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254 lost sounds saying, “We’re still paying for him. When I was coming up back in1934 and ’35, they didn’t forget about old Jack. I had to live like a saint to get a break.”29 Old hatreds die hard. Jack Johnson lived to the ripe old age of sixty-eight, and died as he had lived, furiously and at high speed. He was killed in a automobile wreck on June 10, 1946, while speeding down a highway near Raleigh, North Carolina. Postscript The legend of Jack Johnson does not end there. As America emerged, slowly, from the darkness of institutionalized intolerance and racism, he began to be viewed more favorably as a pioneer in the long struggle for black equality. He was particularly appealing during the rebellious 1960s, and in 1967 a hit Broadway play was produced based on his famous 1910 fight with Jim Jeffries, called The Great White Hope. It won a Pulitzer Prize as well as Tony Awards for the both the play and its stars, James Earl Jones (whose character was called “Jack Jefferson”) and Jane Alexander. In 1970 the play was made into a Twentieth-Century Fox feature film, also starring Jones and Alexander. Both this film and a documentary, Jack Johnson: The Big Fights, were nominated for Oscars that year. Several books about Johnson were issued, or reissued, most of them playing up the controversy and spirit of rebellion that had followed him throughout his life. Some were less about Johnson than they were vitriolic attacks on racism (the biography by his friend Robert deCoy, for example, uses the “n word” on practically every page). Few writers seem to have known about his recordings or the voice that presented a somewhat different picture—an intelligent, thoughtful man who knew exactly what he was doing. Jack Johnson was a rule-breaker, but he led by his own example of excellence, not by being a firebrand. As Irene Pineau Johnson wrote to the editors of Vanity Fair in 1926, “You writers from whom words and stories flow so glibly, most of the time will not look beneath the surface to even see the facts in a case. . . . How many men would be willing to survive the uphill climb and struggle, enduring the bitterness and heartaches, as Jack Johnson has done, and who could still remain the steady, temperate man he is today? Very few! These virtues have not the earmarks of a ‘levee Negro.’ You are entirely mistaken in your impression of him. Signed / Mrs. Irene Johnson.” 17 Daisy Tapley The contralto Daisy Tapley may have been the first African American woman to record commercially in the United States.1 We must say “may have been,” because we cannot be sure who is on all the lost brown wax cylinders of the 1890s. The elusive Kentucky Jubilee Singers cylinders (1894), if they truly existed, may have contained female voices. Moreover, if Tapley was the first, it was on the basis of a single duet recording in which she did not take a solo line. 04.235-334_Broo 12/17/03, 1:46 PM 254 255 Tapley’s impact on recorded history may have been slight, but her contribution to the world of black music was considerable, making her one record of special interest . She was born Daisy Robinson in Big Rapids, Michigan, c. 1882, the daughter of Harvey and Martha Robinson.2 Shortly thereafter her family moved to Grand Rapids, and, in 1890, to Chicago. Daisy showed great musical promise and as a child studied with organist Clarence Eddy and pianist Emil Liebling, among others. At age twelve she became the organist at Quinn Chapel. At age seventeen she entered show business, joining the three Winslow sisters to form an act called “The Colored Nightingales ,” which played at the Alhambra Theatre in Chicago in 1899.3 This was followed during 1900 and 1901 by various engagements in Chicago, with the Slayton Jubilee Singers, Prof. N. Clark Smith, and others. Shortly thereafter she met a young actor named Green Henry Tapley, a member of the Williams and Walker theatrical troupe. They were married around 1903,4 and Daisy joined the company, traveling with it to London where she met the great composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and others. Back in the United States she appeared with Williams and Walker in vaudeville in December 1905, at the same Alhambra Theatre where she had debuted as a teenager. Green (who styled himself somewhat grandiosely as “G. Henri...

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