Spotlight on... Artist in Residence Francois Clemmons

Author: Alexxa Gotthardt

Artist in Residence Doctor Francois Scarborough Clemmons came to Middlebury 10 years ago with a powerful tenor voice and perhaps even more powerful personality. Clemmons grew up in Youngstown, Ohio. where he began his singing career in his church choir. He received his Bachelor of Music at Oberlin College and his Master of Fine Arts at Carnegie-Mellon University and went on to delight audiences around the world with both his operatic performances and his moving Negro spirituals. Clemmons founded the celebrated Harlem Spiritual Ensemble and also played the role of Officer Clemmons on the well-known children's television program Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Also known as "Diva Man," Clemmons has brought a unique energy to the College's campus that has affected countless students, faculty and community members. Clemmons' concert on Friday Oct. 12 marked the 35th anniversary of his Carnegie Hall debut. Here, The Campus speaks with Clemmons about his musical career.



The Middlebury Campus: When did you know that you wanted to dedicate your life to singing?

Francois Clemmons: I love singing. I've always sung. There has never been a time in my life when I wasn't singing. I like to tell the story that I got my first spirituals in my mother's stomach before I was born. She sang to me. As a boy, I can remember imitating my mother - it was a fun thing to sing the songs that she sang and generally speaking, they were church-related or Christian repertoires. They would be things like "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" or "Jesus Lay Your Head in the Window." A lot of the songs I remember singing before I went to nursery school were songs out of the old church tradition and I got a lot of encouragement right from the beginning from many members of the church because I also sang in the church choir and frequently I was the youngest person in the choir. I just had this attraction to be up there singing in the choir. And my mother did sing in the choir but I got that just from modeling from her doing it. We went to church every Sunday and I belong to the stereotype. I was raised in the Baptist church. I left a long time ago for many personal reasons, but it certainly laid the groundwork when it comes to my love of this repertoire and in discovering my voice. Now that we have the separation of church and state, you don't sing Jewish hymns, you don't sing Islamic music, you don't sing anything else except a lot of times folk music. I feel we miss a great deal by not singing this repertoire because it's our music and it originated and was created in America. This is part of our traditional folk music, so to speak. I think there are some great songs like "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" and "Go Tell it on the Mountain" - there are so many beautiful songs that to me are beautiful not just because any theology is associated with them, but the tunes are very beautiful. And they serve many different purposes - they serve purposes for communication and for drawing people together.



TC: When did you begin singing opera?

FC: Opera went through two periods. The first was when I was in high school and I was an usher at Stambaugh Auditorium that was a concert hall like the Center for the Arts and we could usher for the symphony and other performances that were going on. I signed up a number of times to quite frankly just get out of the house because many nights, after school and homework, my family would go to church, and I didn't want to go to church every night, so I signed up. During that same time I also saw Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro" and I will say again that this music just kept ringing in my head. Also, there was a distinguished black singer named Betty Allen, a mezzo-soprano, who also came from Youngstown, and she had had this international career and some success and she was coming to Stambaugh Auditorium to do I concert - I think it might have been my junior year - and the ladies at church importuned my mother to let me go to the performance, they would pay for the ticket, and they did, and they took me backstage. Well that was the first time I met a black person singing opera, and singing it with international recognition. Well this lady was bigger than life! She was a tall lady anyway - 5'10"- and she was very elegant. She had a lot of make-up on and jewelry - things that I like! I heard her sing and I just thought I can do that - I am going to do that! The second thing happened to me was in 1961 when Leontyne Price made her Metropolitan Opera debut in Il Trovatore by Verdi. I heard it on the radio at home and I heard people talking about this black soprano, Leontyne Price. It just blew me away that a black singer was singing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and had become an international superstar. She was the one who broke the color line - the racial barrier - in the classical music world. That was my second real injection of opera. Betty Price had started it, but Leontyne Price took it to the top.



TC: Was Carnegie Hall your first big opera debut? Were the challenges you had to overcome to reach that point?

The thing was that I sang opera at Oberlin and I sang opera at Carnegie Mellon, but the big deal-like the Big Apple for the jazz artists - was Carnegie Hall for the opera singer like me. I won the Metropolitan Opera auditions and that eventually led to me coming to New York and singing for 7 years with the Metropolitan Opera Studio which is their repertory company which is a very reputable company. They did performances around the city or sometimes in Washington D.C. at these very exclusive places, and they arranged that Carnegie Hall debut. It was the first major performance I did in New York and it was so exciting. It was the first major thing that I had done that brought a lot of attention in the musical world, which is not all the world, its just a small group, but the buzz was around, there was a new tenor in town. There were people interested, and there were other wonderful young artists too, and we all kind of formed a brotherhood-sisterhood of young singers who were just out of Julliard or Oberlin or Eastman School of Music or Michigan or Indiana and we were taking the world by storm, or so we thought. There was that period of incredible headiness.

And I have to add to this that there was a reality that there was a lot of racism in opera, and that was where a lot of the challenge was. There were some opera houses that would not hire black singers. That is why it seemed like we were pioneers. The Civil Rights movement had begun in the 1950s and continued through the 1960s, so we felt that we were a part of that tradition. That is the thing I resented in some ways, because the music schools did not prepare you for the racism in the world, they painted this idealized picture. You just learn your French, learn your Italian and then you go out there and you sing and the world was going to wrap their arms around you. It was not that easy.

The thing that saved me was Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. I had met Fred Rogers in 1968 in Pittsburgh where I was the tenor soloist at his church. He came up to me, he expressed his admiration for what I was doing and his pleasure at my singing and he invited me onto his television program. I came onto that program, and I thought it would be a one-time shot. I never imagined the impact that it was going to have on my career. So Fred Rogers was kind of on the cutting edge, and there I was. The only thing that I can tell you that it was an accident. The universe did it for me.



TC: How did you end up at Middlebury?

FC: I came here through the artist recital series. They invited my group, the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble, up. I started the ensemble and was with them for about 20 years. Paul Nelson invited us to come up and perform at Mead Chapel for the Fall Family Weekend. I really was in love with being up here, and we were just received so well. There was a standing ovation at Mead Chapel and people just
demanding more. After that, we came back two or three more times. Then, in 1996 I got a letter from John McCardell that Middlebury College would like to grant me an honorary doctorate of the arts, and I was just floored. You work very, very hard in this business, but the one thing I can tell anybody who thinks 35 years is nothing, is that its a lot of hard work. That is what stands out - the fact that you are celebrating survival, determination and maybe 20 percent talent. It is a lot about being in the right place at the right time, having people participate in your career - you can't do it alone, I can assure you. The school eventually asked me if I wanted to take over the College Choir and I thought about it and I took the position and I have been very happy on the whole and I have stayed. We have a romance going. I think I was what Middlebury was looking for as much as Middlebury might have been what I was looking for.