Song brings of itself a cheerfulness that makes the heart to joy.
The notice in the Fairbanks News-Miner was small. She was ninety-one. How much history that notice recalled-the history of song, of opera, of the struggle of a Black woman to break the barriers of prejudice which today seem far from the America she knew growing up in Philadelphia, and afterwards in the world she conquered and held enthralled during the more than four decades of her brilliant career. The greatest musicians and impresarios of our century praised this extraordinary figure. In any century only a handful of extraordinary men and women are known to countless millions around the globe as great artists and great persons.