The year was 1851, and new voices were ascendant in America. The first edition of the New York Times was printed that September. In November, Melville published Moby-Dick. Stephen Foster wrote the minstrel song “Old Folks at Home,” in which a fictional black narrator longs for a mythical “old plantation.” Actual former slave Sojourner Truth delivered a brilliant extemporaneous speech at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio; it entered history as “Ain’t I A Woman?”
Into this swirl of change stepped a singer named Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield. In October 1851 she gave a performance in Buffalo, New York, and it caused a massive stir: she was the first black woman to ever appear there in concert. In a twist on Jenny Lind’s nickname the Swedish Nightingale, a reporter from the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser dubbed Greenfield the “Black Swan.” Greenfield carried that epithet to her grave. Then as now, her musical and professional identity would be irrevocably, indelibly linked with the color of her skin.
Song of the Lark 