Black Diva

Many a mewling white tenor has strutted the proscenium at Manhattan's Metropolitan while more gifted Negro singers, by long-standing custom, were excluded. But in the field of concert singing Negroes like Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson have held their own with the best. Today's most famous Negro singer is soft-spoken Contralto Marian Anderson, whose big, warm-blooded voice is conceded to be one of the world's finest. Last summer at the tony Berkshire Festival near Stockbridge, Mass., another remarkable Negro voice! this time a soprano, threatened to claim a share of Contralto Anderson's laurels. The voice was Dorothy Maynor's (TIME, Aug. 21), plump, Norfolk-born daughter of a Methodist minister, who had been studying for several years with courtly Manhattan Vocal Coach John Alan Haughton. The picked audience of musicians and critics who heard her run the gamut from Wagnerian hallelujahs to coloratura tinkletones spoke of her as a native Flagstad.

Last week the memory of these Stockbridge bravos brought a sold-out house to Dorothy Maynor's first public recital, at Manhattan's Town Hall. Bronze, cherub-faced Diva Dorothy soon showed that her Stockbridge judges had not been far wrong, but had been a little premature. When she was through, Manhattan's critics huddled in the lobby, agreed that the Voice had a rough edge here & there, prophesied a sensational future.

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