Barbara Smith Conrad:
Mezzo-soprano, Civil Rights Pioneer
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Picture the scene: it is midnight on a Tuesday in the summer of 1946. Your car has broken down about 10 miles east of the tiny northeast Texas town of Pittsburg at a little dirt crossroads called Center Point. Through the thick layer of pines, you spot a light in a window. And as you approach the sweltering house of this rural black family, you hear music coming through its open windows. It's not blues crackling off a 78, or gospel, or spirituals, or even the Hit Parade. It's Mozart, and it's live! At a piano sits a boy of 10, executing a sonata like a veteran, and beside him, his precocious six-year-old sister is singing--now lilting her way through an art song with his patient help. According to cosmopolitan diva Barbara Smith Conrad, who today is a Manhattanite and world-renown mezzo-soprano, that's pretty much how it started. That would be a fairly good story if we stopped right there, but there is more. In 1957, she was 17, a sophomore voice student at The University of Texas. Smith had auditioned and won the lead in the Purcell opera Dido and Aeneas, she as Dido, queen of Carthage, and the love interest of a white Aeneas. In one of the notable episodes in U.S. civil rights history, Smith was told by University administrators that she could not perform the role. In the words of state representative Joe Chapman, one of several legislators who reportedly pressured the administration, it was "only for the betterment of The University of Texas." She remained at the University for the next two years, her nontypical college career continuing with moral and financial support from the likes of Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, whose film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? scandalized establishment America over the very same issue a full decade later. To shield their friend and confound antagonists, black women across campus began using the name "Barbara Smith." When she joined Equity, the entertainment labor union, after graduating in 1959, there was already a Barbara Smith registered, so she began using her father's first name, Conrad. During the '70s, she spent six years touring Europe and South America with various opera groups. In 1977 she played Marian Anderson in the three-hour ABC movie Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years. She won acclaim in the Houston Grand Opera's Carmen. In 1981, Conrad signed a contract with both the Vienna State Opera and the Metropolitan Opera Company, each considered among the most distinguished opera companies in the world. Conrad remained understandably estranged from The University of Texas for some 25 years, until then-president Peter Flawn reached out to her in 1984 and brought her back into the UT community. That year, Conrad returned to UT to debut in the premiere of Earl Stewart's opera Al-Inkishafi. The following year, the Texas Exes (Ex-Students' Association) named Conrad a Distinguished Alumna. She returns to UT now almost every year for the Distinguished Alumnus Awards, where she often takes the stage and leads the audience in what is surely the most refined and interpretive version of "The Eyes of Texas" performed anywhere. No longer with the Met, her recent projects have included recording Spirituals in 1995 in concerts on the east and west coasts. Whether on the world's finest stages or puttering around one of her two Upper West Side apartments in Manhattan, Conrad never really goes offstage. A diva to the core, her inflection, diction, facial expressions, all could be understood from the back row of a darkened theater just as they are across the kitchen table. Were this interview completely accurate, virtually every sentence would end with an exclamation point. "I'm a farm girl," she says, now traipsing past the garden she has planted on the balcony she shares with her accompanist and roommate, Pat Sage, on 72nd Street. She might have been a farm girl, but she is every bit an uptown woman. Tell me about where you grew up. 
I grew up between two communities. Pittsburg, Texas, has always been our home. It's where my mother was born, in a little community called Center Point, a very special place, a unique and extraordinary place. We still have a home in Pittsburg. The community itself was founded by six freedmen; one of them was my great-grandfather. It gets its name because we had Lone Star Steel quite nearby. It was a hub. We didn't have the malls. We didn't have those things to distract. All of the businesses were downtown. Center Point is smack-dab in the pine trees. You couldn't get more country than that. It was so country that we had no paved roads when I was little. It was farm country with some small cattle ranches. What did your parents do? Both of our parents started off as teachers. My mother and father started a school in Cass County. The school was between two rural communities: Honey Grove and Shady Grove; one was Baptist, one was Methodist, too funny. That's where I was actually born. My father went on to make a rather auspicious career in the armed forces. He was a major in World War II and Korea, terribly injured in both -- shell shock, mortar shock. He had a good head for math and was a born leader. Momma continued in the public schools in Cass County where I was born, near Texarkana. My father came from a little town called Leesburg. My parents met at Center Point. We were just there with my mom and sister and family to celebrate the 30th year of this church homecoming. Mother kept us all together. We never traveled. We were not true army brats because it wasn't so great for black soldiers, "African-American" soldiers, we call them now (which I actually prefer). She just felt it was better for the continuity of the family--sense of permanence, sense of base--to keep us there, which meant that we were raised by a lot of people--aunts, uncles. What about siblings? We were originally five. I didn't get to know my oldest sister. I was a year old when she died at 12 of adolescent diabetes. And in 1993 I lost a brother who was really my reason for being in the business, Dinard Smith. He was a real child prodigy, the real McCoy, on the piano. He could play anything, anything in any key. He wasn't overly fond of jazz. He didn't resonate there, but you name any old tune, pop tune, gospel tune, hymn tune, he could play it, and of course, he was playing Mozart sonatas by the time he was five or six years old. He was just that kind of music genius. He loved what we called the lyric art of singing. He was just enamored with that sound. And so I learned some very complicated music when I was very little. I'm the youngest. I'm the last of the Mohicans. (Laughs.) Was he the only other musical one in your family? The family made music every opportunity we got. My mother comes from a family of voices, voices, voices. She has a beautiful lyric soprano voice, and until a few years ago, she could still harmonize on a dime. She now has Alzheimer's and lives with my sister and brother-in-law. My father came out of the army at a certain point to be more of a family man, look after his kids who were growing up very quickly, for about five or six years. I remember often his coming into the living room where the piano was at 12, 1 in the morning. "You gotta get up at 4:30 in the morning. You plan to stay up all night? Get to bed, chaps!"(Laughs) I love it to this day! What began to happen was I showed a real aptitude for music and because of the programs in school like UIL [University Interscholastic League], we had opportunities to compete. And I had wonderful teachers. Did you sing in church? Oh, my goodness. You didn't have an option whether you sang in church or wrote for the Sunday School class. My mother was an English teacher much of her life. So your penmanship had to be just so, and your grammar had to be just so. Consequently we got all those duties. It wasn't a hardship. I can't say that we were forced. Was it Baptist? Oh, yes. Roy Vaughan [UT Texas Exes (Ex-Students' Association) executive director 1976-1994] calls me an opera-singing Baptist evangelist. Don't you love it?! That's my favorite title in the whole world. Roy was such a comfort zone. He, Bob Dorsey, and Shirley Bird Perry were there when I started going back to UT. The people who really got me back into the fold were Peter and Priscilla Flawn. To be totally honest, it wasn't that I had planned to never be back in Austin again, but sometimes the way one deals with adversity and heartbreak and all those difficulties in those years is to shut down. The brain has this wonderful anesthetic quality about it. I just blocked it out. It was a place I didn't feel particularly welcome, I guess. I don't ever want to be unfair to the people who were so supportive and so incredibly courageous and loving towards me. They were there too. But as an institution, it was my "Shoene Wiege meiner Leiden," the cradle of a lot of my sorrow, the poem by Heine, music set by Schumann. That's what it is to me. What was your UT experience like before Dido and Aeneas? It was exciting. It was controversial to go there. My father was supportive. By that time he was retired. My mother was terrified of my going and stayed pretty much in a state of terror the whole time I was there. Did she ever come to visit? Yes, a couple of times. She knew of my somewhat outspoken nature, which she always blamed on my father: "Oh, you're just like your father!" It's true. I wasn't a militant child. It wasn't my nature then, still isn't. The courage to speak and say what I feel and think is quite another matter. Perhaps if I had been born in some ghetto someplace or militancy had been part of the core of my bringing up, I probably would have been a great candidate, because I was certainly angry enough! But as is taught in the Christian faith, you make peace, not war. There is something so much more dynamic and noble if you can turn lemons into lemonade somehow. Also, I was very interested in people like Gandhi and Dr. King, these people who taught a different philosophy, really. But I was interested in being a spokesperson. That was important to me. My music was the way I did that. I was like any other student. Excited, scared, totally intimidated by the size. Doesn't that sound familiar? A friend of mine said, "Oh I want to start walking with you, Barbara. Let's meet. Now remember, I'll have to put on sunscreen and probably won't do any makeup." I said, "Guess what. I burn, too. Imagine that! And guess what. This skin doesn't mean I don't wear makeup." So you scratch below the surface, as was said to me by a voice professor of mine years ago, and: a) we're all the same color and b) we're all beasts, potentially. I was having a ball on some levels. It was an exciting time. Where did you live? Huston-Tillotson was two different schools then, and there was a dormitory that they leased to The University of Texas. The [African-American] girls lived there, those who didn't live in the town. So we didn't live on campus, we lived across the big highway, which looks nothing like when I went to school there. It was very hilly and rocky. And the [African-American] boys lived in the ROTC barracks, which had been abandoned. Not ideal. Certainly not ideal for getting to know people and mingling. The reason, more than any other, that I'm so happy that I was a music student going to that University, is that music is a great healer and a great bonder. I got close to people because of the commonality of our interest, the passion of music, the love of it. It just transcends everything. When I first discovered Bach preludes and fugues, I had to think about who I was talking to. You had to be reminded in those moments who was white, who was black, who was Asian, who was whatever. It was somebody who was struggling with the same issues you were struggling with, who was so passionately in love with the art form. That's where I was much of the time, which is why you could be lulled into not looking at how inequitable things were and what a cauldron of things were going on that were not so peaceful, not so wonderful underneath. And I'm glad I had that way to express, to relate, to interlate, to escape once in a while. Because there were plenty of reminders. For example, back then, where the stadium is now was a very steep hill with lots and lots of rocks around. That was sort of a shortcut to the dormitory to walk home. It was true of students then and now. We're always among the last ones to leave the campus, those who are in labs or in music labs. In the course of Dido and Aeneas, on the way home from rehearsal one night, some big guys came to rough me up. It was clearly designed to scare me. There was a lot of fear. There were a lot of crank calls. People threatening you. Every time I would sing at University Baptist Church for a while, there was a threat. It kept me slightly on edge, and if I had one real lasting pain, it's not the physical. It's not even the emotional. It's that those things interfere with your ability to concentrate on the things for which you went there in the first place. I've always loved literature, I just loved learning things. I mean, I wasn't a nerd. I didn't have that kind of major brain power like the Bob Inmans of the world. But I was curious for sure. Are you calling Bob Inman a nerd? No! (Laughing) Bob Inman's not a nerd! I love him dearly. He and his wife Nancy are among my dearest friends. But you know, one of those wunderkinds. My wunderkindism was my ability to communicate through my music and my ability to absorb those forms. But it did make it virtually impossible to be a student. You were so busy surviving. How you prepare the youth is so crucial. My Uncle Bob called me Big Shot, my Aunt Maggie called me Miss International Find. That's the icing. But the filling, when you bake the cake, starts way before that. I was around people who were educated and believed that education was extremely important. It was loved, not just a way out. I have a sister who, to this day, eats books. What was not in the background was the strength that comes perhaps with the day-to-day living with both parents. My father, being an army person, was away. He was often a figment of my imagination. I would fantasize a great deal about who he was and what he was. Luckily, I wasn't off course much of the time. But there was still a lot of that in there. So how you raise your children, what you teach them, how you teach them to cope, give them, please God, some coping skills. That's what's so crucial here, especially when you walk into what a friend refers to as the New York blood bath. For me it was the Texas blood bath. It took a big chunk of my soul. All of this is about energy, which I didn't understand at that age, of course. But you suck it away into these avenues that have nothing to do with your preparation for your life! God, I still can get a little worked up about it. How did you overcome the bitterness you must have felt and return to campus and back into the UT community? I felt so betrayed by people I trusted at the high echelons, not my professors, who were wonderful to me, absolutely not. (I had one who was kind of weird but she got over it. We taught her! You do have to teach people.) I felt such pain. Inside I cried for years. You rarely saw a tear. And it was swallowing those tears that I think was the most costly for me. It would have been better if I would have screamed and ranted and raved. Nancy McMeans, who was editor of The Daily Texan at the time, and Bob Dickerson, a law student, took me aside, and got me to write the story that was ultimately released through Associated Press and UPI, because I was flinging barbs everywhere and my message wasn't being heard. All of East Austin gathered around me and supported me, but I hid my feelings very well. And it was not until two or three years after I left Austin that the anger began to really come out. I'm just not a person who likes to live back there. I like to remember it to move forward when I need to. I'd like to take the lessons from it and use them, and I do. But I am not invested at all in hanging on to a bunch of useless energy. Had I done so, I would have never gone back to UT Austin. In doing so I would have been robbed of some of the most meaningful relationships in my life right now. What are those? I named some. To name more, Barbara Guthery, who has orange in her blood for sure! My beautician across town, Marva, people like that. Ada and Andy Anderson. These are people who weren't obvious, they were just pillars of strength for me. When Peter and Priscilla made that dinner back in Littlefield House to welcome me back, they never said, "Oh, we're so sorry about what happened all those years ago." Nobody went through that nonsense because it was long since past. What they did was recognize the person that I had tried to become. And of course you have to honor those years, because those years were rather formative ones. What can I tell you? Belafonte, who is a man who will stay nestled in my heart in the deepest way forever, called me up and wanted to let me know someone was in my corner. What was that phone call like? (Squeals and laughs) Who can ever forget that? In retrospect, I didn't do that. I was so zombie-like. I was in my room. I was in my room a lot in those days because if I came out there was yet another reporter, another somebody jumping out of my closet, in the windows of my classroom. And I hadn't slept in days and days and days. They called me and said "Harry Belafonte is on the line." I thought "Oh, sure." And it was him on the phone. What did he say? He wanted to let me know someone was in my corner. Wanted to know how I was, how I was getting on, how people were treating me, if I wanted to change universities. (If you really want to know, I had always wanted to go to Fisk University, which was known for its music and particularly for the Fisk Jubilee Singers.) He had talked to Sidney Poitier and Mahalia Jackson about me and wondered how they could help. He talked a lot about their perception of how I was handling the situation. And at that juncture, basically wanted to let me know that there was someone there. Until that call, I had seriously considered leaving. But the conversation I had with my father that morning and the call from Belafonte gave me that resolve and the strength to stay put. So what were '58 and '59 like? More of the same or did things calm down? No, things never calmed down. A lot of people wanted to turn this into a sensational something or other, which I absolutely had no interest in. Didn't then, don't now. There were a lot of conversations with people who really genuinely wanted to help and did help, leaders in the community, politicians, but it really was a time when I turned to the church more strongly. Dr. [Oscar Blake] Smith at University Baptist Church was a rock. His organist, Ms. Francis, was a rock. So you graduated, and what was your next move? Well, before I graduated I came to New York to meet Belafonte at his invitation. I actually didn't leave Texas until '60 because I had to pull some things together. But before I left, nice things happened. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt sent me the money for my fare to come to New York. Lots of wonderful, exciting things happened like that as well. Eleanor Roosevelt paid for your fare to come to New York?! Once. But Belafonte paid for my first trip. So I came to New York and met Belafonte. Ah! That was like a fantasy. I was levitating! Both out of excitement and out of fear. Basically, my teacher at the time, Mrs. Gustafson, had suggested I send Belafonte a tape of my junior recital, something I was very proud of, as a token of appreciation. He got around to listening to it, along with Barry Nurell, a very well known Metropolitan Opera tenor and the cousin of Belafonte's wife, Julie. They together put together a group of people, because Belafonte wanted to know if what he was hearing was as good as he thought it was. One of the things I'll never forget is when we left there and the maestro spelled it out. "Yes, she has the talent, but this is 25 percent talent and 75 percent hard work." Was he ever right! When we went downstairs to the Ansonia Hotel, just right up here (motioning) I remember Belafonte putting his hat on my head, saying, "Hot dang, Barbara, we made it." (Laughs) I went back and finished up things at UT and some months later came to New York. What's the longest-running opera or role that you've performed in your career? We don't have runs as such in opera. You do things in a repertory and so you have so many performances. But the role that I have done the most is Azucena in Il Trovatore. It's a yummy one. It's just one of those big, fat, juicy, dramatic mezzo roles. What are your favorites? There are certain roles that have just grabbed my imagination and used all of my talent. Certainly Carmen is one of them. It's a role that requires everything you can do on a stage, from acting to dancing to singing--the music isn't easy either. It's really a very good acting role and that's the one I made my debut in with the Houston Opera many years ago. Didn't you sing for the Pope recently? Yes, at Aquaduct Racetrack in New Jersey in 1995. He did five or six big Masses. During our Mass there were about 80,000 people. That was truly a highlight, and it wasn't even a career thing. It was a heart thing. It was absolutely fantastic. Were you nervous? Usually I am. When my brother Howard saw my first performance here in New York, he said, "You did real good, Little Sis. I just thought you were gonna rub holes in the sides of your dress!" I was nervous of course. You get very hyped. It's like what I always imagine a racehorse would be like. That's what was so extraordinary about that Mass. Maybe I was just too tired. (I had to be up at midnight to have hair and makeup done and be at the racetrack at 5 o'clock.) but I just felt an incredible peace. Everything went so beautifully. Do you go to church now? I'm involved with churches, whichever one feels good that Sunday. When did you start singing spirituals? When did I not? I just remember that when I heard voices like Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson and the Fisk Jubilee Singers, I was in heaven. But then I can get ecstatic about a Bach chorale too. A spiritual just goes one notch deeper because that's the music of my soul. How long have spirituals been concert fare like they are now? I'm not an historian, but I'm doing a lot of research on the spiritual for my own edification. The spiritual came into its heyday in the concert form at Fisk and with Marian Anderson and Hall Johnson, whom I had the opportunity of working with for almost seven years and is certainly the premier arranger of the Negro spiritual of that era. He considered them art songs--as you would have in German Lieder, Italian art songs, French art songs--because that's how they really did evolve, to that level. It goes way back to the early '30s that I can trace. But composers like H.T. Burleigh and Hall Johnson gave the spiritual a whole other kind of airing. It was the advent of voices like Robeson, Anderson, and the Hall Johnson Choir that created more awareness. Orchestral arrangements came much later. That's still not my favorite way to do spirituals unless you get lucky like I did and get somebody who knows how to get the colors and get the feelings. What's your preferred accompaniment? However it feels that day. I can certainly be arrested by a particular arrangement. There are certain spirituals that you can do a cappella without any difficulty. Other arranged spirituals that I learned that way, I find a little challenging, although I find the older I get the more spontaneous I become again. If you could cast yourself in any role and cast a sort of dream team of singers, living or dead, in other roles to create your own fantasy production, what would that look like? Well, if I were doing, say, Trovatore, it would be Leonard Warren, it would be Leontyne Price. Let's see, who would my tenor be? Oh my goodness. It could be Correlli, because he would be one that sang that role magnificently. That would be a dream team! Actually we're working on a Samson and Delilah production right now with the American Theatre for Music Arts, which involves people that are definitely among my dream performers--Greg Baker, a very exciting young bass/baritone, and Gregory Hopkins, a very exciting young tenor. What's next for you? One of the most exciting things has to do with Texas. I'm going to work with Jerry Junkin again with the Dallas Wind Symphony in November 1998. I have some concerts in Columbus [Texas]. In terms of things I would like to do still and still might do, opera's not out of my life by any means, but it's at the point where it's time to move on. Been there, done that? No, it never gets to that level with me. I've never done anything that I feel that way about. But it does become passé. There are things you are more qualified to do, make more sense to do, and those are definitely going into those mature roles, which are exciting roles. There are opportunities for doing Clytemnestra in Electra, a great opera by Strauss, and I might. I'm also getting ready to do two more CDs--another one of spirituals and one of Christmas music. Is it a shock to the system to go back to Pittsburg? Oh, no. I would live in Center Point in (snaps) an Elgin blink if I could. I love it. I love home. I love Texas.
By Avrel Seale,
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