Digital Extra

2/20/97
Sissieretta Jones: A voice of great richness

By ELLEN LIBERMAN
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

The last act of Sissieretta Jones's life lacked the grand spectacle of the opera she loved. She died not young, not beautiful, not in a lover's arms to a cymbal-clashing crescendo.

Rather, tragedy infused her life like a sustained chord. The celebrated soprano who wore her wealth and fame on her bosom died a poor recluse. The newspapers that showered her with superlatives at the height of her career barely noted her passing in 1933.

And unlike opera -- where, often, the plot is merely an excuse to perform beautiful music -- Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones's story is weighted with lessons.

In her voice, one critic heard "the heritage the singer has received from her race and it alone tells not only of the sorrows of a single life, but the cruelly sad story of a whole people."

The daughter of an African Methodist Church minister, Sissy Jones's "soprano voice of great richness" first amazed the congregants of the Congdon Street Baptist Church in Providence. Her parents, Jeremiah and Henrietta Joyner, had moved their family to Providence in 1876 from Portsmouth, Va., in search of better opportunities.

She was still a teenager when she performed before 5,000 people at a Boston benefit for Irish nationalist Charles Parnell's defense fund.

"She sings like Patti without the slightest visible effort," wrote one journalist, a complimentary comparison to famed soprano Adelina Patti.

If Hollywood were to put it to film, Jones's career rise would be a montage of cheering crowds, puffing trains, dates and places all fading in and out over Jones's mouth opened wide to release sweet, clear notes.

1892, Madison Square Garden. 1893, Chicago World's Fair. 1894, the Wintergarten Theater in Berlin. The Buffalo Exposition. The Pittsburgh Exposition. The Blue Room of the White House before President Benjamin Harrison. A tour of the West Indies, where she accepted from dignitaries the jewel-encrusted medals she liked to display on the bodice of her dress, military style.

"I woke up famous after singing at the Garden and I didn't know it," she once said.

The man she married at 14, David Richmond Jones, knew it. Determined to profit by it, Jones packed his wife off to London in 1890 for arsenic treatments, meant to lighten her skin and straighten her hair. After the Jones marriage dissolved in 1900, other men managed her career. Maj. J.B. Pond, a high-powered theatrical agent, negotiated for her the highest fees ever paid to a black performer of her time.

Though Jones sang like a diva, she would not be one, despite the efforts of her managers. There was talk of casting her in the lead role of Aida at the Metroplitan Opera House, but the role never materialized.

Instead, Jones was forced to make a living as a popular entertainer, where the nickname Black Patti sounded less like an opera reference and more like a character in the minstrel shows that featured her.

In 1895, she formed the Black Patti Troubadors, a troupe of black actors and singers. For two decades, they toured the country performing vaudeville revues. Numbers like Jolly Cooney Island, satirizing black life for white audiences, were the mainstays of the show. But Jones saved arias and spirituals for the finale.

By 1916, the shows had grown stale and stages had gotten smaller. Henrietta Joyner was ailing back in Providence and her daughter returned to care for her.

The woman who once traveled in a plush, $30,000 private railway car retired to a quiet life on Wheaton Street at age 47. She lived off her savings and sold her jewels, bit by bit. For a while, she worked as a cook for a wealthy East Side family. Her only child had died in infancy, but in her last years, she became a mother to homeless children she took in.

Sissieretta Jones passed away of cancer at Rhode Island Hospital in June 1933 -- presumably on her way to a better world -- one she may have glimpsed while performing in Europe for the Prince of Wales and the Kasier.

"It matters not to them what is the color of an artist's skin. If a man or woman is a great actor or a great musician, or a great singer, they will extend a warm welcome," she wrote in a letter home. "It is the soul they see, not the color of the skin."

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