Tom-Tom Overture

By Shirley Graham | Edited by David Kempers | Duration: ca. 5 min.

Shirley Graham’s opera Tom-Tom was premiered in Cleveland in 1932. Although it was performed at a grand outdoor venue to an audience of what was estimated to be 25,000 people over two nights, the work did not stay in the public view, and as Graham’s own interests moved to social activism, and she married W.E.B Du Bois in 1951, Tom-Tom was believed lost. In 2011, Lucy Caplan (then a junior at Harvard University), found the work in Graham’s archival materials at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University. Dr. Lucy Caplan is now a member of the music faculty at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Tom-Tom grew out of a play that Graham wrote in 1929, and was described as “a drama of the development of Negro music from the first faint beatings of the African tom-tom to the most finished products of our trained musicians today.”

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