103 years ago today, the New York Hippodrome’s regular matinee and evening performance of Good Times included a bonus act: their prima donna Belle Story sang a tribute performance to mark the centennial of Jenny Lind’s birth. You can find a more detailed biography of Story at the University of Arizona American Vaudeville Museum site.
Belle Storey, October 1914, Theatre Magazine https://archive.org/details/theatremagazine20newyuoft/page/174
Those of you who’ve seen The Greatest Showman might know some version of Lind’s story. She was an nineteenth-century opera singer known as the “Swedish Nightingale.” Brought to the U.S. by P.T. Barnum, she gave 93 concerts and donated her earnings to charity. Lind was a huge celebrity in the nineteenth-century, with “Lind mania” seizing her fans. Lind sang at Castle Garden, now known as Castle Clinton, on the southern tip of Manhattan. By the time the Lind Centennial took place in NYC, the venue was an aquarium.
[Jenny Lind, three-quarter length portrait of a woman, three-quarters to the left, facing front, seated], Daguerreotype from Matthew Brady’s studio, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington DC https://loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3c10191/
Belle Story dressed in a reproduction of the gown Lind wore, was introduced to the stage as a fellow Hippodrome performer dressed as Barnum. She sang two numbers, “The Echo Song” (aka “The Herdsman’s Song” by Jacob Ahlstrom) and “Comin’ through the Rye” (a Scottish ballad with lyrics from a Robert Burns poem). “Rye”, according to music professor Steve Waksman, was not originally on Lind’s program but had been requested by the public and added. It makes sense, then, that Story chose a song that was associated with NYC specifically and with the kind of populist crowd that still came to the New York Hippodrome in 1920.
Newspaper story about the Carneigie Hall celebration of Lind’s centennial, New York Herald, 10/7/1920, page 9 via Chronicling America
The Lind Centennial was celebrated in at least a few other US locales: based on a quick survey of newspaper coverage, it looks like they may have taken place in areas with a large Scandinavian immigrant population. But the major celebration in New York took place at Carnegie Hall with German soprano Frieda Hempel as Lind. Hempel also sang “Echo Song,” accompanying herself “on the genuine Lind piano played at the 1850 concert.” But she didn’t appear on the same bill with Powers’ Elephants or sing her final aria as twelve women dove into a tank of water and disappeared, so I give Story the W.
