PBA Galleries

(Sheet music) Fred J. Hamill and Paul Cohn, “Of Course” / Introduced by MATTIE V. WILKES, with Williams & Walker (Windsor Music Co., NY. c/1900) 3pp. 10.5 x 14” Color pictorial cover, with inset photograph of Wilkes - possibly the first American sheet music to picture an African-American woman singer.

When her photo graced this music cover, the beautiful 22 year-old “mulatto” soprano Mattie V. Wilkes was already a star, appearing with the most popular Black vaudevillians of the day, Bert Williams and George Walker.  Three years later, she would marry the equally renowned Black composer and performed Ernest Hogan, who is often credited with having introduced Ragtime music to the American stage. After his death, she toured the vaudeville houses of Europe, even Czarist Russia, and then went on to yet another career as a film star in the “race movies” of Oscar Micheaux, the pioneering African-American director-producer, including the first film version of Charles Chestnutt’s Conjure Woman.