Summertime and the living is easy
Fish are jumping, and the cotton is high

"Summertime," Porgy and Bess

Porgy and Bess
George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, and Dorothy Heyward
American Treasures of the Library of Congress

On September 2, 1935, George Gershwin signed his name to the completed orchestral score of the opera, Porgy and Bess. The composer called the seven- hundred-page score his masterpiece and never ceased to marvel that he had created it. Many critics consider Porgy and Bess to be the first and finest American opera.

Portrait of Leontyne Price
as Bess in Porgy & Bess,
Carl Van Vechten, photographer,
May 19, 1953.
Creative Americans: Portraits by Van Vechten, 1932-1964

In February 1934, George and Ira Gershwin and Dubose and Dorothy Heyward began their collaboration on a libretto, songs, and music for Heyward's novel, Porgy, about the African-American "Gullah" culture of South Carolina. During the summer of 1934, George Gershwin spent several weeks on Folly Island off the coast of Charleston, where the Heywards owned a beach cottage. There, he and Heyward observed customs of the local people and listened to their music. Gershwin joined in their "shouting" which involved rhythms created by hands and feet as accompaniment to the spirituals.

Portrait of John W. Bubbles,
as Sportin' Life in Porgy & Bess,
Carl Van Vechten, photographer,
December 27, 1935.
Creative Americans: Portraits by Van Vechten, 1932-1964

The play opened in Boston on September 30 and premiered in New York on October 10, 1935. The cast included Juilliard-trained singers Anne Brown as Bess and Ruby Elzy as Serena, Todd Duncan, a Howard University music professor as Porgy, and vaudevillian John W. Bubbles as Sportin' Life. The songs they sang, including "Summertime," "I've Got Plenty of Nothin'," "Bess, You is My Woman Now," and "It Ain't Necessarily So," have entered the American folk and popular repertoire, but are musically subtle and difficult to render, containing jazz, blues, and folk elements. George Gershwin wrote of his composition, "I think the music is so marvelous, I don't believe I wrote it." Most reviewers welcomed the opera. One notable exception was composer Virgil Thomson who had collaborated with Gertrude Stein on Four Saints in Three Acts, an opera with an all-black cast. Thomson called Porgy and Bess "crooked folklore and half-way opera." In spite of these sour notes, the opera played to appreciative audiences in Boston and New York.

Actors Protest Segregation

During its Washington, D.C. run, Todd Duncan led the cast in a strike to protest the National Theatre's segregation policy. The actors held out against offers by the theater to permit African-Americans to attend a "blacks only" performance.

As spokesman for the cast, Duncan stated that he would never play in a theater which barred him from purchasing tickets to certain seats because of his race. Theater management gave in to this demand and for the first time an integrated audience attended the National Theater.

The play folded after its Washington, D.C. run and West Coast engagements proved a financial disaster. For many years, the opera received more attention and acclaim in Europe and the Soviet Union than in the United States. Gershwin's complete score was not heard on an American stage again until 1976, when the Houston Grand Opera mounted a critically acclaimed production. In 1985, fifty years after its Broadway premier, the "folk opera" was performed by New York's Metropolitan Opera Company.

• Search on Gershwin or Porgy and Bess in Creative Americans:Portraits by Van Vechten, 1932-1964 for more photographs from a variety of productions of the opera.
• Explore The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip, an ethnographic field study completed by the Lomaxes four years after Gershwin's trip to South Carolina. Listen to original sound recordings of spirituals sung by a chain gang in South Carolina, and see photographs and manuscripts from the Lomaxes' journey through nine Southern states. See the Special Presentation, a guide to the collection's rich materials.
• Read the Today in History feature on Leontyne Price for more on the gifted lyric soprano who starred as Bess from 1952 to 1954 in New York.
• Search on Gullah in American Life Histories, 1936-1940 to find items from the South Carolina Writer's Project that reference Gullah culture.

The Rock Springs Massacre

Chinese Camp in the Mines,
circa 1851-1857.
California As I Saw It: First Person Narratives, 1849-1900

On September 2, 1885, a mob of white coal miners violently attacked their Chinese co-workers in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Twenty-eight Chinese were killed and fifteen wounded, some of whom later died. The homes of seventy-nine Chinese people were set ablaze and the bodies of many of the dead and wounded thrown into the flames. Hundreds of Chinese workers fled into the surrounding desert. Violence exploded after Chinese workers refused to participate in a strike for higher wages planned by Euro-American miners. A week later, federal troops escorted Chinese laborers back to the mines. After restoring order, federal troops remained at Rock Springs until 1898. Although the federal government refused responsibility for actions in a territory, President Grover Cleveland requested a compliant Congress to indemnify the Chinese for $150,000.

Chinese American Child,
William Henry Jackson, photographer,
circa 1900.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920

In the mid-1800s, large numbers of Chinese came to the U.S. to build the transcontinental railroad and to work in the gold fields. With completion of the railroad, the ebb of gold prospecting and widespread economic depression, jobs became scarce and Chinese immigrants became the brunt of increasing exclusion, racism, and violence. The Rock Springs Massacre, for example, followed a similar race riot in Tacoma, Washington where some seven hundred Chinese immigrants were shipped out of the city by force.

• Read the WPA interview "A Chinese Laundry at a Bargain Sale." This interview with a Seattle, Washington woman offers insight into the hostility Chinese Americans faced in nineteenth-century America.
• California As I Saw It: First Person Narratives, 1849-1900 contains many accounts of Chinese life at the time of the California gold rush and the years that followed. Search on Chinese to find many items including The Last of the Mill Creeks, and Early Life in Northern California by Sim Moak. The chapter "Chinese Trouble in the Early Days in California" describes the prejudice encountered by the Chinese community.
• Search the collection Before and After the Great Earthquake and Fire: San Francisco, 1897-1916 on the term Chinese to see early films of Chinatown and its residents. San Francisco Chinese Funeral records the funeral procession of Tom Kim Yung, military attaché with the Chinese legation to the United States whose suicide followed a police assault.