 . . . Fall 1997
Despite worldwide consensus that it is the greatest American opera, George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, set in the African American ghetto of Catfish Row, remains a constantly assailed icon. Most of the sour notes issue from the culture the opera purports to be about.
The $1.4 million, 90-minute documentary, co-produced with Standifer by the U-M School of Music and Vanguard Films, examines the opera from a profoundly diverse African American perspective. The project received an $906,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, second only to the NEH grant for Ken Burns’s documentary on the Civil War. The Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts were among other key contributors.
Standifer says Heyward appreciated Black Americans’ "persistence, humor, faith and optimism. He heard us singing about heaven, but he also saw the gambling, fighting, lusting and superstitiousness. He saw the sacred and the profane, and tried desperately to honor his respect for the authentic in folklore."
In 1927, Heyward and his wife, Dorothy, based a play called Porgy on the novel. They saw the work as homage to the raw and primitive power they presumed to exist in Black folk life, a popular idea that many artists of the day deployed in treatments of a variety of other "folk cultures" worldwide, from Jewish and Eskimo to Gypsy and American Indian.
In the early 1930s, the composer George Gershwin saw the play. He prized the novel highly and had already corresponded with Heyward over the possibility of basing an opera on it. Gershwin found the Heywards eager to collaborate on an opera with him and his lyricist brother, Ira.
"Gershwin knew," Standifer emphasizes, "that the book and opera were born when Blacks were being stereotyped in a negative way and that the opera could suffer as a result of its use of stereotypical characters." When Jerome Kern approached Heyward with a project that would star Al Jolson playing Porgy in blackface makeup, Gershwin convinced Heyward that the sensitivity and artistry required were far beyond Jolson’s talents.
"To prevent degrading caricatures of Blacks," Standifer says, "Gershwin stipulated in his will that Porgy and Bess always be performed by African American casts in English-language productions. His family has honored that wish." Gershwin died two years after the opera’s premiere.
Gershwin had seen his opera come under fire right from the beginning. "The Black composer and critic Hall Johnson offered a scathing analysis of the opera in the Black journal Opportunity in January 1936," Standifer says. "He wrote, ‘Will the time ever come when a [Black] performer on a Broadway stage can be subtle, quiet or even silent—just for a moment—and still be interesting? By now we are painfully aware that in all Negro group scenes on Broadway, there must be swaying of bodies and brandishing of arms.’"
Numerous other prominent Blacks, from W.E.B. DuBois to Duke Ellington, have passed even harsher judgments on Porgy and Bess. DuBois said that whites’ perceptions about Blacks were strongly influenced by the white-controlled mass media. Therefore, he saw works focused solely on uneducated and poor ghetto dwellers as an impediment to Blacks’ struggles against segregation and for political and economic rights. Ellington thought the music was a pretentious and cliched exploitation of African American motifs.
Many Black performers have refused to appear in a production, most notably, Harry Belafonte, who turned down the lead role in Samuel Goldwyn and Otto Preminger’s 1959 movie version, disdaining a role that would have him "performing on my knees, looking up at white people."
Leontyne Price, however, said that when she sang Bess, she found the character was already "most of me; there was little to prepare for. I don’t mean playing the character, I mean being wonderfully Black."
Standifer obviously sides with the more accepting camp. "Heyward had insights into our character," he says, "and there is plenty of sex and violence throughout opera repertoire. But the low-life characters in Catfish Row sing in the style of high vocal culture. Jazz, the blues, classical, gospel—Gershwin mixes in all of these elements. That’s the genius of the piece. It does what America is about—the social mix."
Standifer wanted the writers and directors involved in his documentary "to be faithful to the ambiguities inherent in the opera: Is it Black music or Jewish or some sort of American amalgam? Does the story reflect Black culture or outsiders’ notions of Black culture?"
The late composer and pianist Eubie Blake recalled how George Gershwin often "came uptown [to Harlem] a lot" to listen to him and his composer friends like James P. Johnson perform. In a 1974 video interview with Standifer, Blake said that "there’s little question but what he used a lot of what he heard and learned, [judging] from stuff he finally made big bucks from. Porgy and Bess is about the best example of what he did ... cause he let all them folks add and improvise on — which was routine in musicals like [Noble] Sissle’s and my Shuffle Along — the stuff he wrote, which made him more real and sound more like us folks he was writing about."
The late Eva Jessye (1895-1992), who taught at U-M after retiring from the stage, recalled to Standifer how she went to the first audition for the opera in 1935 and showed Gershwin acting and singing techniques that would authenticate the performance. "That’s the thing, that’s what I want," she recalled Gershwin as saying. Jessye was hired as choral director and performed and directed the chorus of performances of the opera for the next 35 years.
"Jazz is America’s classical music," Taylor says on the documentary. "No one makes that point more graphically than a man who is not African American, who comes from a different culture and who sees enough truth and enough validity in the music . . . [to] make it available to a broader number of people than those of us from the African American community could do at that particular time."
Gershwin was so true to African American musical idioms of the spiritual that many people, Blacks as much as others, think the spirituals are traditional pieces. Heyward and Ira Gershwin showed comparable skills in their composing of the lyrics.
Some strong voices condemn the opera on the documentary. Harold Cruse, professor emeritus of history, author of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and Plural But Equal, and the founding director of U-M’s Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, attacks the notion that Black culture can be adequately conveyed through the voice of third parties.
Cruse says Gershwin’s opera "belongs in a museum, and no self-respecting African American should want to see it or be seen in it." Denouncing the opera for portraying "the seamiest side of Negro life—presumably the image of Black people that white audiences want to see," he sees Porgy as a symptom of "many whites’ ambivalent obsession with the ‘primitive’ Black" as represented by the more raucous denizens of Catfish Row.
Black performers, Cruse adds, have found "significant economic and artistic advancement" by exploiting "these primitive views of Blacks."
Standifer believes the documentary confirms his thesis that the opera and the debate that runs, and often rages, around it are "a mirror of our culture." As a result, he says, the documentary "holds up the opera as a way to see, think about and discuss the Black American experience."
Even those who condemn the opera must acknowledge its popularity. Standifer believes that it is hard for anyone to argue convincingly that a work that has left audiences weeping, clapping, stomping and cheering in Italy, Russia, England and the United States has achieved this response by appealing to vile stereotypes, consciously or unconsciously held.
"Facts can obscure the truth, but the human truths that pain is uncomfortable, that love is endearing, that children are amusing and sweet and intriguing, that old people are wise and valuable, are to be cherished. These are truths in Birmingham, Alabama, or Birmingham, England. Porgy and Bess is a truth; it’s a human truth. Take the beauty that is inherent in it and exalt it and cherish it and be made taller and better and finer by it, with gratitude to it."
His professional career already included compilation of a video archive that included interviews with performers who had appeared in all versions of the opera and the 1959 feature film. These and other resources from the N.C. Standifer Video Archive of Oral History he built and directs at U-M, and the Eva Jessye Afro-American Musical Collection, which Jessye donated to the Black Music Students Association in 1974, were invaluable.
As for the personal motivation, "I’m a graduate of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee and a former Fisk Jubilee Singer," the lean and intense 61-year-old Texan explains. "It’s a school whose origin can be traced to singing since the world-renowned Fisk Jubilee Singers provided the school with critical funds for many years.
"Music has played an important role in the Black American community and in the American community at large. We created ourselves, our behavior, our culture under adverse conditions in America, and continually re-created ourselves as these conditions changed. That is a reality underlying all of our culture, including our music.
"For hundreds of years, we had no venues for performance other than the church. Blacks had no place to practice culture against the grain other than in rural backwoods and honky tonks or, since the urban migrations of the early 20th century, on street corners. We’ve developed our culture right where we are. As a result, our music is always current, even forward-looking, and at the same time it always looks back to the very beginnings of our music.
"Right from the dawn of the stage musical, Blacks played pioneering roles. My mentor Eubie Blake and his musical partner Noble Sissle had huge successes in the early quarter of this century, but when big money was to be made, Blacks did not reap great rewards.
"What if James P. Johnson had not been Black? He would have competed with the Gershwins and Hammerstein. We were blocked from the mainstream even though we had mainstream skills. Yet, we had something truly, authentically American. People heard and were irresistibly attracted to these ‘strange’ sounds and beats in our music. They saw that we had mixed the European and the Black American folk traditions and made something quintessentially American.
"Important economic and social questions accompany the mainstreaming of our music and our image. Who has devised the image? Who has got credit for the creativity? Who interprets our culture? Who has made the money from it? All of these questions come to play as we follow the various productions of Porgy and Bess in the documentary and listen to the people who have been involved in taking the drama and music to the world public."—JW.
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The story and music render African American culture through the minds of a white Southerner and two Jewish New Yorkers, and that means Porgy and Bess "is consistently controversial—some find it to be a glorious love story and others find it construction built of demeaning stereotypes," says
The opera, says Standifer, began life as a novel, Porgy, by DuBose Heyward in 1925. Heyward was a Charleston, South Carolinian, of plantation-owning stock. But with the death of his parents, he became destitute at age 4. He quit school to support himself, and one of his jobs was cotton checker on the waterfront. There, he came in daily contact with Black dockworkers and fishermen and their families. "He was fascinated by their folklore, language and mores," Standifer says. "He got the idea for his story from a newspaper account of a legless Black beggar who assaulted a woman and was arrested while attempting to escape in his goat cart. The fact that the beggar had a private life of his own by night, a life full of love and aspirations, seemed to contain the seeds of human struggle that make for drama."
With Heyward as his guide, George Gershwin briefly visited Charleston’s African American ethnic communities, especially the "primitive," as Heyward called them, Gullahs of isolated James Island. The Gullahs preserved African traditions, speech patterns, songs, dances, musical styles and incantations, some of which Gershwin incorporated into his composition. The result of his observations and collaboration with the Heywards, the opera with the more suitably romantic title Porgy and Bess, premiered in Boston in 1935.
Some stars who have performed in Porgy, like Diahann Carroll, Grace Bumbry, Damon Evans and Simon Estes, appear in the documentary to tell of their initial reluctance and continued ambivalence about the work. Sidney Poitier, who reportedly agreed to take the lead in the 1959 movie version only because he was told he’d have no career if he refused, declined to appear in the documentary, saying the whole experience was so painful he didn’t want to relive it.
The composer and pianist Billy Taylor is also among the African Americans who embrace the opera. Taylor sees the Gershwin brothers’ desire to explore Black folk and jazz idioms as a natural urge for artists to transform the culture around them.
Perhaps the poet Maya Angelou, who appeared as Ruby in the 1954 production at Milan’s La Scala during her stage career, explains that popularity best when she says:
"The people who made Porgy and Bess the controversial aesthetic issue that it has been and is, were my teachers. Especially Charles Samuel Johnson, Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois and Aaron Douglas, all of whom were members of the Harlem Renaissance and taught at Fisk when I was there in 1950s. We were taught to analyze the many positives and negatives of Porgy and Bess, to recognize how controversial the question is of whose culture does it reflect, and to why it is that our Black American culture is taken to the public by whites who presume to know how we think and even feel.