Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Georgia: A Grand Mansion of Sound with Sharon McMahon

Episode Date: August 23, 2021

In this solo episode, Sharon shares the story and career of opera sensation Jessye Norman from Augusta, Georgia. By the end of this episode, you will love and adore the voice of this woman, who was a pioneer in so much more than opera. Jessye was born in the 1940’s South, where Jim Crow Laws were in place - schools, businesses, and her town were still segregated. Her mother was a school teacher and taught all her children to read and play the piano - and that is where her family discovered her ability to sing. Her parents taught her that she is no different than anyone else and deserves to live her dreams. Sharon walks listeners through stories from Jessye's career and how she helped change the opera. For more information on this episode including all resources and links discussed go to https://www.sharonmcmahon.com/podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, hello, hello. So happy that you're here. I have just a delightful story for you today. We are doing something a little bit different. Instead of me sharing this story with one of my friends, I'm going to share it with you. And you can let me know, do you like hearing just me talk to you? Or do you enjoy hearing me talk to my friends? So let me know after you listen to this what your thoughts are. But today, I want to get into the story of a woman who really has just touched my heart. She is one of the queens of American music. So let's get into it. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. And welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. This is a woman who perhaps you don't know now, but you definitely should.

Y'all know who Jessi Norman is? I hope after this episode, you will fall in love with her the way I have. Jessi Norman is an American opera star. Don't turn off this episode and be like, hate opera, hate it, not interested, not interested in opera. Let me tell you, I am not an opera fan. I am not somebody who is like, ooh, gotta go to the Met, gotta listen to all the people in the costumes sing words I don't understand. I get it. I am not an opera fan, but her story, her voice, I just love it so much. She was born in Augusta, Georgia in 1945. This was, of course, during the time of Jim Crow.

Schools were segregated. Her mother was a school teacher and her mother taught only African American students. Jesse Norman was from a black family. So her mother got paid very little to teach at the school. Her dad was an insurance salesman, but her parents strongly believed in their children's abilities. And all of the children in the family were taught to read by their mother at the age of four. They were all also taught to play the piano. And Jessie Norman displayed an aptitude for singing at a very young age. She started singing in churches, singing with a group, and then would just kind of like break away from the little kids group and would be up and down the aisle singing, trying to get the crowd to notice her. She started

doing that when she was four. And at seven, she entered a singing competition and sang, God Will Take Care of You. She only came in third, and it was because she forgot some of the lyrics. She was so disappointed to only come in third. Somebody asked her later, how do you think that went? How are you feeling? And her response was, I guess God will take care of me because that is the last time I will ever have a memory slip in public. And it was, it was the last time she ever forgot the lyrics to a song in public. She said this in an interview, girls were born at the time, obviously in the 1940s. She was growing up in the 50s.

Girls were born, given a certain amount of schooling. Then they were married, were mothers and homemakers. And if they worked at all, were limited to very specific kinds of jobs, not meant to leave a real mark on the world outside their homes. Too few of our elders seemed to imagine a bigger world for us. I loved this part. She said, I craved bigger. And I found it hard, even at an early age, to fit my mind, body, and spirit into the too tiny box carved out for girls and women of my generation. And I really resonated with that. How many of us have felt like we're too much? We're too much for whatever it is. We're too

much for our friend group. We're too much for our teacher. We're too much for our parents. So many of us, I think, have experienced feeling like we're too much and we need to be less so we're less noticeable, so we're less annoying. Even one of the world's greatest singers, she truly is one of the greatest soprano opera singers of all time, grew up feeling like she was too much. She also says, my mother followed her passion and poured her very soul into the betterment of African-American children who at the time counted on their own communities to give them what segregation denied them, a fighting chance in a country that had yet to allow those of African descent to participate fully in the pursuit of the American ideal. Even though Brown

versus the Board of Education reintegrated schools legally in the United States in the early 1950s, the schools of Augusta, Georgia were not integrated until the 60s. There were a lot of places in the country that just kind of straight up ignored the Supreme Court ruling and where she grew up was one of them. She also says great progress has been made and yet still there is so very much to do. And I was like, if that is not the truth. And I love this too. She said, my mother and countless others are counting on us. Her story, it's just moved me so much. So when she was nine, again, she's going to segregated schools. She got a radio for her birthday. She had never listened to opera music before. Obviously there weren't CDs, nothing could be downloaded.

So she listened to what was available and she discovered on Saturday nights, there was a broadcast from The Met, the Metropolitan in New York City, and she was fascinated by it. She made a point of listening to The Met Opera broadcast every week. And she asked her mom, can I take voice lessons? And her mom, being a musical woman herself, her dad sang in a choir, her mom played multiple instruments. Her mom said, sure. And she found her a voice teacher. She started taking voice lessons in middle school and then continued taking voice lessons into high

school. She talked about how when she was coming of age during the civil rights movement, this left an indelible impression on her. Her parents were concerned over her physical safety as a teenager. As a young black woman living in the South, wanting her own independence, her parents still felt like, I don't know how safe it is for you. She had brothers and she described how difficult it was for her to not be given the same privileges as her brothers because of her parents' fear for her physical safety. She said, rooted in a specific place and time in the history of our nation, in the deep South, where people marched, bled, and soldiered their way through the civil rights movement, every image of African-Americans being run down with water hoses and chased by dogs

brought long lectures from them about each of us being born a child of the creator and that we were just as good as anyone who breathes on this planet. She talked over and over again about how her parents did not want their children to grow up believing that they were less than anyone else. And that even though these terrible things were happening in the world, it did not make them less. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind thethe-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve!

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podcasts. So when she was 16, she entered a voice competition in Philadelphia. She was obviously extraordinarily talented, but she didn't win. She did not win the voice competition. And yet there were people there who listened to her and said, she has got something special. They offered her a full scholarship to Howard University in Washington, DC. While she was midway through studying for her degree though, her dad died and her family was like, you probably should come home. Like we might need help with your younger sibling. And so she was about to leave college when her voice teacher from Augusta, the woman who had been her voice teacher throughout middle and high school, held a concert as a fundraiser to allow Jessie to stay in college. And she did. She stayed in college. She finished her degree in music at Howard. And then she quickly discovered that in late 1960s America, that race relations in the United States were such that there were

almost no jobs for a black opera singer of her caliber. She was an incredible soprano, but her voice had much more range than that. And she felt like if she stayed in the United States, she was going to be relegated to a very, very small number of stereotypical roles. She was not going to be able to sing Italian and German opera the way that she really wanted to. Again, remember in 1968, Martin Luther King had just been shot. This was a time of tremendous upheaval in the United States. So she chose to go to Europe. She moved to Germany and performed for a number of years at the Berlin Opera. She described while she was performing all over Europe in the 60s and 70s, that some opera houses had this policy of paying their performers in cash during the

intermission. Instead of paying them after the show or giving them a check, they would come around with an envelope of cash and they would give it to the performers while they were taking a little break. And she said this was very uncomfortable for her, first of all, because she felt like she was going to lose the money and that it was just awkward to take an envelope of cash and then stick it in her purse and then leave her purse unattended and just felt awkward to her. So one night she was backstage. It was the intermission. She got an envelope from the person who worked for the opera and she just kind of was opening it a little bit, peeking in there. And then the person came back and was like, oh, I'm sorry, that is the larger amount of

pay for the tenor, the male singer. And they took the envelope away from her and gave her a smaller envelope with less money. smaller envelope with less money. She described how she felt in that moment that as a woman, your role in opera is absolutely as equal as a man's is. In some operas, your role is more important. There was no doubt that what she was doing, the service she was providing, the experience she was providing to everybody who was listening was on par with what the men were getting paid, but yet she was getting paid less. And that experience left an impression on her. She felt like that was incredibly unfair. Nevertheless, she persisted.

She persisted and she performed all over Europe. She was not awarded any roles in the United States. She did do a concert in the United States in the early 1970s, but it wasn't until 1982, 14 years after starting out in her opera career, that she got offered an opera role in the United States. And within one year of beginning her opera career in the United States, she was performing at the Met. And if you're not an opera fan, like I'm not an opera fan, the Met is basically the pinnacle of where you can perform in the United States. It is difficult to overstate how popular she quickly became in circles who enjoyed opera, even those who didn't. She became a household name. She had

Christmas specials on TV. She was being asked to sing at all of these incredible events. Like Ronald Reagan said, will you sing at my second inauguration? She was so busy. Just in one year, she filmed her Christmas special. Then she was performing in Salzburg. She was performing in Boston. She was performing in Tel Aviv. Like This woman did not quit. Her star continued rising. In the early 90s, she was asked to sing at Jackie Kennedy's funeral. And then in 1995, she was tapped to sing Amazing Grace at the Kennedy Center. It was a program that was honoring Sidney Poitier. I'm going to play you a little clip. You can go on YouTube and watch this. You can see the look on Sidney's face. His hands are covering his face. He is so overcome with emotion listening to her sing.

They cut to Bill Clinton, tears, tears literally streaming down his face. And he does not even make a motion to wipe them away. Just tears on tears on tears. So let's take just a super quick listen to her performance of Amazing Grace at the Kennedy Center in 1995. Like me I once was lost But now I'm found Was blind But now I see. Her voice is just incredible. Her list of accomplishments is so long. It's so long. I mean, she won five Grammy Awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award. She was named an honorary ambassador to the United

Nations. She also sang at the second inauguration of Bill Clinton. She sang at the opening of the Atlanta Olympics in the United States. She sang for Queen Elizabeth on her 60th birthday. She sang for the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. She got a Medal of Arts from Obama. She received 30, three zero honorary doctorates from colleges around the world. That is the impact Jesse Norman has had on music. 30 honorary doctorates from colleges around the world. honorary doctorates from colleges around the world. That is incredible. I'd be willing to venture that that is almost unrivaled in the world. If you find somebody that has more than 30 honorary doctorates, send me an email because I would like to know. It's so impressive. One of the things that struck me is that she was tapped to sing America the Beautiful at the sixth month anniversary of the 9-11

bombings of the World Trade Center. So of course there were these two holes in the ground. As a memorial, they put two huge beams of light from the site up into the sky. And at the lighting of this memorial, she sang America the Beautiful. And she later said in an interview why she thinks America the Beautiful should be the national anthem. The Star-Spangled Banner, it is unsingable. No, truly. And I know that there are people who say, you know, she must be absolutely crazy. But I really do feel that the Star-Spangled Banner, that the Star-Spangled Banner, it covers too much territory. That is an octave and a fifth.

That means you've got 13 notes that are incorporated into our national anthem. For a song that is to be sung by a general public, one octave is enough. And the song that I wish we had as a national anthem is America the Beautiful. It doesn't talk about war. It doesn't talk about anything except the beauty of this land and the joy that we should have in being in this land. And it's a much more, for me, much more beautiful song, even though I understand completely the rousing that happens in the heart from listening just to the opening bars of the Star-Spangled Banner. So a reviewer from the New York Times listened to one of her concerts and said this about her voice. It was a grand mansion of sound. It opens onto unexpected vistas. It contains sunlit rooms, narrow passageways, and cavernous falls. What a description. I love what she had to say too,

that other black opera singers who came before her, who were not given the same opportunities that she was, she says, they made it possible for me to say, I will sing French opera, or I'll sing German opera instead of being told you will sing only Porgy and Bess. And she went on to say, look, it's unrealistic to pretend that racial prejudice doesn't exist. It does. It's one thing to have a set of laws and quite another to change the hearts and minds of men. That takes longer. I do not consider my blackness a problem. I think it looks rather nice. In about 2015, Jessie Norman suffered a spinal cord injury. She didn't really make public how it happened, but she did spend the last four years of her life confined to a wheelchair. She

continued to sing. She continued to give interviews, make public appearances, despite being in a wheelchair. And this is what she had to say. I sing and I truly enjoy doing so and have done so practically all my time on earth. I live a blessed life filled with enormous pleasure in seeing the effect that music can have on the emotions and spirits of people. I do not take it for granted. And I know that making music that means something to someone else is a privilege. So on September 30th of 2019, Jessie Norman died. She died in New York of septic shock and multi-system organ failure related to her spinal cord injury. All kinds of other opera singers sang at her memorial service. The opera world will truly never be the same. I would love to have you listen to just a few clips of her music. If you go to YouTube

and you Google Jessi Norman, it's spelled J-E-S-S-Y-E, Jessi Norman, and you look at her beautiful face, just close your eyes and listen to her voice. It truly is moving. It truly is just a voice of power, of singular talent. I love the imagery of her voice was a grand mansion of sound. And I also love her outlook. I love that she knew what difficult circumstances she was born into, what difficult circumstances her family and others that went before her faced, and she did not let it stop her. She did not let those circumstances dictate who she became. She decided who she would become. That's it for today, everybody. I hope you love this. I hope you enjoyed getting a peek into a Georgian, an American, who really did something impressive with her life.

I'll see you soon. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or a review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. I cannot wait to

have another mind-blown moment with you next episode. Thanks again for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. you you you you you you you you