They were women whose artistry inspired generations of music, theater, film and television lovers. And they were women who joined the ancestors within a few days of each other this fall.
I’m talking about opera star Jessye Norman, 74 (September 15, 1945-September 20, 2019) and singer/actress Diahann Carroll, 84 (July 17, 1935- October 4, 2019)
Jessye Norman
I can’t remember the first time I heard Jessye Norman’s sing. But I know that her voice touched me deeply. While working on a radio feature as a newly minted Howard University faculty member during the early 1990s, I interviewed colleagues in the university’s music department who remembered Norman’s time as a Howard undergrad and the majestic nature of her voice.
Then In 1992 I served as a writer/producer on the NPR and Smithsonian Institution’s 26-part radio series, Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions. The Wade production team knew that we wanted to include some of Norman’s sensitive renderings of the so-called Negro Spirituals in the series. We also wanted to ask Norman why she chose to sing and how she interpreted this enduring African American sacred music.
So we contacted Norman’s management company and set up an interview that I would conduct. Norman’s manager placed a lot of conditions on the interview; specifically detailing where and when the interview could be held and carefully scrutinizing the questions we wanted to ask her. The closer we got to the interview date, the more anxious I became. I would soon interview a world-renowned, Grammy Award winning artist whom I highly admired, for a series that would be distributed nationally on NPR member stations in 1994 – and based on her manager’s directives, I might not be able to ask all the questions we had wanted her to address.
An NPR engineer and I arrived early to set up for the interview in the luxurious Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan. When Norman and her manager swept into the hotel suite, I sought to put her (and myself) at ease by mentioning our joint Howard University connection. Before long, our interview settled into a comfortable flow, and she opened up about her personal and musical background, the importance of the spirituals in her life and her approach to interpreting those songs. It was an enlightening and wonderful afternoon!
Segments of that interview, along with Norman’s performance of the spiritual, There’s A Man Going Round, can be heard in the first episode I produced for the Wade series, Songs and Singing as Church. You can also hear Jessye Norman perform and talk about the spirituals in the Wade episodes, Steal Away: Songs & Stories about Slavery, and I’m So Glad Trouble Don’t Last Always: The African American Spiritual and the Struggle for a New Classical Concert Tradition.
And in 2014, Norman returned to her alma mater to dazzle an attentive Howard University audience as she talked about her memoir, Stand Up Straight and Sing!
Diahann Carroll
I never had the pleasure of meeting or interviewing Diahann Carroll. But she was a fellow native of the Bronx, New York and she had graduated from the High School of Music of Art (M&A), then located in Harlem. When I was admitted into M&A, I was excited about the opportunity to study music with fellow students who came from all ends of NYC’s five boroughs. And this arts high school claimed such famous alumni as actor Billy Dee Williams, NPR producer Susan Stamberg, film/television writer/producer Steven Bochco, and jazz drummer Billy Cobham – just to name a few.
But as another M&A alum, Carroll particularly impressed my teenaged self because starting in 1968, she played the lead character in the sitcom, Julia – the first black woman to star in her own network TV series. She also was the first African American woman to win an Emmy as a lead actress in a comedy series. And my parents had raved about Carroll’s starring role in the Broadway musical No Strings – a performance for which she would earn a Tony Award. She would go on to shine in films like Claudine, The Five Heartbeats and Eve’s Bayou, and hit TV shows Dynasty and A Different World.
Here’s a link to an NPR tribute to Carroll on the day she died.
So Jessye Norman and Diahann Carroll – ever majestic and trailblazing – will be missed. But I hope that their soaring artistry will continue to be cherished.