Following Heather L. Hodges’s fantastic guest post about the Gullah Geechee culture that the Gershwins and Heywards portray in Porgy and Bess, we turn to one of the opera’s most contended aspects: its treatment of the Gullah language. In this post, our managing editor, Andrew S. Kohler, explores how the work’s text came to be so far removed from Gullah, and how future performances may approach the inconsistent libretto so as to give Gullah culture and language the respect they are due. The language of Porgy and Bess is a far cry from that of the Gullah community of Charleston […]

DuBose Heyward was at the forefront of Southern literature in the early twentieth century. His novel Porgy contributed to the growing conversation about African Americans in American literature and theater. George Gershwin had been actively seeking an opera libretto when Heyward’s Porgy caught his eye. Frances Sobolak is an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan pursuing a Linguistics major and Music minor. She joined The Gershwin Initiative team in the fall of her sophomore year through the university’s undergraduate research opportunity program. In the early twentieth century, poets in Charleston, South Carolina, pioneered a literary renaissance where a group […]