Sissieretta Jones

Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones (January 5, 1868 or 1869 in Portsmouth, Virginia, United States, to Jeremiah Malachi Joyner, an African Methodist Episcopal minister a singer in a church choir where she began singing at an early age in her father's Pond Street Baptist Church. in Boston, studying under Flora Batson of the Bergen Star Company. In 1887, she performed at Boston's Music Hall before an audience of 5,000. During a performance at Wallack's Theater in New York, Jones came to the attention of Adelina Patti's manager, who recommended that Jones tour the West Indies with the Fisk Jubilee Singers. preferring Madame Jones. She later told a reporter that the name "rather annoys me... I am afraid people will think I consider myself the equal to Patti herself. I assure you I don't think so, but I have a voice and I am striving to win the favor of the public by honest merit and hard work." In February 1892, Jones performed at the White House for President Benjamin Harrison.

Jones performed at the Grand Negro Jubilee at New York's Madison Square Garden in April 1892 before an audience of 75,000. She sang the song "Swanee River" and selections from Verdi's La traviata. She was so popular that she was invited to perform at the Pittsburgh Exposition (1892) and the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893).

In June 1892, Jones became the first African American to sing at the Music Hall in New York (renamed Carnegie Hall the following year). Among the selections in her program were Gounod's "Ave Maria" and Verdi's "Sempre libera" from La traviata. and also managed artists such as Mark Twain and Henry Ward Beecher, and her fees began to rise. By 1895, she had become the "most well known and highly paid" performer of African American heritage of her time. She noted in her letters that she encountered less racial prejudice in Europe, and that performers' skin color was irrelevant to their reception by audiences. By 1896, she also had become frustrated with racism limiting her venues in the United States, particularly when the Metropolitan Opera, which considered her for a lead role, rescinded that opportunity because of her race. The Indianapolis Freeman reviewed the "Black Patti Troubadours" with the following: "The rendition which she and the entire company give of this reportorial opera selection is said to be incomparably grand. Not only is the solo singing of the highest order, but the choruses are rendered with a spirit and musical finish which never fail to excite genuine enthusiasm." As the show grew more organized by the early 1900s, she had added scenery and costumes to her opera excerpts, and there were definite plots and musical comedy where she appeared in the storyline. The company Troubadours made an important statement about the capabilities of black performers In the 1967 book Black Magic by Milton Meltzer and Langston Hughes, she was described as a "stunning woman with a beautiful voice". that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

As of 2003, several dresses from her early stage career were maintained by the Rhode Island Heritage Society. A plaque marks the area where Jones' home stood on Wheaton Street on Providence's East Side. A biography of Jones by Maureen Lee, titled Sissieretta Jones: The Greatest Singer of her Race, was published in May 2012. The research for the book was partly based on a scrapbook of Jones which was on display at Howard University.

In 2018, The New York Times published a belated obituary for her.