Two Clipped Magazine Advertisements for M. Sissieretta Jones’ “Black Patti’s Troubadours”

Portland, Oregon, 1899. Two double-sided clippings measuring approximately 7 ½ x 4 ¾ inches, both put together with tape. Slightly wrinkled and toned; excellent.. Matilda Sissieretta Jones (1869–1933) was an African-American opera singer from Portsmouth, Virginia. She studied at the Providence Academy of Music and the New England Conservatory in Boston. At the start of her career, Jones sang solo or in small groups, touring North and South America, the Caribbean, and Europe. Jones’ talent was renowned; she was the first Black artist to sing at Carnegie Hall, and she performed for multiple US presidents and the English royal family, among many other accomplishments.[1] In 1896 she formed Black Patti’s Troubadours—Jones was given the nickname “Black Patti” by a critic after famed Spanish opera singer Adelina Patti. The Troubadours would perform comical vaudeville and minstrel skits without Jones, followed by Jones performing her “operatic kaleidoscope” of musical excerpts.

Offered here are two magazine clippings—based on the advertisements, these were printed in Portland, Oregon—promoting two Black Patti’s shows: “A Rag Time Frolic at Ras-Bury Park” and “Jolly ‘Coon’-ey Island”. The latter was written by Ernest Hogan, a musician widely credited with creating the ragtime genre; he would become the first African-American performer to produce and star in a Broadway show (1907’s The Oyster Man). Jones’ kaleidoscope pieces include excerpts from Faust, Pirates of Penzance, and others; both shows also feature an audience-judged cakewalk. Of interest to scholars of M. Sissieretta Jones and African-American entertainers at the turn of the century.

[1] “Jones, M. Sissieretta (‘Black Patti’)”, in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, ed. Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates (Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 1064.