Wanamaker’s Colored Chorus
Around 1909 Philadelphia department store magnate John Wanamaker, an ardent music lover, began publishing The Opera News magazine. But his musical taste wasn’t limited to opera. Five years later, another facet of his musical passion took center stage at his lavish New York City store on East 8th Street between Broadway and Lafayette Street. In February 1914 Wanamaker’s weeklong Lincoln’s Birthday commemoration drew no small amount of attention.
“One of the unique offerings presented at the Wanamaker Auditorium, New York, was the concert given each afternoon last week by the Lincoln Emancipation Jubilee Singers,” wrote Musical America magazine.
To carry this off, Wanamaker’s in-house concert impresario Alexander Russell engaged the renowned African American contralto and educator Daisy Tapley (1882–1925) to train some two dozen singers from the store’s numerous Black employees into a fine chorus. Accompanied by Tapley on piano, the singers became best known as Wanamaker’s Colored Chorus. Tapley also led a separate 30-piece orchestra of musicians, who were also assembled from the store’s Black workforce.
In the pages of his Opera News, Wanamaker championed his employees’ deep-rooted repertoire as “probably the nearest approach we have to ‘folk music’ in the United States.” The store’s newspaper ads over the years promoted the annual Lincoln Anniversary programs of “Afro-American Folk Songs and other music showing the influence of negro melodies.” Indeed, the Wanamaker Colored Chorus — whether tiered upon the store’s famous horseshoe-shaped rotunda, or presented in its sumptuous auditorium — quickly became a daily afternoon draw for shoppers and visitors.
The Wanamaker Colored Chorus’s much anticipated appearances expanded beyond the annual Lincoln’s Birthday celebration. For several years on, they were a highlight of the store’s traditional Easter Operatic Festival and other seasonal occasions. The showcase also exposed the singers’ talents to outside engagements and radio programs, affording them some degree of artistic autonomy. Store performances often included such esteemed Black musical guests including soprano and educator Minnie Brown (1889–1943), who was also Tapley’s life partner; soprano Abbie Mitchell (1884–1960) and her husband, composer Will Marion Cook (1869–1944); composers R. Nathaniel Dett (1882–1943), Harry Burleigh (1866–1949) and J. Rosamond Johnson (1873–1954).
The last named composer reminds us that, despite Wanamaker’s famously Black-friendly hiring and musical-promoting practice, the store was not immune to prevailing racial prejudices. One day during the Great War (WWI) Mrs. J. Rosamond Johnson and singer Blanche Dean Harris, while shopping at Wanamaker’s for the soldiers canteen in Harlem, were refused service in the store cafeteria. The distasteful incident may have inspired one of John Wanamaker’s later advertising slogans: “A man that blackens another man’s character does not whiten his own.”
By the late 1920s and 1930s, Wanamaker’s annual Lincoln’s Birthday commemorations were largely under the direction of legendary choral conductor Eva A. Jessye (1895–1992).
