Her granddaughter, Dr. Renee Campbell, and Kentucky Opera Director Ben Robinson share how Song Week came together.
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It started as a casual conversation.
Dr. Renee Campbell, who serves on Kentucky Opera’s board, sat down with the company’s new general director, Ben Robinson, so the two could get to know each other. She told him about her grandmother, Ada Doss Campbell.
You may remember Ada’s story. I first reported it in 2021. She died in 1940 at Louisville’s Central State Hospital, on the Colored Ward, and her records said she died of professional neglect. Her family spent decades not knowing where she was buried.
Robinson says he heard music in it.
“I thought that this story sounded like it was calling for music,” he told me. Kentucky Opera already had a song recital program planned for November. “When Dr. Campbell told me about this, that was the seed of the idea: What if we were to do an entire week of song, telling the stories of women who can no longer speak for themselves?”
Dr. Campbell says she had no idea where the conversation would lead. “I handled myself like I usually do, on faith,” she said. “I told him the story, and Ben seemed to be very moved by it and wanted to do it. I was just elated, humbled, sentimental.”
She says the story’s reach still moves her. "For the story to get so much attention and love, it was just amazing," she said.
For Robinson, the story carries a bigger weight. “This is a story that, unfortunately, seems to be repeating itself over and over again,” he said. Before moving to Louisville, he knew the story of Breonna Taylor. “These stories bear similar weight.”
Robinson previously worked as managing director of Lyric Fest, an art song series in Philadelphia. After Taylor’s murder, Lyric Fest commissioned a song about her. That piece, Taking Names by Jasmine Barnes, will be on the Ada Doss Campbell program. Robinson says it explores how Black girl magic can be a disappearing act. It is, in his words, “devastation baked into it, and yet also so hopeful for the future.”
The songs are not meant to retell Ada’s life line by line. Robinson says they work as “meditations on chapters of Mrs. Campbell’s life.” The tagline for the week is “Our souls sing on.”
“For all of the things that happened that were wrong to her, she still managed to have two sons, and those two sons went on to have families that have achieved so much,” Robinson said. “That narrative of the family living on is what I find most inspiring.”
He says the week isn’t about pointing fingers. “These are three different women whose stories need to be told again and again, so that we can evolve as a society, and continue to shape the policies, the practices, the social order that will elicit true change.”
The Unsung Singer: Winnaretta Singer
Tuesday, Nov. 17, 7 p.m., Bird Hall, University of Louisville School of Music. Free; registration required.
Winnaretta Singer was the daughter of sewing machine pioneer Isaac Singer. She inherited a fortune and wanted to host a musical salon in Paris. To do that, she needed a husband with a title. Robinson says she was American and lesbian, so she entered a lavender marriage with a gay French prince. The salon became one of the most fruitful places for commissioning composers that the world has known. She also helped Marie Curie turn limousines into mobile radiology units during World War I. The concert pairs narration with art songs from her circle and features U of L voice students.
A Voice: Mrs. Ada Doss Campbell
Thursday, Nov. 19, 7 p.m., Redeemer Lutheran Church. Free; registration required.
This is the program built from scratch. Robinson says the music and poetry aren’t new, “but the way that we’re telling the story is new.” Mariah Graves and Dominique Cooper, both singers trained in Kentucky, will perform. The poetry will be by Black creatives. Robinson says the church was chosen so people in the surrounding neighborhood can get there easily. Seating is limited, with about 250 to 270 seats. He expects it to sell out, and Dr. Campbell has invited people from across the state.
Cotton
Friday, Nov. 20, and Saturday, Nov. 21, at 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, Nov. 22, at 2 p.m. Kentucky Opera Center for Cultural Health, 708 Magazine St. Tickets required.
Cotton is the only ticketed event. It began when Philadelphia artist John Dowell had a dream in which his grandmother called him back to the South Carolina fields where she had been enslaved. He photographed the land and made collages in which cotton covers places like Wall Street. The collection, Cotton: The Soft, Dangerous Beauty of Our Past, made him world famous.
In 2023, Lyric Fest sent panels of his work to eight living poets, including Nikki Giovanni, in one of her last commissioned poems. Damien Geter set the poems to music as a song cycle. It has played the Kennedy Center and the 92nd Street Y and is selling out wherever it goes. Mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges and baritone Justin Austin perform it. Robinson says singers “float” in Dowell’s images, and the poets appear reading their poems.
Robinson calls the week “a bit of a roll of the dice” for Kentucky Opera. The company has never put three performance events in one week. He’d love to see people attend all three, which would take about three to three and a half hours of their week. The programs are also designed to draw different audiences. “The real community-building, strategic-building thing for opera,” he said, “is how do we take this community that we are constructing and continue to get them invested and involved.”
Information and tickets are at kyopera.org.
Dr. Campbell is a social worker, and she has invited schools of social work and psychology to attend. “I’m hoping that students that come will be inspired,” she said. “This kind of stuff happens all the time, and I hope they’ll be more intentional about how they work with people.”
Asked if there was anything else she wanted people to know, she kept it simple: “Everybody deserves to have a voice, and everybody does have a voice. Many people think that they don’t, but it’s in there.”
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