Boston-based creative team aims to raise awareness of National Negro Opera Company founder and restore her former home
Mary Cardwell Dawson may have barely reached five feet in a pair of heels, but she was a force to be reckoned with. Dawson was an American musician and educator who founded the National Negro Opera Company in 1941, using her rented home (dubbed “Mystery Manor”) on Apple Street in Pittsburgh as its headquarters. More than 80 years later, that property and its history need support, and Boston advocates Dawn Carroll and Jon Butcher, as well as Houston-based rapper Michael Berry, are spreading awareness for the cause through an album called “Songs for Mary.”
Inspired by Dawson, the album tells the history of the National Negro Opera Company, and the prominent Black musicians and celebrities who participated in it, through song. The album is the blueprint for a stage show to be developed later on. The Apple Street house was a meeting ground as much as an arts space, and visitors like Duke Ellington, Joe Louis, Roberto Clemente and others frequently spent time there. The album kicks off with the track “If the Walls Could Talk,” in which Berry ruminates on the famous Black visitors to Mystery Manor and draws strength from their spirits.