I Never Walked Alone: The Autobiography of an American Singer (review)

Operatic history boasts many hyphenated sopranos, mezzos, and contraltos, especially in bygone eras. Readers of annals and collectors of vintage vocal recordings will be familiar with the names of several such divas, from the legendary (Amelita Galli-Curci, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Anna Bahr-Mildenburg) to the obscure (Tina Poli-Randaccio, Janina Korolewicz-Wayda).

These famous singers were binomial and tended to stay that way; none of them is known to posterity by just one surname. Shirley Verrett managed to break the mold, however, enjoying an even more illustrious career as Shirley Verrett than she had earlier as Shirley Verrett-Carter. Shedding the married name—and the career-stifling, wife-slapping mate who supplied it—cost the singer a pretty penny, though. As a condition for their divorce, James Carter demanded what he thought would be a prohibitively costly concession: the relinquishing of the "considerable amount of property" they held jointly. Showing the gritty determination that propelled her climb up the operatic heap, "without batting an eye" or regretting the husband-startling decision for an instant, Verrett agreed to this extortion as an acceptable price for her personal and artistic freedom.

That account of the quid-pro-quo breakup of her marriage is just one of the personal and professional stories that Verrett tells, in a candid and earnest if sometimes less than scintillating way, in this autobiography coauthored by Christopher Brooks, an associate professor of African American studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, and gilded with glowing forewords by two of the Three Tenors (Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo). Ironically, her unsatisfactory union was a product of the religious upbringing that, even though she eventually abandoned the strict observance of her Seventh-Day Adventist faith, has always shaped and colored her personality, her outlook, and even her diet. Opera fans and feminists everywhere should be grateful that she left the Adventist fold, which "rejected divorce . . . and disapproved of opera, theater, and movies,"along with jazz, blues, (presumably) rock and roll, card playing, gambling, dancing, smoking, drinking, and makeup and favored kosherlike dietary laws (no pork or shellfish) that promoted vegetarianism but tolerated certain kinds of meat.

Although singing in opera was verboten, Verrett's mother (a rich-voiced soprano) and father (a good if less gifted baritone) appreciated their daughter's innate talent, encouraged her to sing at school assemblies, Rotary Club events, and church functions, and wanted her to have a concert career. Verrett's choir-director father gave her sometimes error-filled voice lessons and, when she was a teenager, offered to pay for instruction. She turned it down. Although she had stopped biting her fingernails while still a little girl because the school nurse told her she needed to have pretty hands if she were going to sing in public, she didn't feel ready for serious study. Then, after winning a 1948 singing contest that boasted John Charles Thomas as principal judge and artistic sponsor, the seventeen-year-old Verrett rejected the great baritone's suggestion that she study with Lotte Lehmann at California's Music Academy of the West. Five years later, however, while selling houses for a living, she decided to begin studying voice seriously—and picked a singing teacher out of the Yellow Pages. Five months after that, at the urging of her teacher's studio accompanist, she began taking lessons, as a soprano, with former Metropolitan Opera soprano Anna Fitziu. Appearances on the Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts television program led to another teacher switch, this time to Marion Freschl, who diagnosed Verrett as a mezzo-soprano, and enrollment at the Juilliard School of Music, where Freschl was on the faculty.

From then on, dramatic flair, hard work, luck, advantageous friendships both fortuitous and sought-after, a natural endowment that enabled her to tackle both soprano and mezzo parts...