Eva Jessye

Eva Alberta Jessye ( born January 20, 1895 in Coffeyville / Kansas, † February 21, 1992 in Ann Arbor / Michigan) was an African American choir director and composer.

Jessye studied from 1908 choral music and music theory at the Western University in Quindaro and from 1914 at Langston University in Oklahoma. She taught at various elementary schools, before she was a reporter and columnist in 1925 of the Baltimore Afro - American. In 1926 she founded in New York, the Original Dixie Jubilee Singers, a choir, the spirituals, ballads, ragtime and jazz music and light opera repertoire on stage, aufführte in radio broadcasts and films. Here the composer Will Marion Cook was aware of them, which she taught and promoted.

The Jubilee Singers appeared in 1926 in Harry A. Pollard's film Uncle Tom's Cabin with. 1929 initiated the Jessye Choir in Hollywood for the film Hallelujah by King Vidor. On this occasion, her choir was named Eva Jessye Choir. In 1934, she was choir director at the opera Four Saints in Three Acts production of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein; in the following year she directed the choir in the world premiere of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, opera, whose performances worldwide escorted over the next thirty years.

In addition, Jessye was active in the American civil rights movement. She collaborated with civil rights activists such as Marian Anderson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Julia Davis, Eubie Blake, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King and Paul Robeson; Eva Jessye Choir was the official chorus of Martin Luther King's historic March on Washington for work and freedom in 1963. Besides she worked as an actress in films such as Black Like Me ( 1964) and Slaves (1969 ) with.

Jessye 1974, founded the Eva Jessye Afro - American Music Collection at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Eva Jessye Collection 1977 at Pittsburg State University, where she was from 1978 to 1981 Artist in Residence. Governor John W. Carlin appointed her 1981 cultural ambassador of the State of Kansas from Eastern Michigan University in 1987, she received an honorary doctorate.

Under Jessyes compositions, the oratorio Paradise Lost and Regained (1934 ), The Life of Christ in Negro Spirituals (1931 ) and The Chronicle of Job ( 1936) should be mentioned.

• Woman
• American composer
• Born in 1895
• Died in 1992