Black Women Orchestras in the early 20th century. So I've been doing a deep dive looking for any info about Gregoria Fraser Goins and her Corda Club (string and mandolin orchestra) which was active from 1910-1920.
Reference: publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/…
Reference: publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/…
So I still can’t find much about the Corda Club other than one reference to a performance of a Samuel Coleridge-Taylor piece. Given that the Corda Club was a string and mandolin chamber orchestra it was likely an arrangement unless he’s written something for mandolin/strings?
There are some wonderful photos of the music/performing arts school run by Gregoria Goins taken by the Scurlock Studio in DC a few years (February 1960) before her death in 1964.
collections.si.edu/search/results…
collections.si.edu/search/results…
This concert announcement in The Sunday Star, Washington (October 10, 1915) places the Corda Club at an event that W. E. B. Du Bois spoke at--this was two years before Gregoria married.
The unsurprising thing is, the fullest biographical account of Gregoria Goins is in Mayes' "The Mulatto Republic: Class, Race, and Dominican National Identity," not a music history book. Gregoria was mixed race & born in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic.
read.dukeupress.edu/hahr/article-a…
read.dukeupress.edu/hahr/article-a…
