Word: negroes
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Hall last week and waited quietly for his audience to settle. Then he began in a voice the color of his skin to sing "I Got a Home on a Rock, Don' You See." The singer was not Roland Hayes, although for years Hayes has been the only Negro to sell out a hall of Carnegie's size. Hayes is slight, frail-appearing. He sings spirituals artfully, in a high voice that is often reedy. The Negro who sang last week in Manhattan was as tall as Basso Feodor Chaliapin and brawnier. His voice was big and mellow...
...Ejected from a restaurant, he soon found out what his mother never taught him, that if you were a nigger you were degraded. The thing to do was find a menial job. You could be a "sweetback" (Negro gigolo). Taylor was not, but he was chauffeur, porter, valet. Later he toured with Circusman Ringling. But he was not satisfied. Something new was growing in him now-he wanted to sing the woes of his race. Like many a Negro he felt a queerly mixed hatred and love of his people...
Will Marion Cook, the Negro Schubert, is fiery, erratic, race-proud. Hearing young Taylor, ambitious, hang on a high note, he kicked him out of Manhattan's famed Clef Club (negro musical organization), shouting: "No can can be a niggah if he sings my music wrong...
Rosamund Johnson was next, arranger of The Book of American Negro Spirituals, composer on the African five-tone scale, whose voice is like a diapason. Taylor Gordon's is like molasses and a clear bell. They sang together. He trained Taylor...
...night the singer met a novelist, pink-cheeked Carl Van Vechten. He now calls him "the Abraham Lincoln of Negro Art." He met and admired others: Muriel Draper partygoing in a window curtain; Colyumist Heywood Broun lying shirt-sleeved beside his bathtub of cocktails, to receive intelligentsia; Lady Oxford asking Gordon to Black Bottom after singing for royalty. He sang all over the U. S., heard deafening and perplexing applause. Now 36, he muses: "Ho! Ho! ... I wonder what I was born...