Abbie Mitchell

Abriea "Abbie" Mitchell Cook (25 September 1884 – 16 March 1960), also billed as Abbey Mitchell, was an American soprano opera singer. She was known for singing the role of "Clara" in the premier production of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess in 1935, and was also the first to record "Summertime" from that musical. Mitchell was the mixed-race daughter of an African-American mother and a Jewish-German father from New York City's Lower East Side. She was reared by a maternal aunt, Alice Payne, in Baltimore, Maryland, where she attended a Catholic convent school.After finishing her school education in Baltimore, Mitchell started studying voice in New York in 1897. The next year composer Will Marion Cook and lyricist Paul Laurence Dunbar cast her in their one-act musical comedy Clorindy: The Origin of the Cakewalk (1898). It was so successful that it ran for the whole season at the Casino Roof Garden. She married Cook a year later, and appeared in the lead role in his Jes Lak White Folks (1899). She also appeared in his production The Southerners (1904).Cook and Mitchell had a daughter, Marion Abigail Cook, in 1900, and a son, Will Mercer Cook, in 1903. Their daughter, raised by family members as Mitchell had been, married dancer Louis Douglas. Their son became a professor at Howard University and a translator, and was later appointed as United States Ambassador to Niger and Senegal.In London Mitchell premiered the principal role in the 1903 musical In Dahomey, produced by the team of George Walker and Bert Williams, with music composed by her husband Cook, book by J.A. Shipp, and lyrics by poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The cakewalk, considered old fashioned by the cast, was almost cut from the show, but proved popular with audiences. It became a fad in the United Kingdom. Mitchell received international acclaim for her performance, and was invited to appear with the company in a Royal Command Performance for King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra at Buckingham Palace. Mitche