Frances Elliot Clark (1860–1958) lived through a transitional time for music education and the music industry in the United States, and she influenced American culture by bringing these two communities together. She brought her background in school and community music education along with strong ties within music education communities to the position of director of the Education Division at the Victor Talking Machine Company. As Victor’s spokesperson and a national leader in the music appreciation movement, she convinced educators to overcome their distrust of the recording industry and view Victor machines and records as modern pedagogical tools. By aligning the cause of music appreciation with contemporary social reform efforts, Clark heightened the social relevance of school and community music education and she modernized nineteenth-century notions of taste, self-improvement, and cultural progress. She even taught Victor salespeople to use the discourse of music appreciation that resonated with educators and community volunteers and helped them sell to women. Stemming from the study of Clark’s Collected Papers in the Special Collections of the University of Maryland Libraries, this article demonstrates how Clark persuaded educators, school administrators, community volunteers, and Victor employees to spread the ideologies of music appreciation.

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Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield was first in a lineage of African American women vocalists to earn national and international acclaim. Born into slavery in Mississippi, she grew up in Philadelphia and launched her first North American concert tour from upstate New York in 1851. Hailed as the “Black Swan” by newspapermen involved in her debut, the soubriquet prefigured a complicated reception of her musical performances. As an African American musician with slavery in her past, she sang what many Americans understood to be “white” music (opera arias, sentimental parlor song, ballads of British Isles, and hymns) from the stages graced by touring European prima donnas on other nights, with ability to sing in a low vocal range that some heard as more typical of men than women. As reviewers and audiences combined fragments of her biography with first-hand experiences of her concerts, they struggled to make the “Black Swan” sobriquet meaningful and the transgressions she represented understandable. Greenfield's musical performances, along with audience expectations and the processes of patronage, management, and newspaper discourse complicated perceived cultural boundaries of race, gender, and class. The implications of E. T. Greenfield's story for antebellum cultural politics and for later generations of singers are profound.

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This article explores blackface minstrelsy in the context of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's singing career of the 1850s–1870s. Although Greenfield performed a version of African American musicality that was distinct from minstrel caricatures, minstrelsy nonetheless impacted her reception. The ubiquity of minstrel tropes greatly influenced audience perceptions of Greenfield's creative and powerful transgressions of expected race and gender roles, as well as the alignment of race with mid-nineteenth-century notions of social class. Minstrel caricatures and stereotypes appeared in both praise and ridicule of Greenfield's performances from her debut onward, and after successful US and transatlantic tours established her notoriety, minstrel companies actually began staging parody versions of Greenfield, using her sobriquet, “Black Swan.” These “Black Swan” acts are evidence that Greenfield's achievements were perceived as threats to established social hierarchies.