Inez Matthews

Among the few African American singers to pursue a classical career in the middle 20th century, Inez Matthews made several recordings. She was heard on the soundtrack of the 1959 film Porgy and Bess. Matthews was born on August 23, 1917, in Ossining, New York. Her family was musical; her older brother, Edward Matthews, performed on tour with the famed Fisk Jubilee Singers. The pair were both heard by Katherine Moran Douglas, a soprano and a cast member at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and it was she who gave Inez her first singing lessons. Matthews also studied with Paulina Novikova and Frederick Wilkerson. She apparently had a gift for foreign languages. Matthews performed for several years with the all-male De Paur Infantry Chorus, formed during director Leonard De Paur's stint in the military. In October of 1950, Matthews scored her first big break as she performed for eight months as Irina, the lead female role, in Kurt Weill's musical Lost in the Stars. She also appeared in Virgil Thomson's opera Four Saints in Three Acts, on which De Paur had collaborated with Thomson in an early concert production. However, Matthews, despite breakthroughs by Leontyne Price and a few other African American singers, still found most operatic stages closed to her, and she gained little recognition. She was probably most often heard, although she remained invisible, as the singing voice of actress Ruth Attaway in the role of Serena in director Otto Preminger's 1959 film of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Matthews made three LP recordings as a soloist for the Period Records label: a triple LP set of Schubert song cycles, one of Schubert's Schwanengesang and songs by Beethoven, and one of African American spirituals. In the late '60s, she taught voice at Virginia State College (now Virginia State University), and she continued to give private voice lessons. Matthews died in Bronx, New York, on March 29, 2004. Much of what is known about her comes from a 1994 article by Kari Paulson, "Conversations with Inez Matthews," in the Journal of Singing. Matthews' recordings of Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin, D. 795, and Winterreise, D. 911, were reissued by the Parnassus label as part of its Black Swans series.
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