E. T. Greenfield, “The Black Swan”

For almost two decades I have been researching biography and reception of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, an African American singer who toured the U. S., Canada, and U.K. in the mid-1850s as the “Black Swan.” This work has taken me to Philadelphia where I spent a month digging in  the archives at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and Library Company of Philadelphia. I also read quite a lot of digitized 19th-century newspapers! I’m interested in any and all tiny fragments that suggests biographical details about her remarkable life, because I still know only enough to keep me on the perpetual search. My publications synthesize biographical details into narratives of her early life, debut concert tour, and travels in the U.K. Additionally, I have a lot to say about her reception, association with elite African American activists of the nineteenth century, and extensive philanthropic work.

To read more about Greenfield, the “Black Swan,” see these publications:

• “Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield’s Mid-to-Late Career, Philanthropy, and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Music 40: 2 (Summer 2022): 211-244.
• “Blackface Minstrelsy and the Reception of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield,” Journal of the Society for American Music 15:3 (2001.)
• “Becoming the ‘Black Swan’ in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America: Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield’s Early Life and Debut Concert Tour,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67:1 (Spring 2014).
• “The ‘Black Swan’ in England: Abolition and the Reception of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield,” American Music Research Journal 14 (2004): 7-25.

Jenny Lind, “The Swedish Nightingale”

At the time of Greenfield’s debut in 1851, comparison (and contrast) to Jenny Lind was ubiquitous in the newspaper discourse. Lind was certainly the more famous of the touring concert singers. As a white European, Lind represented “ideal” feminine musicality in ways Greenfield could not because mainstream audiences and the press heard and reviewed her singing through racist and misogynist lenses. To read more about Lind, see my essay: “Jenny Lind and the Making of Mainstream American Popular Music,” Open Access Musicology (Fall 2020).

Joshua Simpson’s Anti-Slavery Songs

Some of my most recent research is on abolition songs, particularly of Joshua Simpson, a little known African American composer and activist who published two collections of anti-slavery song lyrics. Scholars of African American literature have anthologized Simpson’s songs as poetry, which is important to do. Still, he intended his verses to be sung, and we know nineteenth-century activists sang them in a variety of social contexts. This research has recently been published:  “Joshua McCarter Simpson’s Songs and Mid-Nineteenth Century Antislavery Activism,” Journal of the Society for American Music 18 (2024): 108–127.

I presented “Intertextuality in Joshua Simpson’s Original Anti-Slavery Songs and the Expanding Abolition Movement in 1850s America” to the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in November 2020 and “Sentimentality and Anti-Slavery Activism in Joshua Simpson’s Songs” to the annual meeting of the Society for American Music in March 2022.

Music Appreciation as Cultural Movement and Ideology

Many music professors teach “music appreciation,” but I have studied this as a historical and ideological practice, viewing music appreciation as a cultural movement in early-20th century America that unfortunately has a long legacy. This was the topic of my PhD dissertation at University of Wisconsin Madison and subsequent publications for the Journal of Historical Research in Music Education and Routledge’s Milestones in Music Education (2024). For more on these topics, read: “Selling Musical Taste in Early-Twentieth-century America:  Frances E. Clark and the Business of Music Appreciation,” Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 38:2 (2017).