The Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University

Chronicling Maryland’s Musical Greats

The images are at once arresting and sweetly nostalgic. A smiling Cab Calloway, bedecked in wide-brimmed hat and dress whites. The diminutive Chick Webb seated behind his trademark drum set, sticks held in the air in celebration. A fresh-faced Ethel Ennis at age 17, hair upswept and shoulders bare in what may have been her first formal portrait.

The River Chambers Orchestra began at Chambers’ home on McCullogh Street in Baltimore.

The three well-known musical personalities, each of whom made their starts in Maryland, are among dozens whose lives and experiences are chronicled in The Storm is Passing Over, an online exhibit curated by Peabody archivist Elizabeth Schaaf, who retired in January. The exhibit, which celebrates the Baltimore area’s rich African American musical heritage, originally traveled around the state of Maryland; portions of it are now accessible online at the Peabody Archives website.

The exhibit gets its name from a work written by Charles Albert Tindley, the composer born on Maryland’s Eastern Shore who pioneered the gospel hymn—the basis for the music of the 20th-century African-American church. Notes Schaaf, “Tindley incorporated the language of the poor into his songs, fashioning his melodies and harmonies into expressions of hope”—most famously in I’ll Overcome Someday, which became the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement.

In addition to featuring well-known personalities like Eubie Blake and Billie Holiday (as well as Calloway, Webb, and Ennis), The Storm is Passing Over highlights lesser-known figures who played a significant role in the musical life
of Maryland.

Visitors to the site will learn, for instance, about A. Jack Thomas, one of the first black bandmasters in the U. S. Army and the first African-American to conduct the all-white Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. He went on to found the Aeolian Conservatory in Baltimore. There’s also W. Llewellyn Wilson, who taught generations of musicians at Douglass High School, including bandleader Calloway and soprano Anne Brown, the first Bess in George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess, which premiered on October 10, 1935, at New York’s Alvin Theatre.

A vintage photograph of Baltimore’s North Avenue area captures the area in its musical heyday. “From the end of World War II to just after desegregation, Pennsylvania Avenue was the major business and entertainment center for Baltimore’s African American community,” says Schaaf. “The Avenue was a musician’s paradise, with three or four clubs in each block from Biddle Street to North Avenue, all of them featuring live entertainment.”

—Sue De Pasquale

The Storm is Passing Over was produced in cooperation with the Enoch Pratt Library and Coppin State College.