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Entertainment, Instruction, Inspiration. A Great Meeting Under the Direction of Department of Work Among Negroes…

[N.p.]: United Presbyterian Church, [ca. 1926?]. Illustrated broadside on card stock, 9.875” x 13” plus margins. Location, date, and time filled out in ink. CONDITION: Very good, light soiling to top right corner.

An apparently unrecorded illustrated broadside advertising a performance of the globe-trotting Knoxville College Quartet early in the blockbusting “race record” era.

The historically-Black Knoxville College was founded a decade after the Civil War by the United Presbyterian Church “to provide the most thorough literary, classical and scientific training, together with instruction in the most useful of the manual arts, in short, to so train head and hand and heart as to prepare young men and women for the largest usefulness in life” (“Colored Students”). The Knoxville College Quartet, a reincarnation of the college glee club of the 1890s, toured Europe and the British Isles to great acclaim in 1925, even performing on a live broadcast of the BBC. The group performed domestically well into the 1950s, frequently stopping at Presbyterian venues. In the early and mid-1920s, the quartet consisted of Lowell Peters of Little Rock, Arkansas (who later performed with the Southernaires Quartet), Beady Mann of Chicago, Newell Fitzpatrick of Somerset, Kentucky (later head of the Knoxville College music department), and Andrew Paul of Knoxville.

The broadside offered here gives details for an 8:15 p.m. concert on July 1st in the “High School Auditorium” of the United Presbyterian Church. A central portrait of the quartet is flanked, below, by headshots of John A. Cotton (1865–1943), “who is one of the outstanding negro leaders of the south,” and the white Rev. R. W. McGranahan (1862–1936), Secretary of the Church’s Department of Work Among Negroes. The concert consisted of “Negro Spirituals, Sacred Songs, Plantation Melodies,” and was accompanied by brief talks by Cotton and McGranahan, illustrated with “Stereopticon Slides” showing “the work of the college” (“Concert Tonight”). No location is specified on this broadside, but newspaper accounts matching the concert described—including both Cotton and McGranahan as well as “pictures of the work among colored people”—record performances in Tulsa, Oklahoma on June 17th; Winchester, Kansas on July 7th; St. Joseph, Missouri on July 8th; and Tarkio, Missouri on July 9th, 1926 (“U. P. Church Notes”).

No holdings recorded in OCLC, nor do Google searches yield any examples.

A scarce and visually rich broadside for a performance by a long-running Black college quartet, accompanied by talks and stereopticon views on the work of the Presbyterian Church among African Americans.

REFERENCES: “Colored Students Hold Intercollegiate Debate,” Knoxville Sentinel, March 30, 1915, p. 7; Booker, Robert J. “Knoxville College quartet toured America, Great Britain,” knox news, August 21, 2019, online; “Concert Tonight,” St. Joseph Gazette, July 8, 1926, p. 14; “U. P. Church Notes,” The Winchester Star, June 25, 1926, p. 1.

Item #9705

Price: $650.00

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