Mattiwilda dobbs biography of albert

Singer, educator

At a Glance…

Sources

Mattiwilda Dobbs, internationally-known as a concert and opera singer and the third black American to sing at the Metropolitan Opera, was born the fifth of six daughters of a United States postal railway clerk on July 11, 1925, in Atlanta, Georgia.

Her father, John Wesley Dobbs, worked the run between Atlanta and Nashville, Tennessee. In those days of Jim Crow, he used to borrow books from Fisk University and other libraries to take home for his children who, because they were black, could not borrow from the Atlanta public libraries.

Mattiwilda dobbs

He also required that each of his daughters take ten years of musical training. A piano was the first thing that her father had bought after he married Irene Thompson.

Dobbs sang in her high school choir but did not think seriously about vocal training until she was in college.

When her singing voice was noticed, “I already had a long musical training,” Dobbs rec