A DREAM COMES TRUE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22391, 11 April 1936, Page 9 (Supplement)

A DREAM COMES TRUE

Girl With Golden Voice Marian Anderson, a Negro girl, has been acclaimed "one of the greatest living singers," but it has not gone to her head. Years of hard work and struggle have made her patient and unassuming, yet she was happy to feel after her New York success early this year that her goal is in sight and that her great gift is as acceptable in the land ot her birth as it would be if she had a white The young singer had taken the critics by storm in Germany, where she spent her little all on some first-rate lessons and a concert. She was an event" at the music festival in Salzburg last summer, but about New York alio had felt somewhat uncertain, it happened that her contralto voice so captivated the audience that they stormed her with applause 1 and demanded encores until the lights had to be turned out in the hall. Then, instead of staying in town to receive the congratulations and invitations her success would have brought her. Miss Anderson took the train to her mother's home in Philadelphia. It was the best place she know of to prop her foot up—for at her great concert she had had one foot in a cast, having injured it. Reporters who sought her out there commented on tho grey woollen sock drawn over the bandage, the starched lace curtains, the plush furniture and the imitation flames in the grate, contrasting this homely comfort with the princely splendour in which they are accustomed to interview great singers. . In this neighbourhood Marian s father once conducted a small coal and ice business, and she was the " Baby Contralto " at tho Baptist Church. Her mother went out to do housework,-and when her father died Marian, at 16, undertook to support tho family by singing. Now she is a singer of the very first rank, and her story is another of those fairly tales in real life that hearten us about the human race.