ABSTRACT

This chapter presents a biography of mid- to late-19th-century singer Elizabeth Taylor, known as Greenfield. Miss Taylor, already surnamed 'the Black Swan', reportedly began singing in public, in her by then home town of Buffalo, in October 1851, at an age when many a Victorian singer had ended or was ending her career. 'The Black Swan' arrived in Liverpool on the Asia in May and, on the wings of preposterous pre-puff, was presented to London on 31 May 1853 at the Hanover Square Rooms. She ventured a 'dramatic scena' entitled 'Yes, now I'm free, or The Slave's Escape', and dedicated to the Duchess of Sutherland, in which, in a Yma Sumac duologue, she sang the lines of the slave-owner in chest voice and the slave in head voice. She performed through the 1850s, often under such novelty circumstances as a pendant to a lecture on 'The emancipated negro' and in the 1860s, latterly in the company of her pupils.