the Gershwins
rode the dissonant edge of “modern” musicking hard in their work, offering their
mannered interpretations of the “blues,” crossed with “spirituals,” crossed with
“jazz,” “Tin Pan Alley,” and “classical . . . recitatives . . . canonic techniques . . . IL
leitmotif.”34

And it was a project that was polarizing from the start. There were the critics,
some of whom were unsettled by its “Negro folksiness” all mixed up with classi-
cal fugues and arias, others who were undone by vaudeville musical theater and
Harlem cabaret-era jazz infusing itself into the “form” of the opera. And that’s
just the white folks. Prominent African Americans’ reactions to the show range
from the aforementioned Ellington’s write-off to that of sociologist Harold Cruse
to Lorraine Hansberry, who was featured in a 1959 Variety article entitled “Lor-
raine Hansberry Deplores Porgy.” In 1959, anche, James Baldwin would greet the
arrival of the film–which he describes as “lumber[ing]” into theaters all “grandi-
ose, foolish, and heavy with the stale perfume of self-congratulation”–by declar-
ing in trademark fashion that “what has always been missing from George Gersh-
win’s opera is what the situation of Porgy and Bess says about the White world.”
Black suffering, “bizarre sexuality,” as New Yorker critic Hilton Als refers to it, figlio-
ic blackface hokum. This is the racial mountain that we’re asked to climb so often
when attending a night at this particular opera.35

Gershwin the composer and Heyward the librettist would work to adapt, A
transpose the errant woman of “the slum” from the discursive realm, across the
dramatic form cowritten by Heyward and wife Dorothy and a Broadway hit in
1927. They would work to “transcode” this Bess in their bid to “elevate” jazz to the
realm of the classical, to adapt a racial and gender figuration and situate it within a
fully “sung play” whose structure, as Fisher notes, “incorporates” the genre’s “in-
herent techniques . . . songs” and “arias, duets and ensembles, sung recitatives that
provide action and link its songs . . . leitmotif themes that provide reminiscence, O
identify ideas or characters.”36

We might think of this aural, visual, and kinesthetic palimpsest of the 1925
source text as a kind of “remediation” (as Hutcheon would have it) of that Rhapsody
note, an elongated Barthesian “stereophony of echoes, citations and references” in
not just Heyward’s racial repertoire but Gershwin’s as well. The composer’s nearly
wholly overlooked 1923 blackface operetta Blue Monday, which features a scorned
“Black” murderess hell bent on short-circuiting another love triangle37 demon-
strates his own persistent interest in the figure of Black female vice as muse.38

By the time Gershwin set out in search of the quasi-ethnographic material he
collected on three trips to Charleston in 1933 E 1934, he was ready to push for-
ward with what would seemingly become a kind of odd and unusual cross-polli-

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nation of forms of racial mimicry that combined urban racial caricature with that
of the mythical “folk.” During this period, Gershwin engaged in a series of expe-
ditions–part Charleston research project, part promotional press junket–with
Heyward to Folly Island in the two years leading up to the production’s premiere,
heading to “a Negro meeting . . . ‘shouting’” along with the worshippers, “catching
the beat instinctively and later working it into his music,” according to a 1935 Nuovo
York Times article.39 Such anecdotes showcase the Gershwins’ and Heyward’s ac-
tive participation in a long tradition of racialized transcription.

No doubt, Heyward and the Gershwins walked a complicated line in the busi-
ness of notating and transcribing Black vernacular sound, oscillating between
notational violence and a fascination with and fetishistic reverence for audible
“Blackness” that seemingly resists incorporation (what we might think of as a
kind of Derridean archival violence that shelters, preserves, and presents itself as
revealing, even as it conceals, histories of subjugation).40 Or perhaps even more
aptly we might think of this transcriptive endeavor as endemic of the kind of “vi-
olence” that Baldwin theorizes as undergirding the fantasy of the Porgy and Bess
opera itself.

This “cruelest” of fantasies, Baldwin observes, in which “Negroes seem to
speak to [white America] of a better life, better in the sense of being more honest,
more open, and more free: in a word, more sexual” and are therefore “hideously”
“penalized . . . for what the general guilty imagination makes of them.” “This fanta-
sy,” he continues, “which is at the bottom of almost all violence against Negroes,"
underwrites the entire Gershwin-Heyward project. Yet Gershwin scholars even to-
day still liken this process to acts of “interpreting the music through the filter of his
own tastes and experiences.” As does music historian Anna Harwell Celenza, who
characterizes this kind of phenomenon as a translation of “feelings” and “impres-
sions,” the kind of which are, in my opinion, as familiar as jumping Jim Crow.41

But there has to be more to say about this old school love and theft; we can and
should put more pressure on examining the relationship between the idioms and
aesthetics erupting out of this line of interpretation and the nameless subjects–
out in the streets, up the dark hallways, perched on the fire escapes, or maybe even
placed on Gershwin’s wall–who were interpolated into a project for which they
most certainly never asked to be included. Celenza’s reading of one famous 1934
photograph of Gershwin “sitting at the piano supposedly working on Porgy and
Bess” hinges on the contention that this “portrait of a young African American girl
he painted in the early 1930s . . . is not,” she argues, “a photograph depicting the girl
as she actually is,” but of “how he envisions her. It shows his interpretation of who
she is, painted in response to his encounter with her.”42

And don’t we know it.
If anything, it is an image of an image that reminds us of the extent to which
Gershwin, his brother Ira, and the Heywards–both mother and son–were at the

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forefront of a battle over Black women artists’ vocality, their sonic ontology, their
interpretative radicalism, their aesthetic will to survive. They were crafting, col-
laborating with one another, some would say colluding with one another in the
production of what musician and conceptual artist Mendi Obadike has influen-
tially termed an “acousmatic blackness” particular to Black womanhood: questo è,
they were developing the sound of the “perceived presence of the black body in
a vocal timbre, whether or not that body is determined to be black by other met-
rics.”43 Such moves are as old as the American culture industry, as numerous crit-
ics have long reminded us. But the stakes, I would argue, could not have been high-
er for Black women artists in those early years of blues recordings, when system-
ic structures had enabled white women like Sophie Tucker and Marion Harris to
lay down tracks for the mass market in the 1910s, in the decade before the sisters
gained entrance into the studio booth.44

If, as the brilliant musicologist Nina Eidsheim insists, we have to think of voice
as “co-articulation,” if we have to think of vocality and vocal timbre as what she
calls a “thick event,” a “collective” phenomenon that is informed–at once–by
embodied performance and manifestations of networks of listening (singers lis-
tening to other singers, critics and historians listening to and recording and char-
acterizing their own culturally dense perceptions of performers), a “chain of as-
sociations,” Eidsheim argues, “made by an individual under the pressures of the
social and cultural contexts in which that individual participates,” then we have
reached the point of finally paying much closer attention to both the Heywards’ as
well as the Gershwins’ pivotal role in inventing, producing, and branding a deep-
ly influential and lasting “sound of black womanhood” that they delivered to the
masses in the era that competed with the 1920s rise of the classic blues queens as
well as in the decade after the decline of their popularity.45

The sisters were quietly furious about this, even as they made their own sounds.

I t is time now, Poi, to ask: what, if anything, has this grandly imposing hybrid

musical text offered Black women artists, and what have these artists done to
deform the Gershwin form? Time to ask whether there’s another generative
method of listening to the way that this production archives interracial encounter
in sound and also creates spaces where Black women performers might improvise
heroically complex, opaque, and mischievous ways of sounding out their subjec-
tivities. How might we listen against the grain to the Gershwin and Heyward ar-
chive that these artists carry with them, translate, redeploy, and revise by way of
virtuosic performance strategies? How might we think differently about the poli-
tics of cultural appropriation and racial mimicry by way of their work?

A range of Black women artists have taken up the challenge of wrestling with
Gershwin and Heyward’s invention, performing an aesthetically demanding
lavoro, a work in which Black women performers in particular are made to coun-

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tenance varying modes of representational violence and dramaturgical labor, UN
work that simultaneously calls upon them to tap into their most heterogeneous
virtuosic abilities (to be able to sing in “wide vocal ranges” and with “great phys-
ical stamina” folk, Broadway, opera, and spirituals) while also asking of them si-
multaneously to re-inscribe the most familiar of Black female caricatures. And it
is my contention that these virtuosos in various versions of the show have inno-
vated ways of turning the clashing tension between the sonic form of Bess and
the content of her caricature into an experimental genre unto itself. Each of these
women crafted vocalities that enabled them to traverse and mediate social spaces
and ultimately keep a different time to that of the production’s gauzy, incandes-
cent vision of “Summertime” for its Black rural laborers. In this way, pure, these
women ultimately strategized ways of scoring the conditions and possibilities of
being aesthetically on the edge and “outside” the histo-temporalities and racial
geographies set for them, and they passed that secret on to generations of artists
who followed the paths that they paved. This is part of the continuing life of the
larger “novel” that, for sure, exceeded the boundaries of Heyward’s original plans
and dreams.

From the opera icons and musical theater actresses who have inhabited the role
of the lead heroine through the years to the myriad performers who have served in
supporting roles and the all-important chorus: think of everyone from The Living
Is Easy novelist Dorothy West who was in the cast of Heyward’s 1927 play to theater
veterans Abbey Mitchell and Etta Moten, from opera legends like Leontyne Price
to classical upstarts like Clamma Dale in 1976, from ingenues like a young Maya
Angelou to midcentury stars like Pearl Bailey and Diahann Carroll, to say noth-
ing of the magnificent and tremendously influential Eva Jessye, who served as the
opera’s longtime choral director.46 Clearly, the Gershwin production has been a
gateway for Black women musical artists who have invoked a range of aesthetic
practices to tackle its troubling constructions of Black womanhood, its render-
ing of a tragic heroine as a sonic adaptation of those “social documents” and data
that eviscerate the human, convert them into “statistical persons,” as Hartman
reminds, “reduce[S]” them to “human excrescence of social law and the slum.” In
Gershwin and Heyward’s “hot hands,” she is not a heroine able to “joy her free-
dom,” in the words of historian Tera Hunter.47

Yet I want to suggest that, even in her original rendering, remaining perched on
the edge of the community, the edge of the play, the edge of morality, the perpetu-
al edge of her operatic diva emotions, Bess provides a way for numerous artists to
mine fraught performative spaces. There is, Ovviamente, a distinction between the
state of Bess’s being “outside” versus the state of being “put outdoors,” in Toni
Morrisonian terms. “There is a difference,” Morrison writes in a legendary line of
The Bluest Eye, “in being put out and being put outdoors. If you are put out, you go
somewhere else, if you are outdoors, there is no place to go. The distinction was

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subtle but final. Outdoors was the end of something, an irrevocable, physical fact,
defining and complementing our metaphysical condition.”48

Both the novel as well as the opera flirt with this kind of haunting precarity as
Bess’s presumptive destiny. But in its theatrical iteration, I would suggest that her
positionality on the fridge presents itself as something of a fugitive opportunity.
There is room, in other words, to consider Bess as outside and on the edge of the
narrative as holding the potential for her to move in ways unlike the other wom-
en on Catfish Row who (save for the capricious Clara who rushes into a hurricane
looking for her man) remain resolutely static, committed to the joys of strawberry
picking and picnics. Bess is by no means “free,” like the “old women” at the close
of Morrison’s novel whose eyes bespeak “a synthesized” “puree of tragedy and
humor, wickedness and serenity, truth and fantasy.”49

Piuttosto, her edginess and her “rough edges” linger and resonate across Black
women’s sonic histories. They evoke her constitutive “resonant meaning” as a
character who is listening in the ways that perhaps Jean Luc Nancy had in mind.
“To be listening,” Nancy claims, “is always to be on the edge of meaning, or in an
edgy meaning of extremity.”50

In Gershwin’s epic, Bess listens: to Clara’s opening “Summertime” before
singing it herself, to Porgy’s proclamations of love, to Crown’s seductive come-
ons (Quale, in most versions save for the latest, turn lightning fast into sexual
coercion), to Sportin’ Life’s call for her to follow him to New York.51 Tractable
throughout the course of the narrative? Forse. But in that surfeit of listening,
in that absorption of voices singing lullabies, love songs and temptation songs
to her, she figuratively (Rif)arranges a new musical future for the women who
(Rif)cover her and provide her with (performative) cover.

What I am suggesting here is that Bess’s fate is an aesthetic–as well as histor-
ical–question mark that has inspired Black women artists to “worry the line,” as
Black feminist literary critic Cheryl Wall might put it, and to “worry her line” so
as to sonically shake it loose from the constrictions of its putative, predetermined
outcome.52 To worry the line of Bess, Poi, is to take up the Black feminist liter-
ary practice that Wall cites as borrowing from blues idioms, the “changes in stress
and pitch, the addition of exclamatory phrases, changes in word order, repetition
of phrases within the line itself.” Such a move beckons us to retrace the under-
theorized, unheralded performance strategies of artists who transformed the Bess
role into avant-garde musicking.

Let us not forget that long and esteemed line of performers–actors, vocalists,
and multihyphenate musicians–who worried about Bess and went their own
distinct, resourceful, and imaginative ways about worrying her line. From Anne
Brown, the Julliard phenom who first tackled the role and brought her to Broad-
modo, on through to that megastorm of modern theater, Audra McDonald. Genera-
tion after generation of Black women artists have put the Porgy and Bess repertoire

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to their own ends, repurposing a text that had, according to Alex Ross, a “score”
that “invites considerable freedom of interpretation. Once the chords of ‘Sum-
mertime’ start rocking,” he continues,

they become a steady-state environment in which a gifted performer can move around
at will. She can bend pitches, add ornaments, shift the line up and down. Billie Holiday
and Sidney Bechet made “Summertime” their own; Miles Davis, on his Porgy and Bess
album of 1958, actually discarded Gershwin’s chords and kept only the melody. IL
same freedom of expression is permitted in the opera’s other set pieces such as “Bess,
You Is My Woman Now,” “My Man’s Gone Now,” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”53

It is the form, Poi, finally–a form originally developed in deep consultation
and collaboration with Anne Brown–that begs for fluidity and movement, Quello
beckons its own revisions and refusals, that inspires rigorous, theatrical virtuosic
attack in order to burst its protagonist into the realm of polyvalent representa-
tional possibility, in order to enable these women to move to a space of their own
sonic creation: outside of the fictive pastoral and the present absence of the me-
tropolis and toward an “insistence on potentiality . . . and possibility for another
world.”54

Think, for instance, of Billie Holiday. With her 1936 version of “Summertime,"
Lady Day, one year removed from the Porgy and Bess premiere, audaciously and
artfully streamlines the “Summertime” melody and reminds us that she is, ac-
cording to Farah Griffin, “the first really modern singer,” with her complex af-
fective gestures, her “careful juxtaposition of notes,” her trademark subtlety, her
fearlessness in “running ahead of the band” at times, lagging behind at others.
Holiday’s ironic vocals dance with Bunny Berigan’s trumpet and bask in the lux-
urious thematic dreamscape of the song. It is her sinuous, roving version of Ger-
shwin that (as Farah Griffin reminds me) clears a space for and inspires Miles’s
panoramic 1958 rendition two decades later.55

Could it be any more fitting that Holiday would record the first pop chart ver-
sion of this song? Baldwin suggests that there could be no other way since he
imagines that “she was much closer to the original” Bess “than anyone who has
ever played or sung [the role].” But while his analogy is fueled by the drugs and
tragedy nexus that he draws in eulogizing these two figures, my interest in mining
the relationship between Holiday and Gershwin pays attention instead to Holi-
day’s craft as what so many have referred to as “a jazz musician’s vocalist,” one
who, when performing “Summertime,” assumes the role of an Albert Murray
blues hero, a chance taker, an artist who gambles with and changes up the tem-
porality of the lullaby by way of exploiting the “steady state” open frontier of the
song and inserts her own play into the formalistic structure of the tune.56

Lady Day and her sister brethren–Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, Lena
Horne, Pearl Bailey, Sarah Vaughan, to name but only a luminous few, the ones

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who would follow her in answering the Bess riddle by carrying her to center of the
pop world–are forever busy drawing out the human in this opera-musical reper-
toire, lighting out across the sonic universe, elegantly critiquing and engaging in
prodigious conversations with its malevolent roots while yet still gathering up all
those women out on the edge.57 Their brave and fiercely intelligent performances
in the Porgy and Bess archive take us all the way back to the kitchen where jazz is
nobody’s lady other than her own.

about the author

Daphne A. Brooks is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American
Studi, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at
Yale University. She is the author of Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race
and Freedom, 1850–1910 (2006) and Jeff Buckley’s Grace (2005). She is currently work-
ing on a three-volume study of Black women and popular music culture entitled
Subterranean Blues: Black Women Sound Modernity. The first volume, Liner Notes for the
Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, is due to be published in 2021.

endnotes

1 Ryan Raul Banagale, “The Afterlife of Rhapsody in Blue,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ger-
shwin, ed. Anna Harwell Celenza (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 246.
2 Richard Crawford, Summertime: George Gershwin’s Life in Music (New York: W. W. Norton,

2019), 123.

3 Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Farah Jasmine Griffin, “When Malin-
dy Sings: A Meditation on Black Women’s Vocality,” in Uptown Conversation: The New
Jazz Studies, ed. Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). On white culture workers, jazz, theater,
and mass culture, see David Savran, Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the
New Middle Class (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).

4 On the history of jazz in relation to systemic racism, see Gerald Horne, Jazz and Justice:
Racism and the Political Economy of the Music (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019).
5 Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

(New York: W. W. Norton, 2019).

6 The “lady jazz” phrase appears in multiple iterations across works by white cultural crit-
ics and historians of the early jazz era. Erma Taylor cites composer and conductor Wal-
ter Damrosch as having “enthused [Quello] ‘Gershwin has made a lady out of jazz’” in
reference to Rhapsody in Blue. Erma Taylor, “George Gershwin–A Lament” (1937), In
George Gershwin, ed. Merle Armitage (New York: Longmans Green & Co., 1938), 189.
Damrosch famously commissioned Concerto in F. See also Henry O. Osgood, So This
Is Jazz (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1926), 204. Lawrence Gilman, “Mr.

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150 (1) Winter 2021Daphne A. Brooks

George Gershwin Plays His New Jazz Concerto” (1925), in The George Gershwin Reader,
ed. Roberty Wyatt and John Andrew Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press,
2007), 85–87. My great thanks to Brian Kane for engaging in conversations with me
about this topic and pointing me in the direction of these works. Kane also reminds
that the phrase is “always attributed” to Paul Whiteman “but apparently without ci-
tation.” Brian Kane, email to the author, Marzo 4, 2020, emphasis his. He notes that
Bañagale cites Whiteman in Ryan Bañagale, Arranging Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue and the
Creation of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Deems Taylor as
quoted in Crawford, Summertime, 113.

7 Hartmann, Wayward Lives, 47. For examples of the “jazz is a woman” trope, see Shane Vo-
gel’s discussion of the 1957 televised broadcast of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s
A Drum Is a Woman. Shane Vogel, Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 102–131.

8 DuBose Heyward, Porgy (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001); DuBose Hey-
ward and Dorothy Heyward, Porgy (New York: Players Press, 2006); George Gershwin,
Porgy and Bess: Opera in Three Acts (New York: Gershwin Publishing Corporation, 1935);
and George Gershwin, DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, and Ira Gershwin, Porgy and Bess:
Vocal Score (New York: Alfred Publishing, 1993).

9 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 2004); Beloved, dir. Jonathan Demme (Bur-
bank, Calif.: Touchstone Pictures/Harpo Films, 1998); and Toni Morrison and Richard
Danielpour, Margaret Garner, Opera in Two Acts (New York: Associated Music Publishers,
2006).

10 J. Rosamond Johnson as quoted in Joe Nocera, “Variations on an Explosive Theme,” The
New York Times, Gennaio 21, 2012. See also Edward Morrow, “Duke Ellington on Ger-
shwin’s ‘Porgy,’” New Theatre (1935): 114–115; and Porgy and Bess, dir. Otto Preminger
(Culver City, Calif.: Samuel Goldwyn Productions, 1959). Joseph Horowitz notes that
Morrow’s own debunking of “Gershwin’s lampblack Negroisms” was widely attribut-
ed to Ellington, who subsequently disassociated himself from the article, but not with-
out adding that Gershwin’s music, though “grand,” was “not distinctly or definitely
Negroid.” Joseph Horowitz, “Porgy and Bess at the Met,” The American Scholar, ottobre
9, 2019, https://theamericanscholar.org/porgy-and-bess-at-the-met/.

11 Gwynne Kuhner Brown, “Performers in Catfish Row: Porgy and Bess as Collaboration,"
in Blackness and Opera, ed. Naomi Andre, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2014), 179–180.

12 Vedere, for instance, the all-Black casts of the original 1935 production directed by Rouben
Mamoulian, that of the 1942 Broadway revival directed by Cheryl Crawford, IL 1952
touring production directed by Robert Breen, and the 1976 Houston Opera production
directed by Jack O’Brien. For more on racial politics and the history of the casts, Vedere
Ellen Noonan, The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess: Race, Culture, and America’s Most Famous
Opera (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

13 George Gershwin, Porgy and Bess (Opera Study Guide with Libretto), ed. Burton Fisher
(Boca Raton, Fla.: Opera Journeys Publishing, 2018), 22. My thinking with regard to
the concept of the “counter-composer” draws inspiration from Margo Jefferson’s
theories of the “counter-diva.” See Margo Jefferson, “The Trolley Song: Cecile Mc-
Lorin Salvant,” The New York Times Magazine, Marzo 9, 2017, https://www.nytimes
.com/interactive/2017/03/09/magazine/25-songs-that-tell-us-where-music-is-going
.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&mtrref=undefined.

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14 On Black women artists as arrangers, curators, and archivists, see Daphne A. Brooks,
Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Cambridge, Massa.:
Stampa dell'Università di Harvard, 2021). On theories of arrangement, critical listening, and the
role of the arranger, see Peter Szendy, Listen: A History of Our Ears (New York: Fordham
Stampa universitaria, 2008); and Hartman, Wayward Lives, 27.

15 Heyward, Porgy, 47.
16 See Noonan, The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess, 105, 250–254; and Heyward, Porgy, 66.
17 James M. Hutchisson, DuBose Heyward: A Charleston Gentleman and the World of Porgy and Bess

(Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000).
18 Noonan, The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess, 128–129.
19 Hutchisson, DuBose Heyward, 26. From this critic’s standpoint, Hutchisson’s meditations
on race and racial politics in the life and work of Heyward are, at best, antiquated, E,
at worst, profoundly problematic and oversimplified at various points in his biograph-
ical study of the author.

20 Ibid., 24.
21 Janie DuBose Heyward sustained a lucrative career as a “dialect recitalist in Charleston,
South Carolina, in the 1910s and 1920s. Janie DuBose Heyward, Songs of the Charleston
Darkey (unidentified publisher, 1912). See my manuscript-in-progress One of These Morn-
ing: Black Feminist Genius and the Gershwin Problem (forthcoming) for an extended discus-
sion of Janie DuBose Heyward’s blackface dialect repertoire. For more on Janie Hey-
ward, see Hutchisson, DuBose Heyward, 1–19.
22 Noonan, The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess, 17.
23 See DuBose Heyward, “Gamester’s All,” All Poetry, https://allpoetry.com/Gamesters
-Tutto. On DuBose Heyward’s poetry career, see Hutchisson, DuBose Heyward, 20–48.
24 Hutchisson, DuBose Heyward, 52, 53. On Janie Heyward’s potential recording career, Vedere
Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, Denmark Vesey’s Gardens: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle
of the Confederacy (New York: The New Press, 2019), 203. See also “Mrs. Heyward’s Di-
alect Reading,” The Charleston Evening Post, Dicembre 4, 1922. My thanks to Ethan Kytle
for his assistance with regard to this material.

25 Heyward, Songs of the Charleston Darkey.
26 Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chap-
el Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 56; Cynthia Blair, I’ve Got to Make My
Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (Chicago: University of Chica-
go Press, 2010); and LaShawn Harris, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Number Runners: Black Wom-
en in New York City’s Underground Economy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016).

27 Heyward, Porgy, 78, 79.
28 Hutchisson, DuBose Heyward, 47. Toomer apparently engaged in correspondence with Rex
Fuller, Heyward’s successor as the secretary of the Poetry Society, and he also contact-
ed Heyward directly about this. See “Jean Toomer letter to Rex Fuller, Febbraio 19,
1923,” in The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919–1924, ed. Mark Whalan (Knoxville: The Uni-
versity of Tennessee Press, 1926), 131–132. See also Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard
Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
Stampa universitaria, 1987), 95. My great thanks to Emily Lutenski for discussions regarding
Toomer and Heyward and for bringing these works to my attention.

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29 Hutchisson, DuBose Heyward, 47; and Jean Toomer, Cane (New York: W. W. Norton,

2011).

30 On Bessie Smith’s early recording career, see Chris Albertson, Bessie Smith (Nuovo paradiso,

Conn.: Stampa dell'Università di Yale, 2005).

31 Heyward, Porgy, 157.
32 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2012), 7.
33 Brent Hayes Edwards, Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Massa.:

Stampa dell'Università di Harvard, 2017), 17.

34 James Standifer, “The Tumultuous Life of Porgy and Bess,” HUMANITIES 18 (6) (1997).
35 Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: New York Review of Books,
2005), 101–106; “Lorraine Hansberry Deplores ‘Porgy,’” Variety, May 27, 1959; E
James Baldwin, “On the Horizon: Catfish Row,” in James Baldwin: Collected Essays, ed.
Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America, 1998). Hilton Als argues that this “show
about black people, created entirely by white people, has never been a favorite of black
audiences. In traditional stagings, [the characters] Porgy and Bess come together amid
their community’s will to destruction; there is no uplift, just sweat, blood carnality,
and resignation.” Hilton Als, “A Man and a Woman: ‘Porgy and Bess’ Reimagined,"
The New Yorker, settembre 26, 2011.

36 Fisher, Porgy and Bess, 19.
37 This is a work that my grad colleague Allison Chu is now brilliantly interrogating.
38 Roland Barthes as quoted in Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 6. See also Roland Barthes,
“From Work to Text,” The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1986); Allison Chu with Brian Kane and Daphne Brooks, “Porgy and Bess
at 85 and Gershwin Remixed,” Yale University Black Sound and the Archive Working
Group Online Public Conversation, ottobre 9, 2020.

39 George Gershwin, “Rhapsody in Catfish Row; Mr. Gershwin Tells the Origin and Scheme
for His Music in that New Folk Opera Called Porgy and Bess," Il New York Times, Octo-
ber 20, 1935.

40 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: The University of Chicago

Press, 2017).

41 Baldwin, “On the Horizon”; Anna Harwell Celenza, “Exploring New Worlds: An Amer-
ican in Paris, Cuban Overture, and Porgy and Bess,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gersh-
win, ed. Anna Harwell Celenza (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 153–181.

42 Celenza, “Exploring New Worlds," 174.
43 Mendi Obadike as quoted in Nina Eidsheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre and Vocal-
ity in African American Music (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019), xi. See also
Mendi Obadike, Low Fidelity: Stereotyped Blackness in the Field of Sound (Ph.D. diss., Duke
Università, 2005).

44 For more on the racialized and gender politics of the early recording industry, see my

Liner Notes for the Revolution.

45 Eidsheim, The Race of Sound, 22–23.
46 Dorothy West appeared in the premiere production of the drama Porgy in 1927. Abbey
Mitchell appeared as Clara in the 1935 premiere production of Porgy and Bess. Future

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diplomat Etta Moten Barnett appeared as Bess in the 1942 Broadway production. Leon-
tyne Price achieved her breakthrough in the role of Bess in the 1952 touring production
and Clamma Dale appeared in the lead role in the Houston Opera high profile 1976 Rif-
vival. Maya Angelou joined the 1954 cast of the touring production in Italy, and Pearl
Bailey and Diahann Carroll appear in the motion picture adaptation.

47 Hartmann, Wayward Lives, 19; and Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s
Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, Massa.: Stampa dell'Università di Harvard, 1998).

48 Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage, 2007), 18.
49 Ibid., 159.
50 Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 7.
51 Gershwin, Porgy and Bess.
52 Cheryl Wall, Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

53 For more on Anne Brown, see Kuhner Brown, “Performers in Catfish Row.” See also
Gershwin & Bess: A Dialogue with Anne Brown, dir. Nicole Franklin (Los Angeles: Epiph-
any Inc., 2010); “Audra McDonald: Shaping Bess on Broadway,” Fresh Air (NPR),
May 15, 2012, https://www.npr.org/2012/05/15/152693314/audra-mcdonald-shaping
-bess-on-broadway; Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Nuovo
York: Picador, 2008), 162; and Miles Davis, Porgy and Bess (Columbia Records, 1959,
audio recording).

54 Jose Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press,

2009).

55 Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be A Mystery (New York: One World Press,
2002); and Billie Holiday, “Summertime” (Sarabandas, 1993, audio recording; first re-
leased 1936).

56 Baldwin, “On the Horizon”; and Albert Murray, The Hero and the Blues (New York: Vin-

tage, 1996).

57 Mahalia Jackson, “Summertime” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” Sum-
mertime (CBS Records, 1956, audio recording). See also “Summertime and I Feel Like
a Motherless Child by Mahalia Jackson,” YouTube, uploaded September 28, 2009,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hohnr22zTxc; Nina Simone, “Summertime,"
Nina Simone at Town Hall (Colpix, 1959, audio recording); Lena Horne, “Summertime,"
on Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte, Porgy and Bess (RCA, 1959, audio recording); Pearl
Bailey, Porgy and Bess (Roulette Records, 1958, audio recording); and Sarah Vaughan,
Sarah Vaughan Sings George Gershwin (EmArcy, 1958, audio recording).

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