Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,115

This is the grave of both Marian Anderson and James DePriest.

Born in 1897 in Philadelphia, Anderson grew up in the Black working class. Her father sold ice and later sold booze. Her mother did have a bit of higher education but couldn’t teach in Philadelphia because she didn’t have a degree, so she took care of little kids. Anderson grew up in the Baptist church and there was a lot of singing and young Marian was pretty amazing at singing. By the time she was 6, she sang at local functions for small amounts of money. She had an aunt who shephered her through the process. She soloed at the People’s Chorus of Philadelphia beginning when she was 10. Her father died when she was 13 and the family didn’t have much money, so she didn’t get a lot of formal training in these years. But she did what she could and a lot of people could see her talent and helped her get the education she needed, both musical and formal.

In 1925, Anderson won a singing contest run by the New York Philharmonic. It didn’t take her long to reach the stratosphere now. She first sang at Carnegie Hall in 1928. After a 1929 Chicago concert, where reviewers called her incredibly talented but not quite fully formed, she won a Rosenwald Fellowship to study in Berlin, which gave her the real training in classical music singing she needed. Like a lot of black Americans, Anderson found Europe personally liberating and she spent much of the 30s there. Her biggest mentor became none other than Jean Sibelius, who composed a lot of songs for her. I’d say that’s a good mentor! She would do U.S. tours too, including in the South, in which she fully remembered that for as famous as she’d become, she was still black and would be treated as such under the Jim Crow laws.

This leads us to what makes Anderson so famous today, which was the controversy over singing at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939. The Daughters of the American Revolution, that white supremacist organization, denied her application to sing at their concert hall in Washington. This got the NAACP organizing and got the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt. Unlike Franklin, Eleanor legitimately cared about racial discrimination. Eleanor was also a major figure in the DAR. Infuriated by the organization’s idiocy, she led thousands of people in resigning from it. This all got tons of attention. The northern media got ahold of the case. Why couldn’t the amazing black lady sing at Constitution Hall? What did it matter? The Philadelphia Tribune wrote, “A group of tottering old ladies, who don’t know the difference between patriotism and putridism, have compelled the gracious First Lady to apologize for their national rudeness.” Even more remarkable, some southern papers came out in favor of Anderson. Said the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “In these days of racial intolerance so crudely expressed in the Third Reich, an action such as the D.A.R.’s ban … seems all the more deplorable.” So Eleanor got FDR and Harold Ickes to allow Anderson to perform at the Lincoln Memorial instead, in which 75,000 people attended and millions listened on the radio.

Anderson finally sang at Constitution Hall in 1943 and became a big performer for the troops overseas. She remained a big deal for the rest of her life. She became the first black woman to sing with the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1955. Dwight Eisenhower had her sing as his 1953 inauguration. Then his administration sent her on an Asian tour as part of the American soft power programs of that era. She sang again for Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961. She sang at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and many other civil rights events.

Marian’s sister Ethel married a man named James DePriest. They had a son in 1936 named James Anderson DePriest. He was also born in Philadelphia. He became of the nation’s great conductors in the late 20th century. He went to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and then got a master’s from the Annenberg School. He played drums in a jazz quintet in his 20s, but he was mostly interested in conducting. He won a competition to conduct for the Philadelphia Dance Academy in the late 50s and that started his career. But he was still mostly playing. As part of the nation’s soft power plans in the Cold War, a man like DePriest was useful for the State Department. Sending Black musicians overseas could make the U.S. look good in the developing world. So that gave DePriest opportunities. In 1962, he was in Thailand. Two things happens. First, he came down with polio, so that’s not good! Maybe wasn’t vaccinated for some reason? But he was able to mostly defeat it. He also realized while there that he really did want to conduct full time when asked if he wanted to conduct the Bangkok Symphony.

So that’s what DePriest did. He rose pretty fast. Leonard Bernstein became a major mentor and chose DePriest as his assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic in 1965. By the late 60s, he was working pretty consistently in Europe. Antai Dorati named his assistant conductor of the National Symphony in Washington in 1971. As he became bigger, his aunt Marian began to work with him. One of her last big projects was narrating Aaron Copland’s Lincoln’s Portrait, with DePriest conducting.

DePriest became the director of the Oregon Symphony in 1980, which was a huge coup for a relatively minor orchestra. He stayed there until 2003, significantly raising the profile of that Portland-based institution. It’s hard to overstate his importance to Oregon cultural history, an issue where I have a personal influence. Portland is something of a backwater in the big cultural institutions because it was a backwater on basically everything until the last 30 or 40 years. So the art museum there is whatever, for example. Of course it’s made up a lot of ground in recent decades and has many other charms. When DePriest took over the Oregon Symphony it was a part-time gig made up of good but not great musicians. DePriest turned it into an institution that recorded albums that people bought.

DePriest also conducted all over the place on guest slots, conducted for many albums for groups across the world, and won every award one could win, or just about. He was given the National Medal of Arts in 2005.

Later in life, Anderson would live in DePriest’s home in Portland. She died there in 1993. She was 96 years old. In 2012, DePriest had a heart attack. He struggled along for another year, dying in 2013. He was 76 years old.

Marian Anderson and James DePriest are buried in Eden Cemetery, Collingdale, Pennsylvania. I had no idea he was there when I went to see Anderson. I didn’t even know they were related. So that was a fund surprise.

If you would like this series to visit other conductors, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Elyse Aehle is in Redondo Beach, California and Van Alexander is in Culver City, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.