Abbie Mitchell

Abbie Mitchell was discovered at fourteen by the composer Will Marion Cook, who cast her in Clorindy in 1898 and married her soon after. She was a star of Black musical theatre before she was twenty, singing in In Dahomey in London and at a royal command performance at Buckingham Palace at eighteen. She moved into concert work and then into straight acting, reaching Broadway in In Abraham's Bosom and The Little Foxes, and taught at the Tuskegee Institute. Clara in Porgy and Bess was her last musical role on stage, and made her the first to record "Summertime".