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On November 27, 1917, the celebrated African American tenor Roland Hayes gave an evening recital at the South Park Methodist Episcopal Church in Chicago’s South Side neighborhood. A young Margaret Bonds watched alongside her mother, Estella, enthralled by the tenor’s programming of Negro Spirituals. The city’s appetite for Black concert culture so deeply moved Nora Holt, music critic for the Chicago Defender, that she immediately proclaimed a “Chicago Renaissance.” Holt subsequently took decisive charge in further shaping Black classical Chicago and situated her work in a community of Black women world-makers. This talk explores the ways in which Samantha Ege maps these histories in her new book, South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene.
